Chapter 15
In the new year, Sasha returns to Round Lake with two surprises for Danny, the first of which is a video call that actually works.
“Hey!” Danny says a few seconds later, and there he is: grainy but grinning, his face filling Sasha’s screen. “We can do video calls now?”
“Wi-fi is better,” Sasha explains, grinning back. The audio’s lagging slightly, Danny’s lips moving an instant before Sasha can hear him, but it’s night and day compared to how it used to be. “They fixed while we were away.”
Funny, what two Olympic team silver medals can do to a Ministry of Sports budget.
Not only has the dorm wi-fi been upgraded, but the food in the dining hall is actually edible now, and there are even rumors that they’ll be getting a brand-new training facility, nothing but the best for the returning Olympians.
He doesn’t mention this to Danny, though, because Danny’s still changing the subject whenever it comes anywhere close to Rio.
“That’s awesome,” Danny says. “So, like, can we always do a video call? Is that okay with you?”
He looks so hopeful, Sasha wants to answer yes without thinking for once, but it’s never going to be that simple. “I can’t when I am home. And maybe not in hotels. But when I am here, yes.”
“Sweet.” Danny beams, and Sasha can’t help smiling—no matter how many times he rewatches Danny’s videos on Instagram, it’s not the same as actually being with him, even if there’s still a screen between them. “So is that your room? Can you give me a tour?”
Sasha obliges, though it’s not much of a tour when it takes about five seconds. “Are you in your room?” he asks after, curious; all he can see behind Danny is a blank, beige wall and the top of either a pillow or a cushion.
“Nah, I’m in the basement.” Danny flips the camera around, showing Sasha an enormous flatscreen TV, a tangle of video game cords spilling from a cabinet onto the carpet, and Buddy gnawing on a bone. “Buddy, wanna say hi to Sasha? Can you say hi?”
Buddy glances up, then comes over to inspect the phone, his nose sniffing across the screen.
“Aww, you’re such a good boy—oh, you want a T-R-E-A-T now, don’t you. But we don’t have any down here, Buddy, I’m so sorry. Yeah, I know. I’m just gonna have to give you some later, okay? Cause you’re the best boy, yeah, of course you are…”
Sasha bites down on the inside of his cheek, trying not to laugh.
Now that Danny’s home from tour and done with school, he’s constantly cooing at one of his dogs, usually Buddy, right in the middle of their phone calls.
It drove Sasha crazy at first, and then somewhere along the way he must have actually lost his mind, because it started making him smile instead.
Lately, he’s been timing it to see how long Danny can go—so far, the record is fifty-three seconds—but today, Danny stops after just a couple good boys. “Oh, hey,” he says, coming back into view with a smirk, “I saw Kirill’s New Year’s vlog. Dude, you guys were wasted.”
Assuming that means drunk, it’s not an inaccurate statement.
Sasha remembers the family party at Uncle Borya’s—dinner and gift-giving followed by champagne toasts, someone opening a window so they could hear the anthem playing from the Red Square—but then he and Kirill had left to meet up with Ilya and Oleg, and after that it’s only flashes of fireworks, blurry street corners, and an outdoor ice skating rink.
Yet Danny doesn’t have much room to talk, considering the voice message he’d left Sasha shortly past midnight in California. Sasha’s listened to it six times and he still doesn’t know what Danny was trying to say.
Thinking about New Year’s reminds him of his second surprise, but before he can say anything, Danny asks, “Is Kirill’s foot okay? Cause when you guys were holding him up on the ice, I was like, oh, shit, this is not gonna end well.”
Less than a week after they’d returned to Round Lake in the fall, Kirill had broken his ankle in three places attempting a triple back flip.
“One for each flip,” he’d joked on the vlog, but off-camera he was fuming—at the surgeon who told him he was going to be in a boot until January, at the trainers who sidelined him for over a month, at the coaches who’ve been limiting his workouts ever since.
And most of all at himself, for doing too much too soon, a fucking triple his first week back at the gym.
Sasha had told him it wasn’t a good idea, and Kirill hadn’t listened—because Irina had called the night before, using a friend’s phone to get around him blocking her number, and he was hellbent on distraction, or destruction, no chance of talking him down.
Now his season’s over before it’s even started, a whole year that’ll be lost to rehab and recovery.
“Yes, foot is okay,” Sasha tells Danny. Their drunken outing hadn’t made things worse, at least, and Kirill’s spent most of his free time since then on his laptop, editing vlog footage.
He’d turned the New Year’s video around in just a couple of days, then followed it up with a tour of his new apartment (which he’d made Sasha film).
“Oh, hey,” Danny says suddenly. “Since it’s January, can we, like, figure out how we’re gonna see each other this year? Like, besides Worlds?”
Sasha straightens, ready to speak; but Danny’s still going, his face all animated, the way he usually gets when he’s talking about his dogs or trying to explain the entire plot of the last movie he watched.
“Cause I was thinking, like, what if we went somewhere in Europe? We could do London, or, like, Italy or Greece, or, like, I don’t know, Patty went to Denmark last year and he said it was awesome, so I’d be down for that. I don’t speak any Dutch, though.”
Sasha opens his mouth, but not quickly enough.
“Oh, you know what would be awesome? Germany. I’d love to do Oktoberfest and just get, like, totally hammered with a bunch of Germans…
but October’s kind of far away. And then we have Worlds.
” Danny’s expression dims, then brightens again.
“Wait, aren’t Worlds in Germany in, like, 2019?
Dude, that’d be sick, like, if we both go to Worlds, and then we do Worlds and Oktoberfest… ”
Listening to Danny make plans for them two years down the line, as if there’s not even a doubt in his mind that they’ll still be together, Sasha gets a strange swooping sensation in his stomach.
It reminds him of the first time he was allowed on the “big kids” trampoline at the gym, and he’d gone higher into the air than he’d ever gone before—but no matter how much it felt like flying, he always came back down in the end.
He clears his throat, interrupting Danny’s soliloquy on pretzels.
“You are home for summer, yes?”
“This summer? Yeah, just hanging.”
“Okay.” Sasha shrugs, trying not to smile. “So I will see you when I go to California.”
For an entire second, Danny is speechless.
“Wait, what? You’re coming here? Like—for gymnastics?”
“No.” Sasha shrugs again, though he’s already given up on not smiling. “For vacation. With my mother.”
It was his New Year’s gift to her: a trip to San Francisco, the one place she’s always wanted to see.
Not because of the giant red bridge or, apparently, the largest Russian Orthodox church outside of Russia, but because she’d fallen in love with an American show, Full House, and had watched the dubbed version religiously while he was still in diapers.
She’d actually cried when he’d told her the house was real and they were going to see it.
But if maybe he had a second reason for bringing her to California, and they happened to make a few other stops along the way, like Los Angeles…
“Are you shitting me right now.” Danny’s staring at the screen, his face lit up like a New Year’s tree. “Are you serious? Wait, how long are you gonna be here? And like, when?”
“Two weeks—”
“What—”
“—and maybe June, or July if this is okay for you?”
“Um, yeah, like, literally whenever? I mean, I have Nationals, like, late August, but that’s when you guys have the Russian Cup, right?
” Without waiting for an answer, Danny draws in a sharp, excited breath.
“Dude. This is awesome. Are you gonna be in San Francisco? Cause of the Full House thing? I can totally drive up and meet you guys. Does your mom like seafood? There’s this amazing place I went to once, I forget what it was called, but I can look it up… ”
At first, Sasha’s stuck on the fact that Danny somehow remembered Alina’s interest in an old American TV show—when he hadn’t even remembered mentioning it—but then his mind catches up to “meet you guys,” and he balks, realizing that Danny’s veered off in a direction he hadn’t meant for him to go.
“Not just San Francisco,” he interjects, trying to bring them back on track—to the plan he’d so carefully put together, looking at it from every angle to find the flaws and cracks, all the places where his mother might see through him. “San Diego, too. And Los Angeles.”
“Oh, sweet, that’s like right near me,” Danny says, perking up, and Sasha nods. He’s had Google Maps open on his laptop for almost a month now; he knows exactly how close Los Angeles is to Newport Beach.
“So maybe when we are in Los Angeles, I tell my mother I want to take walk, or drink, after dinner,” he starts, nerves jangling like janitor’s keys in his stomach—now that he’s sharing his plan, he can’t help wondering if it’s good enough, if there’s anything he’s overlooked.
“I can pay for hotel room, if you can come? I think better if we are close to where I stay with my mother, so we have more time…”
And then he stops, because Danny’s expression’s gone from curious to confused to something else, something that almost looks hurt.
“Wait,” he says after a moment, though Sasha’s already doing that. “You’re gonna be here for two weeks, and you only want to see me for like… two hours?”