Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
Dean
By the time I got back to my room, the adrenaline that had pumped through me as I’d watched Luka and Mila had faded into a restless kind of exhaustion that refused to let me settle.
Great. They skate, and I feel wrecked.
Ethan had disappeared half an hour earlier after throwing me one long look that probably meant he knew I wanted to be alone. Or maybe he simply knew who I was thinking about.
Luka.
It was always Luka.
God, he was beautiful out there tonight.
It was more than technical brilliance. It had felt as though he was balancing perfectly on the edge of something dangerous without letting the audience see him shake.
Maybe that was why the worry wouldn’t leave me alone now.
Most people would have watched that performance and thought Luka looked calm.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how tired he’d looked afterward.
I’d watched him in the Kiss and Cry. He’d glanced toward me before looking away almost immediately, tension flashing across his face so quickly nobody else would have noticed it.
But I noticed Luka. That had become the problem.
I knew too much now.
I knew the tiny pause before he said something he didn’t fully believe. The careful neutrality in his expression whenever pressure started closing around him. The way his shoulders locked when he was trying to carry everything alone.
Tonight, he had looked as if he were stretched painfully thin.
My phone buzzed, and just like that, my heart skipped a beat.
Luka.
Then it sank when I saw the text from my mom.
Want to have dinner with us? Now that you’re a man of leisure?
I let out a sigh. I couldn’t face another meal where I struggled to keep everything locked up inside me.
And if I think this is struggling, what the hell is Luka going through?
I felt like the world’s most selfish asshole right then.
I typed a reply: maybe tomorrow? Kinda wiped out right now.
Mom: that’s fine. Get some rest. Love you.
I replaced my phone on the nightstand, then gazed at it.
Every instinct I had urged me to call him.
Luka hadn’t come to see me after the short program, and I knew him well enough now to understand that wasn’t an accident. If he’d wanted comfort, if he’d wanted distraction, he’d have found me somehow. The fact he’d stayed away told me everything I needed to know.
Something was wrong.
The urge to hear his voice sat heavily in my chest. I wanted to tell him he’d been incredible tonight. I wanted to remind him that one difficult evening didn’t have to be carried alone.
My thumb hovered over his name.
Then I stopped.
If I called, he would answer. Not necessarily because he wanted to talk, or because he was having an easier night than I was.
He’d answer because that was who he was.
Luka had spent so much of his life taking care of other people’s expectations that sometimes I wasn’t sure he knew how to put himself first. If he thought I needed him, he’d pick up the phone no matter what was happening inside his own head.
The realization hurt someplace deep.
I leaned forward, elbows braced on my knees, and scrubbed a hand over my face.
For weeks I’d been worrying about what the federation might do to him, the pressure they were putting him under, the impossible position they’d forced him into.
I thought I understood the problem.
The truth was, I’d only been looking at half of it.
One more skate remained.
Tomorrow night, Luka and Mila would step onto Olympic ice for the last time in these Games. Then the competition would end, the Village would start emptying out, and the strange little world we’d built here would disappear.
Until now, I’d been so focused on not losing him that I hadn’t really let myself think about what happened if I didn’t.
What if he chose me?
Not in some dramatic movie ending sort of way. Not Luka abandoning everything overnight and running off into the sunset.
That wasn’t who he was.
But what if, when all of this was over, he decided he couldn’t go back to pretending?
What if he wanted more than stolen days in Milan and secret nights behind locked doors?
The thought should have filled me with uncomplicated happiness.
Instead, it scared the hell out of me.
Wanting Luka to be free and watching him pay the price for that freedom were two very different things.
I knew what was waiting for him at home. The federation. The media. The expectations that had shaped his entire life.
If he chose himself—if he chose us—none of that would simply disappear.
I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes.
For the first time, I found myself wondering what our lives would actually look like outside the Olympic bubble. Airports, different countries, video calls at stupid hours because one of us was always somewhere else. Competitions. Training camps. Time zones.
None of it looked easy, yet every version of the future my mind produced contained Luka somewhere inside it. A message waiting when I woke up. A voice on the other end of a phone. A hand reaching for mine in some airport halfway across the world.
Before Milan, before Luka had crawled under my skin and into my soul, those thoughts would have terrified me.
Now they felt inevitable.
Then another possibility slipped in beside it.
What if he went home and decided survival mattered more?
What if he looked at everything he stood to lose and chose the safer path?
The ache that followed surprised me with its intensity.
I wouldn’t blame him for that. God, how could I? After everything he’d told me, after everything I’d learned about the life he’d been living, I understood exactly why he might make that choice.
Maybe that was what made it so painful.
I loved him enough to know I could never ask him to destroy his life for me.
The room was quiet except for the distant sounds of the Village drifting through the window.
I looked at my phone one last time.
Tomorrow, he would skate.
Tomorrow, maybe nothing would change.
Or maybe everything would.
Either way, the choice had to be Luka’s.
All I could do was love him enough to let him make it.
Luka
The rink sat almost entirely dark when I stepped through the gate, the vast Olympic arena stripped down to maintenance lights and echoes.
Pale reflections stretched across fresh ice beneath the rafters, silver and cold and empty in a way this place never was during competition.
Hours earlier it had thundered with applause, music, camera shutters, commentators talking over one another in half a dozen languages.
Now every scrape of my blades carried upward into silence.
I paused just inside the boards, breathing in the familiar sting of cold air while ventilation hummed overhead.
No judges sat waiting beneath bright lights.
No federation officials watched from the shadows pretending observation and surveillance were different things.
No cameras searched my face for composure worthy of national television.
For a moment, nobody required anything from me at all.
I pushed into motion immediately, long strokes carrying me down the rink.
One lap became two. My body slipped into patterns ingrained deeply enough to exist beneath conscious thought: outside edges, crossovers, turns threaded together with mechanical fluency born from repetition and fear and discipline so old I no longer knew where training ended and instinct began.
Cold air cut into my lungs as speed gathered beneath me.
Usually skating emptied my head.
Tonight it cleared space for thoughts I had spent years keeping locked behind routine and exhaustion and careful silence.
Volim te.
The words still shook loose inside me every time I replayed them.
I had trained myself to edit everything. Interviews. Expressions. Eye contact. Tone. Entire conversations trimmed carefully into acceptable shapes before they ever reached another person.
Then suddenly I was in Dean’s room, admitting I loved him before fear could drag the words back down my throat.
I drove harder into the next sequence, blades biting sharply into the ice. Three turns. Change of edge. Backward crossover. My legs burned pleasantly with exertion, but the pressure inside my chest refused to ease.
So I jumped.
The double Axel launched almost automatically, years of training taking over before thought caught up. Rotation. Landing. Exit edge clean and centered.
Of course it was. I had built an entire life around making difficult things appear effortless from a distance.
My breath clouded pale in the darkened arena.
Clean programs. Clean interviews. Clean public image.
Even my existence had been polished into something presentable long before I understood what parts of myself required hiding in the first place.
Memory surfaced abruptly.
I was ten years old beside the rink while my father straightened the collar of my training jacket before practice competition.
“You look nervous.”
“I am not nervous.”
“Good.”
I learned early that approval arrived through performance, through behaving correctly enough to make other people proud in public.
Years later, after I landed my first triple-triple combination at twelve, a federation official smiled at my coach and said, “This one will represent us beautifully.”
Represent.
Even then the wording carried warning beneath praise. They were never training a child. They were shaping an image.
I accelerated again, harder this time, speed blurring the empty stands around me while years of accumulated restraint pressed painfully against my ribs.
Every interview where I smiled at questions designed to imply Mila and I belonged together.
Every rumor I allowed to survive because correcting it felt dangerous.
Every moment spent monitoring my own body language like a man under permanent surveillance.
My edge slipped unexpectedly beneath me and I corrected instantly before I could fall.
The recovery happened so fast it barely registered, yet the familiarity of it made me laugh once under my breath.
That, too, had become instinct.