25. Adrian
My teachers. My coaches. My best friends. Hell, every single person who had ever known me long enough to form an honest opinion—agreed on one thing about Adrian Zhao.
I lacked impulse control.
Which was how I ended up in a hotel room in Osaka kissing my biggest rival.
The one person most likely to stand between me and an Olympic medal.
My coach's nephew. The reigning national champion. The golden prince whose composure I’d spent weeks picking apart like a curiosity I couldn’t leave alone.
His hands fisted in my shirt, his breath ragged against my lips, his whole body shaking with the force of finally letting something out that he'd been crushing down for way longer than he would ever admit.
Consequences? Consequences could go fuck themselves.
Consequences were tomorrow's problem. Tomorrow's Adrian could deal with the fallout—that poor bastard.
Tonight's Adrian had just heard Nico Fontaine say kiss my ass in a voice that lit up every nerve ending in my body, and tonight's Adrian was not in the business of saying no to that.
His mouth parted in a gasp—involuntary, startled out of him by something I did with my teeth against his lower lip—and that was all the invitation my tongue needed.
I licked into his mouth without hesitation and the sound he made in response—soft, half swallowed, somewhere between surprise and surrender—was going to live in my head rent free for the rest of my natural life.
His tongue responded more tentatively. Cautious at first, testing and then finding the curve of my lip ring and tracing it with delicate, exploratory little licks. Curious even here. Learning the shape of something new with the same careful attention he applied to every element on the ice.
That was the thing about him. Nicky could be feisty—I had the evidence, I had pulled it out of him—but his default setting was sweet.
Genuinely, disarmingly sweet in a way he had no idea was rare.
He kissed like someone who'd spent his whole life letting other people set the pace and was shocked to discover he had preferences.
Every time I shifted the angle or bit down or dragged my teeth across his bottom lip, he made these small, bitten off sounds and each one brought me closer to losing whatever restraint I pretended to have.
Not that I was in the best state of mind. Seeing him with Théo at dinner had made my blood boil.
I could admit that now. With Nicky's mouth on mine and his hands twisted in my shirt.
Watching them together—the loaded eye contact, the careful silences, Théo squeezing Nicky's arm in the lobby like he still had some kind of claim—had lit something in me that went way past our general mutual dislike.
Théo Beaubien didn't deserve Nicky.
Uncharitable? Maybe. The guy had been through his own shit and done the best he could with what he had.
But I'd just watched Nicky spend two hours acting like everything was fine for a man who'd kept their relationship hidden for three years and then bailed.
Who'd taken everything Nicky offered and left anyway.
And Nicky didn't even blame him. He'd said mutually assured destruction like it was a fact of life. Like being someone's collateral damage was just something that happened and you moved on.
Fuck that guy.
I didn't know how to tell Nicky he deserved more without it sounding like a line. But I could kiss him like he mattered. Like whatever he gave me—the anger, the sweetness, the sharp edges he was just figuring out he was allowed to have—I'd take all of it without flinching.
I could do that much.
He didn't stop me when my hand trailed down his spine.
Slow. Deliberate. Giving him every chance to pull back, to say wait, to be cautious and sensible.
My fingers traced the line of his vertebrae through his shirt and I felt him shiver against my chest. A full body tremor that started at the base of his skull and rolled all the way down, and his breath caught against my mouth and his fingers tightened in my shirt but he didn't stop me.
My hands found the front of his shirt. Fingers clasping the buttons.
I pulled back just enough to see his face—flushed, lips swollen, the tortoiseshell glasses slightly askew, his blue eyes wide and dark in a way I had never seen them. He looked wrecked. And so, so fucking beautiful.
I could see the war happening behind his eyes. The part of him that wanted this just as desperately as I did fighting the part that had been trained since childhood to calculate risk, to weigh consequences, to ask what will this cost me before allowing himself to want anything.
I held his gaze and undid the first button.
He didn't stop me.
Second button. Third. My knuckles grazing warm skin as I worked downward and each inch of contact produced another one of those bitten off sounds—not quite a gasp, not quite a moan, something in between that he was clearly trying to suppress and failing.
The shirt fell open and I spread my hands flat against his chest and felt his heart hammering under my palms, rapid and unsteady.
“Nicky,” I said. Low. Against his mouth.
His eyes slid closed. His hands were still in my shirt but looser now, less angry, more—
“Don't talk,” he whispered. “If you talk, I'll start thinking and if I start thinking, I'll stop.”
So I didn't talk.
I kissed him again—slower this time, deeper, with intent—and felt him soften against me in increments. The tension leaving his body the way it left him on the ice during an Ina Bauer, that controlled surrender that was somehow more devastating than any resistance.
I'd been trying to crack him open for weeks. Poking, provoking, testing every edge of his composure with everything I had.
But this—his hands sliding up my chest, his mouth opening under mine, the quiet sound he made when my thumb traced the line of his collarbone—this wasn't cracking.
This was him choosing to let me in.
Different thing entirely.
I walked him backward until his knees hit the edge of the bed and then we were tumbling onto the mattress. The impact knocked his glasses sideways on his face and I reached down to take them off. Carefully—more carefully than I'd done anything in the last ten minutes—and set them on the nightstand.
Without them he looked younger. Softer. More like the boy I'd seen at Juniors. And for a second, I was sixteen again, standing at the boards in Mississauga, watching a kid with golden hair step onto the ice and feeling something hot and complicated twist in my chest.
He'd been beautiful then. Untouchable. A prince in a fairy tale I wasn't part of.
He was beautiful now. Flushed and breathing hard beneath me, hair wrecked against the white sheets, looking up at me with those blue eyes that had nothing left to hide behind. Not untouchable anymore. Just a person. Just Nicky.
And somehow that was so much worse. Because a beautiful stranger you could admire from a distance. A beautiful person lying underneath you, trusting you with the version of themselves they never showed anyone—that was the kind of thing that ruined you.
He cleared his throat, voice raspy as he said firmly, “This doesn't change anything.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it.” His jaw set in that way I'd been studying for weeks. Another tell. The sign that he was feeling something enormous and trying to contain it through sheer force of will. “I still can't stand you.”
“That's fine.” I lowered my mouth to the hinge of his jaw, pressed my lips just below his ear, felt his pulse hammering against my mouth. “I'm a big fan of hate fucking.”
His whole body went rigid beneath me.
“In fact—” I kissed down the line of his throat, slow, letting my lip rings drag against his skin, savouring the shudder it produced—”if you want to use me to piss off your ex, I'm fully on board. Consider it a public service.”
“You are such an—”
“Did you see his face at dinner? The man wanted to gut me with his chopsticks.” I nipped at his collarbone. “Imagine what he'd do if he knew I was—”
“Adrian.” His hand came up and gripped my jaw—hard, fingers pressing into my cheeks, forcing me to look at him. His eyes were blazing. Not the controlled flicker I'd been pulling out of him in increments. “Please. Shut. Up.”
“Make me.”
Something snapped behind his eyes.
He pulled my face down to his and kissed me with a ferocity that had nothing to do with sweetness and everything to do with a person who'd been told his entire life to be quiet and gracious finally deciding to take something with both hands and not apologize for it.
His teeth caught my lower lip. I made a sound—low and rough—and he swallowed it and kissed me harder. His hands were in my hair, pulling, not gently, and his hips shifted beneath me in a way that made my vision go white.
He was not careful. He was not polite. He was not bending to my will.
He was being Nicky. A real person with wants and needs and desires. The one I’d been chasing since the first day I walked into that rink.
I pulled back just enough to breathe. Looked down at him—flushed, dishevelled, breathing hard, lips swollen, hair a disaster, eyes daring me to say something.
“There he is,” I said softly.
“I told you to shut up.”
“I like feisty Nicky—”
He flipped me onto my back.
I didn’t see it coming—embarrassing, given I should have remembered he was an elite athlete with enough lower body power that he could rotate four times in the air.
One moment I was above him and the next my back hit the mattress and Nicky was straddling me, open shirt falling off one shoulder, hands flat on my chest, a look on his face I was going to be thinking about for the rest of my life.
“Shut,” he said and kissed me.
“Up,” he said and kissed me again.
“And fuck me already,” he finished, biting my lower lip hard enough to sting.
His hips pressed down against mine and I lost the ability to form words—which had never happened to me before. It was the single most impressive thing Nicky had ever done. And this was a man with a national title.