Chapter 10 #2
Tora: Did you make it? Which hotel are you staying at? We’re at the Hotel AKA Boston Common, right in the center.
Tora: Alisa? Are you alive?
Tora: Alisa? Come on, answer me!
Tora: Okay, I hope you made it and didn’t die somewhere along the way… see you at practice tomorrow… good night, I suppose…
* * *
The next morning they were already on the ice, running through their elements.
Alisa had slept surprisingly well and felt none of the jet lag she had been so afraid of after reading endless articles online written by Europeans traveling to the United States.
Somehow it had passed her by entirely. She felt good.
They were going into the Death Spiral element when Tora stepped onto the ice with Loke.
The two of them began with a few easy laps around the rink, just rolling out, and Tora did not take her eyes off Alisa for even a second.
She was angry that Alisa had never answered her messages properly, but now Alisa was here, in the arena, on the ice, very much alive, and somehow she looked infuriatingly good for someone who had just spent hours on a plane.
Tora, meanwhile, felt exhausted. She had barely slept during the flight, everything irritated her, and for one awful moment she wondered if she was getting her period.
No, absolutely not.
With a soft, miserable groan, she forced herself to stop staring at Alisa and turned her attention back to her partner.
Tora and Alisa did not greet each other at all on the ice, as though they had never met, as though they had never known one another in the first place, and when Lev noticed the other pair entering the rink, the realization that they would now have to share the ice with their rivals made him visibly stiffen.
“One more time. Enter into it properly, you’re sliding here!” Pike shouted.
Alisa threw her hands into the air in frustration, and only then let herself glance toward Tora.
By now Tora and Loke were skating hand in hand, beginning with basic backward steps and working on their synchronization.
But it was the way Loke’s hand rested against Tora’s waist that immediately caught Alisa’s attention and refused to let go.
It bothered her more than she wanted to admit. It made her jealous.
Why couldn’t girls skate together in pairs?
She was still thinking about it when Lev slid directly into her line of sight and stopped in front of her.
“Why are you yawning?”
“I’m not yawning,” Alisa protested. “I was catching my breath.”
“We don’t have much time, Alisa. Stop staring at her. The Pike’s going to kill you for getting distracted, and honestly, she’s already halfway there.”
Oh, shit….
Lev pushed off and dropped briefly to one knee on the ice, dragging a gloved hand over the surface and then over his face, trying to cool himself down. His cheeks were burning.
“Why are you both standing there like statues? Lower in the Death Spiral. You’re losing the center in the todes.
Alisa, you’re too tense, your back is too straight.
Again. Come on, come on, keep moving!” The Pike clapped her hands sharply, and at once all of Alisa’s attention was ripped away from Tora and forced back onto the element.
“Let’s go,” Lev muttered.
Alisa nodded.
They accelerated again, faster this time, and then Lev caught her hand and she dropped almost parallel to the ice, spinning around him in a smooth, dangerous arc.
“Hold her, hold her, center, center, Lev!” the Pike barked from the boards, watching them with hawk-like intensity.
“One more time!”
They came out of the spiral, separated, circled apart, and immediately began building speed for the next attempt.
After several more tries, the Pike finally seemed satisfied. During a short break, while they stood in the corner drinking water and watching pale vapor rise from the ice, Alisa let out a slow breath.
“There are so many incredible athletes here,” she said quietly. “Do you think we even have a chance?”
She looked over at Lev. His face was serious, his cheeks still red from exertion.
“Of course we do. We’ll get a quota place, definitely. I know we will.”
Yet even as he said it, Alisa noticed that his hands were trembling.
Without thinking, she reached out, took them gently between her own, and squeezed.
Lev smiled or almost smiled. It was there and gone so quickly that Alisa nearly thought she had imagined it.
“Are you sure?” she asked, unable to keep the doubt out of her voice.
He nodded. Still, there was something he was not saying, and Alisa knew it, although she did not press him.
“If you stop getting distracted by your sexy blonde, maybe we really can get that quota. One per country, remember?”
He looked at her accusingly.
“You practically drool every time you look at her. Honestly, I’m convinced you slept together in Oslo.”
Alisa felt herself go bright red.
Damn it. Was it really that obvious?
“I don’t—”
“Oh, come on. I figured it out months ago. All the other girls are busy making out with hockey players after practice, practically throwing themselves at them when we switch ice time, and you? You never even look at them. Except Hermann, maybe, but nothing happened between the two of you, did it?”
“Lev, stop.”
“No, come on, tell me. We’re not strangers. What happened with the blonde?”
Alisa looked away.
“It’s complicated.”
“Well then,” Lev said, “tonight at the hotel I’m expecting a full presentation about your personal life.”
“Lev. What kind of nonsense is that? Why do you even need it?”
“I want to know you better so we can train better.”
“Yes, yes, I know you. You just want information so you can use it against me later.”
“Ouch. Rude.” He frowned dramatically and nudged Alisa with his elbow. She shoved him back with her hip in return, which sent Lev gliding backward across the ice so suddenly that he nearly crashed into an Italian skater passing behind him.
“Are you trying to kill me in advance?” he snapped, hurriedly screwing the cap back onto his bottle before he spilled water everywhere.
Alisa rolled her eyes.
“You started it, Lev. We are not dating or anything, if that is what you are so interested in. We just talk after competitions.”
“Yes, yes,” he said dismissively. “You sleep with her, so tell me.”
“Even if I did, so what? It happened a few times, we are not that close or something.”
“I didn’t think you valued yourself that low, Alisa.” Lev shook his head, and for a second there was something in his expression that looked almost like disapproval, perhaps even disgust.
And really, what had Alisa been expecting? What the hell had she been thinking?
They lived in different countries. Tora probably did not need a long-distance relationship, and certainly not with someone like Alisa, who still was not even entirely sure what she was, what she wanted, what she was allowed to want.
They were rivals. Rivals on the ice, competing against each other in the same discipline, the same events, the same league, and even thinking about it felt like breaking every rule Alisa had ever carefully built inside her own head.
Well. Every rule except the last one.
And Tora had never once brought up that night between them, not in all the months since.
Not that they talked all that often. They were both busy, both always training, always traveling, and most of the time they only managed a few messages sent late at night from hotel rooms or buses or airport lounges.
Sometimes, when their schedules lined up, they watched films together over video calls and spent hours discussing the lesbian movies they both loved.
Sometimes their conversations drifted somewhere south, so they masturbated together on video calls, but it was… damn… Alisa blushed.
And that was the problem.
Because whatever this was, it was more than friendship. It had been more than friendship for a long time, at least in Alisa’s head, and yet it was still somehow not enough to be called a relationship, because they had never spoken about it directly.
As Tora had said once, with that careless smile of hers:
“We’re just having fun, right?”
“Just having fun.”
Have sex, laugh, live, pretend none of it means anything.
“Well, why are you standing around like idiots?” the Pike shouted from the boards. “Back to work, quickly. We’re running out of time and they’re going to throw us off the ice early today.”
She was already standing beside the barrier with her arms crossed tightly over her chest.
Alisa and Lev looked at each other, smiled faintly, then quickly closed their bottles and set them down beside the boards.
At that moment Tora and Loke were practicing throw jumps on the other side of the rink, and apparently the Pike had noticed.
“Fine,” she snapped. “Then we’re doing them too. Come on, come on, come on!”
Lev took Alisa’s hand, built up speed, and threw her into the jump. By the time she landed, the Pike was already shouting again.
“Higher! The throw is higher than that! The Th3S is unfinished!”
“Triple Salchow again,” Lev muttered under his breath to Alisa, squeezing her hand tightly.
“Ready?”
She nodded.
“Get out of the landing properly! Alisa, blyat’, what was that?”
The Pike’s voice echoed through the rink.
Alisa only let out a quiet breath. Apparently the coach was in a terrible mood today, but there was nothing to be done about it. They still had to keep training, keep polishing the elements until they were perfect, and after that there would still be the choreography to run.
* * *
Alisa and Lev skated their short program well.
Today was only for training, for correcting mistakes and running through details one last time, and tomorrow would be the final with the free skate.
They had been performing the same choreography all season, polishing it over and over again.
Everything was perfect. Or at least they thought it was.