7. Adrian
Surprisingly, the person who had been the nicest to me since my arrival in Toronto was Sabrina Gallagher.
I had always filed her away as Théo Beaubien’s sidekick—the fiery redhead glued to his side at every major competition.
Which was unfair. Sabrina was heading into her second Olympic Games as one of the top Canadian women.
She had a Grand Prix medal of her own. She deserved better than being defined by who she was friends with.
The actual Sabrina was funny and blunt and surprisingly not a diva.
She swore more than I did, which was saying something.
She had a laugh that carried across entire rink lobbies and opinions about everything that she delivered without apology.
She could be an absolute bitch, but only if you really, truly deserved it.
She had found me on my second day at the rink. Dropped into the chair next to me in the lounge, handed me a caramel macchiato with extra caramel, and said, “So you’re the one Renaud won’t shut up about. I’m Sabrina. Welcome to the circus.”
We had been friends since.
As far as I could tell, Sabrina and Nicky were Renaud’s A-squad—the two skaters the whole program orbited around.
Their competition schedules dictated ice time, training priorities, everything.
Théo Beaubien had been part of that once.
Before whatever went down at Worlds blew it up.
Sabrina didn’t volunteer the details and I wasn’t about to ask, but I could connect the dots well enough.
Renaud’s golden trio had become a duo overnight and now here I was, slotted into a vacancy nobody wanted to acknowledge existed.
The pink haired wild card shoved into a system built on precision and pedigree.
I wasn’t naive enough to think Renaud had brought me in out of the goodness of his heart.
The man didn’t have a heart—he had strategy.
Training two skaters who’d spent years being pitted against each other by the press, one of whom was his own nephew and reigning national champion?
That wasn’t mentorship. That was a chess move.
He wanted the best roster heading into the Olympics and sentiment didn’t factor into the equation.
All that soft focus bullshit coaches said in interviews about fostering talent and building champions? Renaud believed it the way my father believed in family dinners—as a performance, not in practice.
Renaud only cared about one thing. A gold medal. Nicky was his golden heir but having a spare never hurt.
Despite the obvious competition Renaud was stirring up in his own ranks, Sabrina had offered me an olive branch.
The only person I knew in Toronto was barely home and it wasn't like I had time to go out and make friends.
If I wasn't on the ice, I was doing off-ice conditioning, stretching, weights, active recovery. Rinse and repeat.
So yeah. I was surprised when she texted me Wednesday to invite me out Friday. Even more surprised when she told me what it was for.
Sabrina: We’re going out to celebrate Nico’s return!! Club Goethe in Kensington. Friday 10pm. Wear something hot.
Sabrina: You’re coming and I won’t accept no.
His return from what, exactly? I wasn’t buying the exhaustion and dehydration story. Not for a second.
Not that Nicky would ever confide in me.
We weren’t swapping secrets over morning coffee.
But I wasn’t born yesterday and I’d grown up around enough money and enough media training to recognize a carefully constructed narrative when I saw one.
Exhaustion and dehydration didn’t require a month long absence from competition.
It didn’t require Renaud managing every detail of the re-entry like a military operation.
And it sure as hell didn’t explain the way Nicky tensed up when someone asked him how he was doing.
There was a lot more going on behind the scenes and I’d bet my trust fund on it.
It didn’t change my opinion of him. If anything, it made him more real.
The version of Nicky I’d been constructing in my head—the golden prince on his golden pedestal who’d never suffered a day in his charmed golden life—was suddenly a little more flesh and blood.
A little less untouchable. Even my stubborn ass could admit when I’d misjudged someone.
Not that I was going to tell him that.
Still, going out to celebrate his return seemed diabolical.
Skaters loved to have a good time. That was universal across every competition and event—the discipline required to compete at this level created a pressure valve that had to blow somewhere and Friday nights were historically where it blew.
Pre-competition hookups, post-competition blackouts, the kind of reckless decisions that got made in hotel bars at 3 a.m. and never spoken of again. I was fluent in the ecosystem.
But Nicky agreeing to this? That was the part I couldn’t wrap my head around. I couldn’t picture him in any of it—the shots, the sweaty dance floor, the 3 a.m. bad decisions. He was too controlled, too careful, too Prince Nicky for that scene.
For the little time I’d spent around him, I’d already clocked it—the chronic people pleasing, the inability to put himself first, the way everyone in his orbit seemed perfectly comfortable taking from him without ever checking what was left.
A week back from God knows what and his friends were planning a night out like everything was totally normal.
Who needed enemies with friends like these?
◆◆◆
I arrived late because I’d spent an hour debating whether to show up at all. And then another thirty minutes trying on outfits.
Hanging out with people who regarded me with varying degrees of curiosity and suspicion wasn’t exactly my idea of a fun Friday night. Cam was in LA so I had no one else to go out with—not that I needed a wingman. I could always pull up an app and have company in twenty minutes.
But I didn’t want to piss off Sabrina. She was the only person in the program who’d gone out of her way to make me feel like I wasn’t an invasive species and I’d learned in three weeks of friendship that Sabrina Gallagher’s I won’t accept no was not a joke.
So I went.
The club was small, dark, the kind of place with exposed brick and low lighting and a DJ who valued volume over taste.
I found the group in a booth near the back—eight or nine skaters from the program plus a few civilians I didn’t recognize—and stood at the edge for a moment, assessing the situation the way I assessed the competition during warm ups.
Exits, threats, where to position myself for maximum impact.
Sabrina spotted me first.
She was in an emerald dress that walked the line between tasteful and indecent.
She looked fucking incredible and she knew it—the green against that red hair, the pale skin, the particular energy of a woman who understood exactly the effect she was having and was thoroughly enjoying it.
She had a pink drink in one hand that was sloshing dangerously close to the rim as she leaned across the table.
When she noticed me, her whole face lit up and she was out of the booth before I could bolt.
“You came!” She kissed my cheek and grabbed my arm and hauled me toward the group, her drink leaving a faint sticky trail on my sleeve.
“Of course I came, gorgeous.”
I shrugged off my leather jacket and she took a step back, green eyes raking me head to toe with the critical appreciation of a woman who took fashion as seriously as her free skate.
“You look obscene.”
I had put in effort. Not for anyone specifically—for myself, because getting dressed up was one of the few forms of self-expression I’d never needed permission for. And yeah, maybe I liked the attention. Sue me.
A sleeveless black crop top that showed a stripe of hard earned abs above low slung baggy jeans.
Years of six hour training days had built me a body I wasn't afraid to show off—dense, sinewy muscle earned one crossover at a time, obliques cut sharp where the fabric rode up.
Tattoos on full display. Pink hair slicked back to expose the pearl necklace I'd layered over a silver choker.
The usual stack of rings on every finger.
“This old thing?” I tugged at the crop top. “Just threw it on.”
“Shut up.” She swatted my arm. “I thought you were going to bail on us.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” I glanced toward the booth. “Maybe fantasized about it a little.”
She laughed—loud and delighted, the kind of laugh that made people at nearby tables turn and look. “You're such an asshole. I love you. Come on.”
She grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the booth. “Also, fair warning—Nico's being weird tonight. Quieter than usual. Don't poke at him too much.”
“Define too much.”
“Adrian. Play nice. This dress might be tiny but you don’t want to see what I have stashed in my clutch.”
“Fine, I can play nice.”
Sabrina spotted another late arrival and I was left to my own devices. That was when I saw him.
Nicky was sitting at the far end, half turned toward the girl beside him, drink in hand. He was wearing a cream coloured sweater with navy slacks, his hair brushed back from his face in the effortless way that managed to look both unstyled and perfect. And he was wearing glasses.
I had never seen him in glasses before. Tortoiseshell frames that did something unexpected to his face—softened the regal edges, dialled down the golden prince wattage.
He looked less like the cover of a skating magazine and more like a grad student who’d wandered into the wrong bar on his way to research something obscure and deeply serious. Younger. More approachable.
Kinda cute, if I was being honest. Which I rarely was.
His eyes found me over the rim of his glass—something clear and fizzy, probably non-alcoholic—and his expression did that thing. The flicker. Surprise first, then a controlled irritation that he smoothed away so quickly most people would have missed it entirely.
I was not most people. And I was getting very good at reading the micro-expressions of Nico Fontaine.
“Nicky.” I slid into the booth across from him because the seat was open and because I wanted to watch him pretend he was fine with my existence in his general vicinity. “Nice party.”
“Zhao.” The single word carried an impressive weight of resignation. Like he’d been having a perfectly fine evening and had just watched it go to shit in real time. “I didn’t realize you were coming.”
“Sabrina invited me.”
“Sabrina invited everyone.” He took a careful sip of his drink. “She’s very inclusive.”
“That's a nice way of saying she didn't run the guest list by you.”
The corner of his jaw tightened. “Everyone is welcome.”
“Even me?”
“You're sitting here, aren't you?”
“That's not the same as I’m welcome and we both know it.” I leaned back in the booth and stretched one arm along the back of the seat. His eyes tracked the movement involuntarily—down my arm, across the tattoos, back up—and then he looked away, deliberately focusing on anywhere but me.
“You're here. I'm not throwing you out. Take the win, Zhao.”
“You look like you're heading to office hours,” I said. “The glasses.”
He touched them like he had forgotten he was wearing them. “I usually wear contacts. My eyes were tired.”
“They're cute.”
He blushed, still looking anywhere but at me. “Thank you.”
“What are you drinking?”
“Club soda.” He set the glass down. “I'm driving.”
“You're the DD at your own party?”
“Someone has to be responsible.”
“Does someone though? I’m pretty sure Toronto has Ubers.”
“I offered.”
Of course he had. He would volunteer to be the designated driver at a party thrown in his honour so that everyone else could have a good time without worrying about logistics. The people pleasing was so bone deep it was almost art.
“Well.” I picked up the cocktail menu. “I'll just have to drink enough for both of us.”
I ordered a whisky sour and watched him over the rim when it arrived.
Prince Nicky, in his cashmere and his glasses, stone cold sober at his own party, making sure everyone else was taken care of. Even here. Even now. Even with me sitting across from him in an outfit he was trying really hard not to notice.
I took a long sip and let the whisky burn and thought about what it would take to get him to stop being responsible for one single night.