31. Adrian
Was it stupid to train with your competition? Arguably one of your greatest rivals in the sport?
The press had been writing about Fontaine vs.
Zhao since we were teenagers. Two skaters who couldn't have been more different—the prince and the punk, the tradition and the rebellion, the darling and the disruptor.
We'd traded national titles back and forth.
Split podiums at every major international.
The rivalry was so well documented it had its own hashtag (#PrinceVsPunk), its own fan edits, its own corner of skating Reddit where people debated our relative merits with the intensity of constitutional scholars.
So yeah. Probably stupid.
But I had been spending all my waking hours with Nicky for the last two weeks and the funny thing was—we hadn't even exchanged phone numbers.
Everything felt ass backwards with him. We had already fucked and now we were slowly getting to know each other.
Like we'd skipped to the end of a book and were now circling back to read the first chapter.
It started with the gym sessions. Then it became morning coffee at the café across from the rink—him with his boring black Americano, one sweetener, and splash of almond milk, me with whatever sweet confection I was craving that day.
Then it was cool down stretches on the mats where conversation happened in the quiet moments between reps.
I told him about my parents. The empire waiting for me in Vancouver that I wanted no part of. The way my father looked through me at family dinners. The way skating was a temporary inconvenience he was waiting for me to outgrow.
And then, three days ago, he told me about his hiatus.
“I need to tell you something,” he said. “And I need you to not make a joke about it.”
“When do I ever—”
“Adrian.”
“Okay. No jokes.”
He was staring at the mat between his knees.
His hands were still, which was unusual—Nicky's hands were always doing something, fidgeting with a water bottle cap, adjusting his sleeves, rolling the hem of his shirt between his fingers.
Now they were just resting on his thighs, palms down, like he was bracing himself.
“The cover story about my break was exhaustion and dehydration,” he said. His voice was flat. Clinical. The voice of someone reciting something they'd rehearsed. “That's what Renaud told the federation and the press.”
He swallowed.
“That's not what happened.”
I waited.
“I overdosed. Took too many sleeping pills after struggling with insomnia for months.” A pause.
His breathing was shallow. “My mother found me.
She couldn't find a pulse. She thought I was—” He stopped.
Swallowed. “The paramedics got there in time. I was hospitalized and then transferred to a treatment facility in Aurora.”
The gym was quiet. The overhead lights buzzed. Somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed.
I had stopped mid-stretch. My hands were still gripping my ankle but I wasn't stretching anymore. I was frozen, my brain trying to close the distance between what I'd believed and what he was actually telling me.
Overdose. Sleeping pills. His mother found him.
His mother found him.
Every interaction I'd had with Nicky since I arrived in Toronto rearranged itself.
Every time I'd poked at him, pushed past his composure for sport, made some smartass comment about his perfect life.
The first day at the rink when I'd said clearly it's not a two way street and watched something flinch behind his eyes.
The way he went still and quiet when the pressure got too much, folding inward instead of exploding outward, swallowing everything until there was no room left.
That wasn't personality. That was survival.
“It wasn't intentional,” he added quietly.
Still staring at the mat. “I just wanted to sleep.
I was so tired, Adrian. The pills were prescribed—they were supposed to help.
Two wasn't working so I took three. Then four. Then—” He stopped.
“I don't remember how many after that. I just wanted to sleep.”
I wanted to say something. Every word I could think of felt completely inadequate.
So I didn't say anything. Just shifted closer on the mat until our shoulders were touching.
He didn't pull away.
“I didn't want to die,” he said quietly, like he was trying to convince himself as much as me. “I just wanted everything to stop for a while.”
“How long were you in—” I couldn't finish. The word treatment stuck in my throat.
“A month. Renaud made sure the cover story was airtight. Exhaustion and dehydration.” The bitterness in his voice was the most honest thing I'd ever heard from him. “My uncle's first call after my mother told him wasn't to ask if I was okay. It was to the federation communications team.”
Something white hot flared in my chest. Not the usual irritation I felt toward Renaud. This was fury. The kind that started in your stomach and climbed into your throat.
“He's more worried about his reputation than you,” I said.
“He's my uncle.”
“That makes it worse, not better.”
That's when his breathing changed. Faster. Ragged. His hands trembling where they rested on his thighs. The colour draining from his face.
“Nicky.”
He didn't seem to hear me.
I pressed our shoulders together more firmly. “Hey. You with me?”
He nodded but it didn't look convincing.
“What do you need?”
“Just—” A breath that didn't seem to go anywhere. “Give me a minute.”
I gave him five. Sat there while his breathing slowed, while the colour crept back, while his hands stopped shaking enough to unclench from his joggers.
When he finally looked at me, his eyes were red rimmed but dry.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t apologize for being human.”
We sat in silence. I kept thinking about every time I'd treated his composure like a game. A locked door to pick for my own entertainment. I hadn't considered that the armour was the only thing holding him together.
“Thank you for trusting me,” I said finally. Insufficient but true.
He looked at me without the mask. Just Nicky. Tired and scared but also relieved.
“You're the first person I've told since I left treatment. I think part of me just wanted to brush it under the rug and go back to my season like it never happened.”
“Why tell me then?”
The second it was out of my mouth, I hated myself a little.
Not because I didn’t want to know. I did. I wanted to understand everything about him, which was turning into its own separate problem. But he’d just handed me something fragile and bleeding and apparently my first instinct was to poke at it.
He was quiet for a long time.
“Because you're the only person who doesn't handle me,” he said. “Everyone else—my uncle, my parents, Kat—they treat me like something that might break. You just treat me like a person. An insufferable person, but a person nonetheless.”
“You are pretty insufferable.”
The ghost of a smile. “Thank you.”
“Your Americano order is offensive. Your training gear is boring. Your posture is beyond uptight.”
The smile became real. Small, watery, but real.
“But you're also—” I stopped. Chose my words with more care than I usually bothered with.
“You're kind. Genuinely kind, not the bullshit people do for cameras.
You're determined in a way that's a little scary.
And you're a generational talent who doesn't seem to realize it.” I took a breath.
“You're also more than skating. We both are.
And whatever your uncle or anyone else has told you about what happened—you survived something.
You're still here. Still showing up. That's pretty badass, Nicky.”
He looked away. Jaw working. Fighting the instinct to contain, to control, to fold whatever he was feeling into something small enough to swallow.
Then his shoulders dropped. Just slightly. And he leaned into me—not a collapse, just a quiet shift of weight that said I'm tired of holding this alone.