Chapter 27 #3
Dean stood in the middle of the room, gold medal hanging forgotten over the back of a chair, heartbreak etched across the face of a man still trying to let me leave with dignity.
And I understood that whatever happened next, there would never be another version of my life where Dean Foster had not changed it.
Then I left before the part of me that loved him won.
Dean
I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling while the Olympic Village settled gradually into uneasy silence around me. Doors closed somewhere down the corridor. Pipes hummed in the walls. Outside the window, Milan glowed gold beneath the winter sky.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Luka standing near the door with heartbreak written all over his face while he told me he didn’t know how to choose between freedom and survival.
What clawed at me?
I understood.
I rolled onto my side and reached for my phone before I could stop myself.
Messages crowded the screen: texts from teammates, notifications, headlines I refused to open. I scrolled past all of them, past a string of increasingly unhinged messages from Noah. Past a photo Mom had sent of Dad asleep in a chair.
Your father is thriving, as you can see.
Normally that would’ve made me laugh. Tonight it barely registered.
On impulse, I Googled Luka, and what came up were videos going back years.
The footage was grainy and badly lit, clearly filmed from somewhere high in the stands at a junior competition. No dramatic arena lighting. No Olympic polish. No impossible pressure hanging over every movement.
Just Luka, younger.
I watched him push onto the ice with that same controlled elegance he still carried now, every movement precise even then. But there were differences too, tiny ones. A hesitation before a turn. A smile after landing a jump that looked spontaneous instead of composed for cameras.
God.
My chest was so fucking tight.
I watched the clip twice, then a third time, not because of the skating, but because of the person hidden inside it.
All of a sudden, all I could think about was Luka alone tonight somewhere else in the Village, trying once again to fold himself back into the shape other people needed him to be, careful, controlled… safe.
The thought hurt in a way I hadn’t expected.
Because even then—even younger, less polished, not yet carrying himself with that impossible Olympic precision—he was still Luka. Still beautiful. Still careful.
That was what undid me in the end. Not the flirting, the kisses, the sex jokes, the stolen nights, or the way my body reacted whenever he walked into a room.
Not even the sight of him standing in my room, looking as if he was trying to hold himself together through sheer force of will while admitting he didn’t know how to survive this.
Alone in the quiet, I finally understood.
I didn’t want Luka to destroy himself trying to be brave for me.
I watched the old video again.
Luka landed a jump, smiled to himself, then immediately looked away as though he’d remembered somebody might be watching. The smile lasted less than a second.
Somehow that made it worse.
I thought about Kristof. Empty lockers. A fifteen-year-old boy learning what happened to people who took up the wrong kind of space.
My chest ached.
I didn’t want Luka brave.
I wanted him safe.
The realization settled heavily into my chest.
Somewhere between Montreal and Milan, between conversations at the rink and nights spent teaching each other pieces of ourselves, the question had changed without me noticing.
It wasn’t whether I loved him.
I did. That wasn’t even a question anymore.
I love him.
I stared at the tiny screen. Luka crossed the rink beneath old arena lights, younger and somehow already carrying too much on his shoulders.
If he went home, I might lose him.
The thought sat heavy in my chest.
But when I imagined him standing beside federation officials, smiling while pieces of himself disappeared one by one, I realized something worse.
Losing him would hurt.
Watching it happen would hurt more.
Because if Luka walked away from me, at least he would still exist somewhere in the world exactly as he was.
I could live with heartbreak. I wasn’t sure I could live with watching him erase himself.
I locked the phone, letting it fall beside me on the bed.
Tomorrow I would skate.
Tomorrow the cameras would follow me again.
Tomorrow Luka would make whatever choice he believed he had to make.
And for the first time since he walked out of my room, I understood something with absolute clarity.
If he chose survival, I would let him go.
I would hate it. I would probably spend years hating it. But I would let him go, because loving Luka had stopped being about keeping him.
It was about wanting him to remain himself.
I looked down at the old video one last time. Luka pushed out of a spin, glanced toward the boards, and smiled before he remembered not to.
The smile vanished.
The image didn’t.
And sometime before sleep finally came, I realized what I wanted most wasn’t for Luka to choose me.
It was for him to stop disappearing.