23. Adrian
The press loved to pit the three of us against each other.
Had been doing it for years. Beaubien, Fontaine, Zhao—Canada's Big Three.
Every preview article, every broadcast graphic, every federation promo reduced us to a triangle.
The prodigy, the golden prince, and the rebel.
Simple. Clean. Nobody had to know what a Lutz was to pick a favourite.
I'd competed against both of them for years and it had never felt like more than the job.
Show up, skate, check the numbers. But heading into Osaka felt different.
One of the last major internationals before Nationals, which meant every score was a data point the selection committee would use to decide who went to Milan.
The stakes had shifted from career to legacy and all three of us knew it.
And something was off with the other two.
I could feel it, even if I couldn’t name it.
Théo had gone on an unexplained hiatus, fucked off to Chicago, then resurfaced months later with a new coach and no explanation.
Nicky had vanished for a month under the thinnest cover story I'd ever heard.
Whatever they'd been dealing with—separately, together, I didn't know the full picture—it had left marks.
And no amount of PR spin could hide them completely.
Which meant Osaka wasn't just a competition. It was a test. Could they hold it together when it mattered? Could I capitalize if they couldn't? And—the part I didn't want to examine too closely—did I even want to win if it came at the cost of watching Nicky fall apart on international ice?
Because the thing was, I'd seen behind the curtain now.
Not the whole picture but enough. Nicky was a good person.
He'd carried my drunk ass up a stairwell and taken care of me when I had done nothing but antagonize him.
Most people would have called a rideshare and made it someone else's problem. Nicky had taken off my boots.
And over room service in Québec, for a brief moment, the prince act had slipped.
Some days I'd rather be the pink haired rebel. He'd said it quietly, almost to himself. And then the way he'd talked about the endorsements and the kids who looked up to him—not with pride but with the exhaustion of someone carrying a weight that had been placed on his shoulders before he was old enough to understand what it would cost. The heir to Renaud’s legacy. Canada’s next gold medal. The boy whose life had been shaped around a future he never got to choose and who’d been expected to be grateful for it.
I recognized that. My cage was built from money and obligation, his from expectation and devotion but the feeling underneath was the same. The suffocation of being someone else's project. The quiet fury of never being asked what you wanted.
So yeah. Osaka was complicated. Because I wanted to beat him—my competitive drive wasn't negotiable—but I also wanted him to be okay. And I was starting to suspect those two things might not be compatible.
◆◆◆
I sat in the aisle seat with Sabrina by the window.
She had the survival instincts of a seasoned competitor when it came to long haul travel—the moment the seatbelt sign turned off, she had slipped on a silk eye mask, wrapped a neck pillow around herself with the efficiency of a person constructing a cocoon, and was unconscious within five minutes.
Her head was tilted against the window at a slight angle that didn’t seem to bother her in the least. I envied her.
Nicky and Renaud were sitting across the aisle.
Renaud was at the window, reading some thick hardcover—a biography of some long dead historical figure, from the look of the cover.
The kind of book that serious men read on planes to signal that they were above the in-flight entertainment.
He was fully absorbed, turning pages at a measured pace, oblivious to everything and everyone around him.
Nicky was jittery.
There was no other word for it.
He kept winding his headphone cord around one finger and unwinding it. Picking up his phone, unlocking it, locking it, setting it down. Opening the in-flight entertainment, scrolling through movies he clearly wasn’t seeing, then closing it again.
His knee bounced under the tray table—subtle, rhythmic, probably unconscious.
Even when I tried not to notice things about Nicky, my brain collected them anyway. Every little tell. Every shift in his breathing. Every time his mouth went tight at the corners.
Bad habit.
He was nervous but not in the normal pre-competition way. Not the useful kind that sharpened you. This was the other kind. The kind that sat under your skin and chewed.
I had a pretty good guess why.
The same person waiting in Osaka that the press was salivating over—Canada’s Big Three, reunited on international ice, someone alert the graphics department—was probably the reason Nicky was slowly strangling his headphones.
Théo fucking Beaubien.
The skating forums had been speculating about those two for years. Are they or aren't they? The body language analyses. The slow motion GIFs of podium hugs that lasted a beat too long. The anonymous posts from people who claimed to have seen them together at this hotel or that restaurant.
But I'd watched them long enough to know the difference between rumour and reality.
The forums guessed. I watched the way they looked at each other when they thought no one else was paying attention.
I'd always filed it under none of my business.
But watching Nicky come apart beside me, I found myself wishing it were.
I could have leaned over. Asked if he was okay. Made some smartass comment about his movie selection. Offered him gum. Done literally anything to break the spiral I could see building behind those blue eyes.
But Renaud was right there, placidly turning pages, and Nicky had made it very clear since Québec that whatever fragile thing existed between us was not something he wanted acknowledged.
Definitely not in front of his uncle.
So I stayed on my side of the aisle.
Watched him fidget. Tried to sleep. Couldn’t. Tried to watch a movie and lost the plot in about seven minutes. Tried to read and made it through the same paragraph four times.
Eventually, I passed out somewhere over the Pacific.
The last thing I saw was Nicky still awake, staring at the seatback screen with the blank expression of someone who was very much somewhere else.
◆◆◆
The hotel in Osaka was the kind of place that international skating events always used—bland, boring, beige.
The lobby was crawling with athletes and coaches and federation officials all doing that thing where they pretended to be relaxed while radiating competitive tension from every pore.
Renaud and Nicky had gone to check us in and get our room keys while Sabrina and I lingered in the lobby with the luggage.
“Théo!” Sabrina shouted and I turned in the direction she was calling.
There he was. Standing near the elevator bank.
He looked thin and pale, dark circles like bruises under his eyes.
Not just jetlagged but tired. He was wearing a pullover with another rink's logo on it.
It was so weird to think of it as my rink and that Théo was the defector.
I didn't recognize the older man next to him gripping a cup of coffee. His new coach. The Chicago downgrade.
Sabrina was already in motion. She hit Théo at full speed—a collision of red hair and enthusiasm that made him stagger back a step before he wrapped his arms around her.
And then they were talking. Fast, overlapping, Sabrina's hands on his shoulders examining him like a mother inspecting a child she'd left in someone else's care.
Théo was smiling—a real smile, not his usual tight lipped press smile—and for a second I thought maybe the guy couldn't be that bad if he could draw that kind of reaction from someone as sharp as Sabrina.
For a second.
And then Nicky appeared. He had our room keys in his hand.
Renaud was probably already across the lobby charming the people who actually mattered to him.
Nicky was wearing his tortoiseshell glasses—no contacts for long flights—and he wasn't paying attention at first. Just walking toward me, sorting through the key cards.
Then he looked up.
And saw Théo.
And Théo saw him.
The lobby didn't go quiet like it would in a movie.
People kept walking, phones kept ringing, the front desk kept checking in guests who had no idea they were witnessing the most loaded eye contact in Canadian figure skating history.
But something shifted in the air between the two of them—a charge, a recognition, the particular electricity of two people with a mountain of unfinished shit encountering each other in a space where the only acceptable response was professionalism.
I stood there and watched it happen. Lucky me.
“Nico.” Théo said it softly. His name in Théo's mouth sounded different than it did in anyone else's. Gentler. Almost tender. Like a lover.
Cool. Great. Not at all making me want to put my fist through a wall.
“Théo.” Nicky hesitated—that awkward moment where neither of them could decide the appropriate level of physical contact—and then went for a quick hug. Brief, careful, the kind where you patted once and pulled back. “It's good to see you.”
“You too.” Théo's eyes were already scanning Nicky's face—quick, clinical, cataloguing damage. The way he looked at him put me on edge.
“Did you just get in?”
“Last night. Long travel day. Layover at LAX.”
“How was the flight?”
“You know LAX.”
They both laughed—short, strained, the shared shorthand of people who'd spent years travelling the same circuit—and I stood there like a potted plant trying to remember how my legs worked.
I should leave. But my feet seemed to be glued to the beige ceramic tile.
“Well,” Sabrina said brightly, clapping her hands together like she just had the most brilliant idea. “Dinner? All of us? I'm starving and I refuse to eat hotel room service alone.”
Théo glanced at Nicky. Nicky glanced at Théo. Some wordless negotiation. Nicky nodded.
“Sure,” Théo said. “That sounds great.”
“Are you rooming with Adrian? We should invite him too,” Sabrina suggested, because she apparently hated me.
Fuck. That should have been my cue to bail—plead jet lag, fake a phone call, develop a sudden passionate interest in the hotel gift shop. But I was still frozen in my spot like an idiot, watching this reunion unfold with the morbid fascination of someone who couldn't look away from a car crash.
And then Théo's gaze shifted past Nicky's shoulder and found me.
His expression changed. Not dramatically—he was too controlled for dramatic—but enough. A coolness. A slight narrowing. The look of someone who had not expected to find me within ten metres of the person he was clearly still protective of.
I walked over and slung an arm over Nicky's shoulder.
Casual. Friendly. The kind of thing a training partner might do.
He went rigid under my arm. But he didn't shove me off, which—given that he'd barely looked at me since Québec—I was choosing to interpret as progress.
We were both very aware of the last time we'd been this close.
“Zhao,” Théo said with a nod. Neutral. Professional. Absolutely glacial underneath.
“Beaubien.” I matched his tone exactly. “Good to see you back on the circuit. Things were getting a bit boring.”
Nicky's elbow drove into my ribs. Théo's expression didn't change but something behind his eyes went very cold, very fast.
“Boring,” he repeated. “Must be nice, treating the sport like a rich kid's hobby.”
“You couldn’t buy your way into a quad flip, Beaubien. But keep telling yourself I’m just a spoiled little rich kid. It’ll make losing to me hurt less.”
His jaw tightened.
And because I couldn’t leave well enough alone, I added, “I'll be sure to wave from the top of the podium. You can watch from wherever you end up.”
Sabrina's smile had fossilized on her face.
“I think we might all be a little hangry and jetlagged,” she said, giving me a pointed look. “Why don't we meet in the lobby in an hour and grab some dinner? I'll find a place.”
Nicky handed her the little envelope with her room key and a number scrawled on top. She took Théo's arm and steered him toward the elevator with the practised authority of a woman who had spent her entire life managing situations that were about to go sideways.
Nicky ducked out from under my arm, grabbed the handle of his suitcase, and headed for the other bank of elevators without a word.
“That went well,” I said, grabbing my suitcase and catching up in two strides.
He looked at me. The composure was intact but barely—a hairline fracture running through the polished surface that only I could see because I'd spent weeks learning where to look for it.
“Don't,” he said quietly.
And for once in my life, I didn't.
We took the elevator to the 18th floor in silence. Stood on opposite sides of the car, watching the numbers climb, saying nothing. The air between us was thick with everything unsaid.
Osaka was already starting off messy.