14. Nico
You have got to be kidding me.
I understood the reasoning. Adrian had been added to the program late. The hotel block had already been booked before anyone accounted for him. Last minute addition, limited rooms, straightforward solution.
I understood it perfectly. It still made me grind my molars.
Not the logistics—those were what they were.
What grated was that Renaud hadn't asked.
Hadn't even mentioned it. Just assumed I would be fine sharing a room with the man he'd brought in to push me, the man who had been under my skin for weeks, the man I had specifically been trying to maintain professional distance from.
He assumed I would handle it because I always handled it. Because I never complained. Because I was accommodating and flexible and didn't make things difficult for anyone, ever.
The problem with being the coach's nephew was that Renaud ran so far in the opposite direction of favouritism that raising an objection—about a room assignment, of all things—would earn me a look of disapproval and a lecture about my maturity.
His expectations of me had always been twice what he asked of anyone else.
I gritted my teeth, picked up the keycard with 1222 written on the envelope, and took the elevator up.
I had taken a later flight so I could go to Margaux’s school concert. With any luck, Adrian would still be at the arena practising. I just wanted a hot shower and some quiet time to arrange myself into something resembling a person before I had to deal with him.
The door unlocked with an electronic beep and a mechanical whir and I pushed it open exactly two inches before it caught on the latch from the inside.
Oh for fuck's sake.
“Zhao.” I pressed my forehead briefly against the door frame. Breathed through my nose. “Can you please let me into the room?”
A pause. Then footsteps, unhurried.
The door shut quietly. Then there was the click of the latch unhooking before it was pulled open again.
Adrian filled the doorframe.
He was in a towel. Just a towel—white cotton slung low across his hips, barely clinging to the jut of his hipbones.
Water still tracked down his chest, catching in the lines of muscle, pooling in the hollow of his collarbone.
His pink hair was dark and dripping, slicked back in a way that made his cheekbones look sharper, his jaw more defined.
The tattoos I had been carefully not cataloguing were all on display—the dense patterns down both arms, the script along his collarbone, the edge of the serpent curling around his left hip and disappearing beneath the towel.
My mouth went dry.
I hated that my mouth went dry.
“Took you long enough,” I muttered.
I had to slide past him into the room and our chests brushed for a brief moment as he backed into the room. I shoved the door shut behind me, relatching the lock. My heart was positively trying to beat its way out of my chest.
“My bad. I locked it out of habit. I just got out of the shower.”
“I can see that. Why wouldn’t you stay behind the door? Anyone walking past could have taken a picture.”
“Nothing that's not already out there.” He said it with a shrug, already turning back into the room, completely unbothered.
He wasn't wrong. Adrian's Instagram was not exactly modest. I'd looked at it. Purely out of idle curiosity. I also checked the feeds of other prominent skaters—Larsson from Sweden, Shimizu from Japan. Keeping tabs on the competition. Normal reconnaissance.
Adrian's feed was a chaotic collection of competition shots, candid moments with friends, and a quantity of shirtless photographs that suggested his torso was allergic to fabric.
He looked good but unfortunately he knew it.
The room was a disaster.
Both beds had been claimed in different ways—clothes across one, sheets already pulled back on the other, his suitcase open on the floor with its contents escaping onto the carpet.
His toiletry bag was visible through the half-open bathroom door.
His jacket was on the desk chair. His charger was in the only outlet near the beds.
“Which bed are you taking?” I asked flatly.
Another shrug and then he dropped backwards onto the bed with the pulled back sheets, one arm going behind his head, the picture of ease.
The towel shifted with the movement, sliding to a genuinely dangerous angle, and an entirely unreasonable amount of thigh came into view.
There was a tattoo there, I couldn't see what from this angle and I was not going to look harder to find out.
I looked away.
I picked up the clothes on the other bed one item at a time—a henley, a pair of joggers, a hoodie that smelled faintly of whatever he vaped—and deposited them on top of the open suitcase with more precision than was strictly necessary.
Adrian watched me do it. Made no move to help or apologize or acknowledge that the clothes had been on my bed in the first place. Just tracked me with those dark eyes from his horizontal position like I was a mildly entertaining TV show.
“Rough flight?” he asked when he finally spoke.
“It was fine.”
“You look tense.”
“I'm fine.”
“You're folding my clothes.”
I looked down. I was, in fact, refolding his henley with the automatic precision of someone who had been trained since adolescence to be neat in shared spaces. I dropped it down on the suitcase like it was on fire and stepped back.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I said and took my bag into the bathroom and locked the door.
Adrian was not going to get under my skin this trip.
I had made a promise to myself on the flight—keep it professional, keep it distant, keep the wall up.
He was a training partner and a competitor and nothing else.