Chapter 33 My Eyes Are On You #2
The moment before the dismount. Her storm-gray eyes finding my green ones from above, and in that fraction of a second—elevated, suspended, existing only in the periphery of a gaze aimed exclusively downward at the man whose hands were holding her against gravity—I saw it.
Fear. A flicker. Brief. The residual echo of a nervous system betrayed at this exact moment in a previous life—the launch, the rotation, the descent that had run out of sky because the man below her had decided her career was worth less than his jealousy.
The fear wasn’t dominant. Wasn’t controlling.
It was a whisper—the kind that arrived at the threshold and waited to see if it would be admitted or turned away.
And behind the fear: determination. The fierce resolve that was not the absence of fear but the decision to perform despite it—the expression I had seen in every significant moment since I’d found her on the floor of Rink Three.
And I realized, in the held-breath fraction between the lift and the release, that there was a thing I had never said to her.
Not during the months in Halifax. Not during the five years of silence.
Not during the frat house floor or the audition or the heat or any of the thousand moments where the words had been forming in my chest and had been prevented from reaching my mouth by cowardice, by timing, by the goaltender’s instinct for reading the situation and deciding the shot wasn’t ready.
The shot was ready. The shot had been ready for five years, and every day I didn’t take it was a save I made against myself.
I mouthed the words. Not shouted. Not whispered. Mouthed. The lips forming the syllables with deliberate, visible, camera-be-damned precision—a medium only the two of us could access.
I love you.
The cameras would catch it. I knew that.
The lip-reading analysis that social media performed on every frame of Olympic footage would identify the words within hours, and the GIF would circulate and the clip would be shared.
But the cameras were irrelevant. The people were irrelevant.
Because the words were not for them. They were for the woman whose gray eyes were locked on mine from above, and the delivery medium was chosen because it matched the magnitude: something offered against resistance, reaching upward because the person it was meant for was worth the climb.
Her eyes widened. For one second. The storm-gray irises expanding, the pupils dilating—the genuine, unperformed surprise of a woman who had not expected those words at this exact moment.
Then the fear was gone. Completely. Instantly.
Erased with the decisive totality of a nervous system that had received information significant enough to recategorize the entire situation.
The whisper of trauma replaced by a signal louder and clearer—the signal of a woman who had heard three words and decided the hands were trustworthy and the words were true and the air between them was a space she could occupy without falling.
She was submitting. Not the designation-level, biology-driven, Omega-to-Alpha variety.
The real kind. The voluntary, conscious, I-choose-to-trust-you-with-my-body-and-my-future kind that no pheromone chemistry can produce and no Alpha dominance can compel.
Giving me herself—the way she always had, from the first night in Halifax to the fetal position on the rink floor to this moment, held above Olympic ice and three words on my lips that should have been there five years ago.
I released her. The dismount was clean—the force calculated, the release timed to the musical accent.
She rotated into the Biellmann spin—the free leg caught behind her head, her body becoming a single, vertical, spinning axis of flexibility that the crowd gasped at because the position required a level of spinal extension that most human bodies couldn’t approximate and that Octavia executed with the casual, devastating, I-do-this-for-a-living precision of a woman whose body had been trained for this from the age of four.
Six rotations in the Biellmann, each one generating a trail of golden light from the costume’s crystals, before she released the leg and transitioned—seamlessly, mid-spin—into the traveling position that brought her back to my side for the final synchronized sequence.
We went directly into sync. Side by side.
Matching strides. The twizzles were tight: four rotations each, forward inside edges, our bodies spinning in unison with the timing that made the audience forget they were watching two athletes from different disciplines and see instead a single organism expressing itself through two bodies.
The triple axels launched in synchronization—the most demanding jump in the program’s closing passage, requiring forward takeoffs and three and a half rotations.
We left the ice at the same fraction of a second.
Rotated in parallel. And landed—both of us, simultaneously, on deep outside edges that produced a twin shhh of blades meeting ice that the hushed crowd heard as one unified sound.
Into the quad Salchow. The grand finale.
Four rotations, maximum difficulty—the element reserved for the program’s closing statement, requiring the all-or-nothing commitment that only the final seconds of an Olympic performance could demand.
The takeoff from the back inside edge. Synchronized.
Our bodies coiling and launching in the paired-entry formation Foxwood had designed for maximum visual impact.
Four rotations. Tight. Fast. The arena lights wheeling above us in streaks.
We landed. Together. The exit carrying us into the closing pose—my arms around her, her arms around me, one leg extended behind each of us in matched arabesques, spinning slowly at center ice as the song’s final lyrics accompanied the deceleration.
The position was choreographed for truth: two different bodies finding a shared language, and the difference making the unity beautiful.
And I hope that I will do no wrong. My eyes are on you, they’re on you, they’re on you. My eyes.
The music faded. The rotation slowed. We stopped. Center ice. Holding each other. The golden-sunset costume pressed against my competition black. Her breathing rapid against my chest. My arms locked around her back.
One heartbeat of silence. Two.
The explosion was physical. The people generating sound the arena’s engineers had not designed the building to contain.
The roar hit from every direction simultaneously—a wall of noise that was less heard than felt, the vibration traveling through the ice and up through our blades with the specific, bone-deep frequency that athletes spent entire careers pursuing.
Roses. They came from the stands—launched, thrown, sailing in parabolic arcs that the overhead lights turned into red-petal trajectories against the dark ceiling. Landing on the ice in a scattering of crimson against white that looked, from above, like the first drops of red rain on fresh snow.
Somewhere in this arena, Garrison Hale had watched.
Had seen the throw he’d sabotaged executed clean by different hands.
Had heard the crowd respond to the woman whose career he’d tried to end performing at a level his replacement hadn’t achieved.
Had witnessed the partnership that the blog and the cameras and the twelve thousand people were already calling the love story of these Games.
Good. Watch. Because this is what it looks like when the girl you dropped learns to fly with someone who catches.
But I didn’t see the roses. Didn’t see the crowd or the cameras or the judges.
I saw her. And I crashed into her—my arms locking around her waist, lifting her from the ice as if the congratulatory embrace of a skating partner were insufficient and what was required was a goaltender’s strength applied to the task of getting this woman as far off the ground as possible.
I kissed her. On Olympic ice. In front of cameras and judges whose scores would determine everything.
The kiss was not choreographed. Not strategic.
It was real. Messy. Desperate. The kiss of a man whose mouth had formed I love you during a lift and whose body demanded the declaration be ratified through every available channel.
The crowd escalated from roar to frenzy. I spun her—one full turn, the golden costume scattering light everywhere, her laughter arriving against my ear with the warm, crying-and-laughing-simultaneously frequency that only Octavia Moreau could produce.
“You fucking DID it.” The words were for her alone. My voice rough. Wrecked.
She couldn’t form words. Not coherent ones. Her arms hooked around my neck with the grip of a woman who had spent too many years watching good things disappear to trust this one would stay. I held her. Tightly. On Olympic ice. In a storm of roses and sound.
I don’t care if we win. The thing that matters—the thing that exceeds the score and the medal—is that I am present.
That I participated in allowing this woman to reclaim her power on the surface used to break her.
A goaltender learned her language, stood on her ice, and became the structure her artistry was built on.
And the structure held. The gold medal is a thing you hang on a wall.
This moment is a thing you carry in your chest for the rest of your life.
We left the ice. The gate. The rubber matting.
My arm around her shoulders, her arm around my waist—her legs trembling from the four-and-a-half-minute demand, the adrenaline beginning its post-performance withdrawal.
The kiss-and-cry bench—the most anxiety-producing two square feet in competitive figure skating, positioned within camera range of the scoreboard and designed to capture the precise moment an athlete’s expression transitions from hope to either celebration or devastation.
And that’s when I caught our faces on the jumbotron—magnified to billboard resolution.
Octavia: flushed, peachy-orange lipstick smeared beyond its original borders, storm-gray eyes bright with held-back tears.
And mine. My eyes were glassy. The realization arriving with delayed recognition—I’d been so absorbed in the performance and the confession and the kiss that the physiological evidence of my own emotional state had been produced without my awareness or authorization.
My green eyes, approximately forty times their actual size on the screen above, were shining with the elevated moisture level that the body generated when emotional input exceeded processing capacity.
I looked like a man who had just told a woman he loved her on Olympic ice and meant it more than any save he’d ever made. Which was accurate. So I suppose the face was honest, even if the face’s owner hadn’t authorized the display.
I reached for her hand. Threaded my fingers through hers with the natural ease that five years of separation hadn’t managed to unlearn.
Her fingers responded immediately—curling, squeezing, the grip carrying the I-need-to-hold-something-real-while-the-scoreboard-decides-my-future pressure of a woman whose heart rate was climbing because the moment of judgment was approaching.
I looked at her. The ponytail’s purple-turquoise-platinum gradient. The father’s gold bracelet on the wrist I was holding. The rise and fall of her breathing visible in the golden fabric across her ribs.
“I’ve never seen a diamond shine as bright as you.”
She turned to me. And smiled. Not the smirk.
Not the competitive, Octaviana-grade expression she deployed as armor.
A smile. Genuine. Unguarded. The kind that engaged her entire face—eyes crinkling, the storm-gray irises warming to a color I’d only seen in the dark, in the quiet, in the four-walls spaces where the real Octavia permitted the real expression to exist. Except now it was existing in front of hundreds of people and a hundred cameras and a jumbotron broadcasting it at billboard scale to every screen on the planet.
She squeezed my hand. Leaned in. Her lips finding the space beside my ear with the proximity and precision she’d learned from me and perfected in the weeks since.
“I love you, too.”
Four words. Whispered against the shell of my ear on the kiss-and-cry bench of the Winter Olympic Games.
My eyes widened. The blush—which I had not experienced since approximately age seventeen—climbed my neck and invaded my cheeks with the unstoppable enthusiasm of a cardiovascular system celebrating without permission.
She added, the smile audible in the whisper: “I guess this proves you have my forgiveness.”
I laughed. Full. Bright. The sound carrying five years of guilt being discharged in a single exhale. “Thank the fucking gods,” I said, shaking my head, “because I would have lost my entire mind if you hadn’t forgiven me.”
She grinned. Squeezed my hand once more.
Then the arena’s speaker system crackled—the brief, electronic tone that every competitive figure skater recognized at the autonomic level and that produced the specific, breath-held, stomach-dropping sensation of a human being confronting the moment where preparation met verdict.
The announcer’s voice began. My hand in hers.
Her hand in mine. Our fingers interlaced on the kiss-and-cry bench, surrounded by roses that had been thrown and cameras that were rolling and hundreds of people whose attention was focused on a scoreboard about to illuminate with the numbers that would tell us whether the girl who bled on the ice and the goaltender who learned to fly had done enough.
We held our breaths in wait, as the announcer was about to reveal the scoreboard.