Chapter 11 Octaviana
Octaviana
~OCTAVIA~
“She had two versions of herself: the one who trained for gold and the one who dressed for war.”
“Fuck, girl.” Candy stood in the doorway of my bedroom with one hand braced against the frame and the other pressed flat against her chest, as if physically preventing her heart from evacuating the premises. “I forgot that you actually look badass sexy when you dress up.”
She was shaking her head. Slowly. The deliberate, side-to-side oscillation of a woman confronted with visual evidence she’d been warned about but had underestimated—the same expression I’d seen her deploy the first time she’d witnessed a gymnast execute a triple-twisting double layout in warm-ups and realized the competition bracket was going to be a problem.
“You look like a menace to society.”
She was not wrong.
The mirror confirmed it. The woman staring back from the full-length glass mounted to the inside of my closet door was not the Octavia who had sobbed on a shower floor six hours ago, or the Octavia who had performed a throw triple Salchow in a crystal-studded leotard at eight in the morning, or the Octavia who had walked past Angelo Reyes without a glance.
This was the other version.
The one who emerged on rare occasions, like a predatory species that surfaced only under specific atmospheric conditions: celebratory mood, adequate sleep, and a level of “fuck it” energy that had crossed the threshold from reckless into liberated.
The red lipstick was the keystone. A deep, matte, arterial crimson that I’d paired with a dark red lip liner one shade darker—the liner applied slightly outside my natural lip line to create a fuller, sharper silhouette that turned my mouth from a feature into a statement.
The combination was specific. Deliberate.
A formula I’d perfected during my brief, glorious, pre-injury phase of actually having a social life, and one that I associated so strongly with a particular version of myself that applying it felt less like putting on makeup and more like summoning an alter ego.
Octaviana.
The name Candy had given her—the nocturnal iteration of Octavia Moreau who emerged when the lipstick went on and the hem went up and the carefully maintained composure of a competitive athlete was replaced by a woman who had decided, for the duration of one evening, that consequences were a problem for tomorrow’s version of herself.
My hair was down. Loose, voluminous, the purple and turquoise and platinum strands falling in luscious, heat-set curls that cascaded past my shoulders and gave my entire silhouette a dimension of movement and body that my competition braids never permitted.
The curls were intentional—the kind that bounced when you walked, that caught light in their spirals and threw it back in fragments, that said I spent forty-five minutes on this and I know exactly what it does to the way people look at me.
And the dress.
The dress was a crime.
Black. Fitted. The kind of dangerously short hemline that rested approximately four inches above my knee and made my legs—twenty years of figure skating’s finest contribution to quadricep development—look like they’d been sculpted by someone who considered modesty a design flaw.
The fabric clung to my waist, followed the curve of my hips with a devotion that bordered on possessive, and did a thing to my ass that I could only describe as architectural.
Structural. A feat of engineering that transformed a body part into a conversation piece.
I rarely dressed like this. Competition life demanded a wardrobe that was functional, athletic, and approximately as provocative as a census form. Training leggings. Moisture-wicking tops. Compression gear.
The sartorial vocabulary of a woman whose body was a professional instrument and whose clothing existed to facilitate its function rather than display its form.
But occasionally—on nights when the weight of discipline had been temporarily lifted and the fuck it threshold had been comprehensively breached—Octaviana got her turn.
And maybe, just maybe, I want to end this dry spell tonight.
The thought was honest enough to make me smirk at my own reflection.
The dry spell had been…extensive. Months.
Many months. The kind of extended involuntary celibacy that happened when you spent your twenties recovering from a career-ending injury, rebuilding your body through rehabilitation, and training at an intensity that left your evenings occupied by ice baths and meal prep rather than the kind of activities that required a second participant and significantly less clothing.
But the power nap had done its work. Two hours of deep, dreamless, post-cry sleep that had reset my nervous system from catastrophic overload to cautiously operational, and when I’d woken to the smell of Candy’s bolognese simmering in the kitchenette and the knowledge—the real, confirmed, certificate-verified knowledge—that I had officially qualified for the Winter Olympics pipeline, the first fully formed thought in my freshly rested brain had been: I deserve a good night.
A real one. The kind that involves music and laughter and the attention of people who find me attractive and the specific, intoxicating freedom of being a twenty-five-year-old woman who just achieved the thing she’s been fighting for and wants to celebrate by feeling alive in her body instead of punishing it.
Is that so terrible? To want one night where the only thing I’m performing is confidence?
No. It’s not terrible. It’s overdue.
I laughed—a full, bright, genuine sound that felt unfamiliar in my own throat, like a language I’d been fluent in once and was relearning. “I know you love Octaviana when she comes out to play.”
Candy snorted. The sound was elegant and derisive in equal measure, which was a vocal combination only she could execute.
“Oh, no. This”—she gestured at me with a sweeping, prosecutorial hand motion that encompassed my hair, face, dress, and the general atmospheric disturbance I was apparently creating—“is the initial phase. The warm-up. The overture. The real Octaviana is when you start getting into the tipsy realms and you become an unapologetic bitch who savagely talks everyone down because your filter goes on permanent vacation and your cocky ass decides the entire room needs to hear your opinions at competition volume.”
I groaned. The sound was reflexive, defensive, and entirely performative, because we both knew the accuracy of the description was approximately one hundred percent and my objections were ceremonial.
“I am most certainly not cocky.”
Candy crossed her arms. Raised a single eyebrow—the left, her precision instrument, the one she deployed for maximum skeptical impact.
The posture was identical to mine when I was interrogating someone, which made sense given that we’d been friends long enough to have absorbed each other’s mannerisms the way adjacent plants absorbed each other’s root systems.
“Every athlete,” she said, enunciating each word with the deliberate, hammer-strike clarity of someone laying bricks, “and their damn family generational line, is cocky as fuck.” She held up a finger.
“Especially when your father was an Olympic-winning coach for some of the best figure skaters who won championships again and again until retirement. You were raised in cockiness. It was your first language. You learned it before you learned crossovers.”
I smirked.
The smirk was involuntary—pulled from me by the mention of my father the way a specific note pulled a specific memory from the archive of your body.
Dad. Jean-Pierre Moreau. The man who had coached three separate skaters to World Championship gold, whose name appeared in the ISU Hall of Fame under the coaching category, who had built a reputation for producing technically flawless, emotionally devastating performers through a combination of relentless discipline, surgical precision, and the specific, unshakable belief that his athletes were capable of more than they thought possible.
The same man who had sewn sequins onto my first competition costume with carpenter’s hands.
Who had taught me to fall on the ice before he taught me to stand on it, because the fall is the first thing you learn, chérie.
Master the fall, and the standing takes care of itself.
Cocky? Maybe. But he earned it. And maybe I learned it from the best.
Candy’s expression softened. The shift was gradual—the raised eyebrow lowering, the crossed arms loosening, the competitive energy of the banter receding like a tide to reveal the quieter, more vulnerable shoreline beneath. Her voice dropped a register.
“How is your dad?”
The question landed in the warm space between us with the careful weight of someone placing a fragile object on a table. She knew the answer was complicated. She’d known since Prague, since the night I’d told her at the rehabilitation facility about the diagnosis.
I sighed. The exhale was long, controlled, carrying a weight that the bolognese-scented air of the dorm absorbed without complaint.
“He’s surviving the chemo.” A pause. The word surviving doing the heavy lifting—not thriving, not responding well, not beating it.
Surviving. The verb of endurance rather than victory.
“You know how it is on the body. The fatigue. The nausea. The way it strips the weight off someone who was already lean and turns them into a version of themselves that the mirror doesn’t recognize.
” I adjusted the clasp of my bracelet—a thin gold chain he’d given me for my eighteenth birthday, the only piece of jewelry I wore to every competition and every party and every hospital visit.
“Doesn’t help that my mom is being a bitch. ”