#power play

Tonight you crack and Bucky never stood a chance.

You’re beneath him at first, your thighs parted around his hips as he kisses down your neck, slow and reverent the way he always is. That big body caging you in, lips tracing your pulse, his metal hand stroking lazy circles on your waist.

Suddenly you tighten your hand in his hair, tugging just hard enough to make his breath hitch.

“Up,” you murmur.

He lifts his head, confused and a little dazed. “Doll?”

You sit up in one clean motion, your palm catching his jaw—not gently, not sweet, but firm, controlled, possessive. His pupils blow wide instantly, like his brain short-circuits at the feel of your fingers digging in.

“Sit back,” you tell him, tone low, steady, leaving no room for anything but obedience.

And Bucky…obeys. Immediately. Without thought. He shifts back onto his heels, spine straightening, chest rising like he’s waiting for inspection. Head empty, instincts buzzing.

You crawl into his lap, slow enough to make him swallow, and wrap your hand around his throat, not to squeeze, just to hold, to guide.

“You listening to me, Bucky?”

His lips part. “Yeah,” he breathes, already wrecked. “Yes, ma’am.”

The title slips out without intention, like his body gives the answer before his mind catches up. Heat floods your stomach.

Your thumb strokes the hinge of his jaw. “Good. Because I’m going to tell you how I want you to fuck me.”

Bucky chokes on air.

Your nice, soft, sweet girl is gone. Or maybe she was always this too; maybe she just hadn’t let it loose until now.

You lean in, nose brushing his as you roll your hips deliberately against his cock, dragging a moan out of him that sounds embarrassingly desperate.

“I want you deep,” you whisper, lips ghosting his. “As deep as you can give me. I want you holding my hips open and fucking me until I forget how to stand.”

His eyes flutter. A ragged sound tears from his throat. He nods so quickly it’s almost frantic.

“You want that?” you ask, tilting his head up by the chin like you’re examining him. “You want to give it to me?”

“Yes—yes, fuck, anything—”

You cut him off with a slow kiss, your fingers tightening around his jaw until he melts. Not a soldier. Not an Avenger. Just a man reduced to trembling putty in your hands.

“Good boy,” you murmur against his mouth.

Bucky whimpers.

Actually whimpers.

Your smile turns sharp.

“Lay down.”

He drops back instantly, muscular body hitting the mattress in one smooth, obedient motion. You straddle him, palms on his chest, watching how his breath stutters. His cock is heavy against his stomach, twitching with every pass of your eyes.

You drag your nails lightly down his ribs. “Look at you,” you taunt softly. “Already gone and I haven’t even gotten on your cock yet.”

“Please,” he whispers, voice cracking like he’s been edged for hours instead of minutes. “Please, doll, I—I need—”

“You’ll get what I give you.”

His hips jerk, the words hitting him like a punch to the gut.

You line yourself up, but you don’t sink down yet. You trace the tip along your folds, letting the sensitivity torture him. His fists clench in the sheets, metal hand denting the fabric.

“Hands on my hips,” you order.

He grabs you instantly, grip firm but reverent, as if he doesn’t know how strong he’s allowed to be anymore. Like he’s scared to do anything wrong.

You lean down and kiss him, slow and filthy. “Bucky,” you breathe against his lips, “I want you to fuck me. Not be gentle. Not hold back. I want all of you.”

He makes a broken sound—half moan, half prayer.

But before he can thrust up, before he can even think about taking over, you sink down onto him yourself, inch by inch, watching his expression crumble into pure ruin.

“Doll—oh god—f-fuck—”

Your hand flies to his jaw again, forcing his gaze up to yours. “Eyes on me.”

He obeys instantly, eyes wide, shiny, helpless.

“Now,” you say, settling fully on him, swallowing the thick length of him in one slow, devastating push, “fuck me exactly the way I want.”

His hips snap up so hard it steals your breath—and you laugh. Breathless. Pleased. Addicted to the sight of him unraveling.

Your nails drag into his shoulders. “That’s it. Just like that. Give it to me.”

Bucky’s gone.

Completely.

His head drops back, mouth open, groaning like he’s being pulled apart. His brain is mush, his thoughts turned to static under the weight of your commands, your hands, your body milking him with every roll of your hips.

“Good boy,” you whisper again, and he swears he could come from the praise alone.

You ride him harder, using him, taking exactly what you asked for, exactly what you wanted, and Bucky can only hold your hips and obey, panting, shaking, overwhelmed, worshipful.

When he finally comes undone, it’s with your name gasped like a confession, like salvation.

And when you collapse onto his chest, his arms wrap around you tight, still trembling.

“Doll?” he whispers, kissing your temple.

“Hm?”

“You can… do that again. Whenever you want.” A beat. “Maybe… right now?”

You laugh against his skin.

“Head empty?”

𝑰. gold

The last thing you heard before the music swelled was the crowd going quiet.

It was not silence—never silent at nationals. Could never be with the arena packed to the upper sections and the overhead lights running so hot you could feel them on the back of your neck and cameras mounted at every angle like the whole world was watching through a lens. But there was a specific quality of quiet that happened right before a skater's final element. This collective inhale. Seventeen hundred people deciding, in the same half-second, that breathing could wait.

You'd been chasing that sound your whole life.

The Rachmaninoff built toward its peak and you felt it in your sternum before you heard it—that specific swell that had been the architecture of your free skate for eleven months, so embedded in your body now that you could reconstruct it from memory at 3 AM in a pitch-dark room. Your left foot hit the ice on the exact beat. Your body pulled into the combination spin before your brain consciously told it to.

Three rotations and then four. Your arms drew in tighter, speed climbing, and for a fraction of a second the rink and the crowd and the weight of what this score meant dissolved completely. There was just the ice and your body and the music and the precise geometric certainty of the one thing you'd been doing since you were four years old.

You came out clean. And the crowd broke open.

You moved into your final pose—arms extended, chin lifted, one leg drawn out behind you in the line your coach had spent three weeks perfecting—and held it through the last note. Held it until the music died. Held it until your own heartbeat was the loudest thing in the arena.

Then you let yourself breathe.

The sound hit you a half-second later, the way it always did after a program. Like your brain delayed the input until it knew you were done. Applause rolling through the venue in waves, people on their feet in the lower bowl, your name somewhere in there if you listened hard enough past the roar.

You lowered your arms. You smiled. Genuinely and not for the cameras, this smile that only showed up when you'd done exactly what you came to do. You pressed a hand to your chest, bowed once to the judges' panel, once to the far end, once toward the section where you knew your coach was standing even though you couldn't find her through the glare.

And then, because you couldn't help it—your eyes swept the upper sections.

You told yourself it was habit every time. You know, just the automatic scan you did after every program, grounding yourself in space before the adrenaline crashed. Normal. Completely normal. It had nothing to do with anything.

Your eyes found him before you were consciously looking.

Section C, four rows from the back, left side. He was standing against the railing with his arms crossed over his chest and his hood pulled up despite the heat of the arena. A little too tall to miss. Too still in a crowd of moving people, like he'd decided that the noise around him simply didn't affect him.

James. Zhao Yufan. Newly number four on the New Jersey Devils hockey program.

He was not cheering nor clapping. He was just watching you with that particular quality of attention he had. The one that evoked this feeling that felt like being studied, like you were a problem he was turning over slowly in his hands. His expression was unreadable from this distance. It always was, and you'd stopped pretending that didn't drive you insane.

You held eye contact for exactly one second. Maybe a few more milliseconds.

Then you looked away and skated toward the boards where your coach was already waiting, arms open, and you let the noise of the arena swallow the fact that your chest was doing something complicated that had absolutely nothing to do with the program you'd just landed.

He came.

You hadn't told him you wanted him to. You hadn't asked, wouldn't have asked—that wasn't what you and James were. You were absolutely not the kind of attachment where you asked for things and expected them to materialize.

You'd established that early. You'd both been very clear about it, or at least you'd both said the words that were supposed to make it clear, and then proceeded to behave in ways that made a complete mess of everything you'd said.

But he came anyway.

He was there with your coach's arms around your shoulders and the crowd still roaring and your score about to flash on the board, you found yourself thinking about the four months that had led to this exact moment.

About Mattamy at 11 PM and the vending machine on the B-level and an argument about ice time that was never really about ice time. About all the ways two people could sink so deep into something they couldn't name that they lost track of when they started sinking.

You thought about James Zhao, who'd come to your nationals and stood in section C and watched you like he had every right to be there.

And you thought about how badly you wished that didn't mean as much as it did.

𝑰𝑰. four months ago — first blood

The thing about Mattamy Athletic Centre was that it never really closed. Almost like the city that never slept, if you wanted to compare it to something.

This was what they told you when your federation arranged the Toronto residency—that the rink ran on staggered schedules, that programs overlapped, that at any hour between 5 AM and midnight there was someone on that ice doing something. Figure skaters claimed the early mornings when the surface was fresh and the light through the upper windows was still gray and thin. Development programs ran afternoons. The later slots, the ones that bled past 9 PM and into hours that felt less like training and more like a personal problem, those belonged to whoever wanted them badly enough to show up.

You'd been showing up for three months before the hockey boys arrived.

The news filtered through the rink the way all rink news did—through the manager's assistant, who told the Zamboni operator, who told two of the junior skaters, who told Lia, who appeared in the doorway of the locker room one morning in October with her skate bag over one shoulder and her eyes lit up like she'd just heard something excellent.

"Five players," she announced, dropping onto the bench beside you. "Hockey. They're doing a joint training residency, something about the developmental league deferring for the season. Here through spring. All drafted, apparently. One of them top five picks in the last two years."

You looked up from retaping your blade. "What team?"

"That's the thing—they're not really a team. More like a training collective. All from different programs, all doing the same deferral for different reasons. They specifically requested a rink with high-level multi-sport programming because their coach thinks cross-training with elite athletes from other disciplines is good for them." She raised an eyebrow. "So... us."

"Great," you said, and went back to watching the tape.

Lia watched you for a second. "You're not even a little curious?"

"About hockey players?"

"About five elite athletes who are apparently very—"

"Lia."

"I'm just saying."

"I know what you're saying," you told her. "And I'm saying I have a short program that's thirty-seven points off where it needs to be before December and I don't have bandwidth for whatever you're implying."

She pressed her lips together in a way that wasn't quite a smile. "Okay. Sure."

You met these boys four days later, and not under circumstances that left any room for the kind of first impression you might have wanted.

It was 10:40 PM. You had the ice until 11 and you were using every minute of it—running your step sequence over and over, the section that kept falling apart in the back half, the transition your coach had flagged three sessions in a row. The rink was empty except for you and the overhead lights humming and the music playing through your earbuds, cut off from everything else.

You didn't hear them come in.

What you heard was the door to the ice slamming open instead of the soft hydraulic close it was supposed to make. It was a full crash, the sound of something hitting the boards on the far end. You pulled an earbud out. Voices... laughter? The distinctive sound of skate blades on rubber matting.

Five of them, spilling through the far entrance in various states of gear. One of them said something in another language, Korean maybe, that made two others lose it completely. Another one—tall, quiet, already scanning the rink with a calm, assessing look—noticed you almost immediately and nudged the one next to him.

You skated to center ice and waited.

The one who'd been laughing hardest stopped first when he saw you. Broad-shouldered with an easy smile. This boy had the kind of face that probably made things go smoothly for him in most situations. "Oh—hey. Sorry, we didn't realize—"

"You're not on until eleven," you said.

"Yeah, we know, we just—"

"It's ten forty-two."

A moment of silence. The easy smile flickered but it held. "We figured we'd come early and—"

"The ice schedule exists for a reason." You kept your voice flat, not hostile, just factual. "If everyone showed up whenever they felt like it, the surface would be garbage by the time the later sessions started. So the schedule exists. You're on at eleven."

From somewhere in the group, a voice cut through. "We'll wait."

You looked over.

He was standing slightly apart from the others, stick resting against his shoulder, helmet in his hand. He was not as immediately readable as the one with the easy smile—where that one had warmth built into his whole demeanor, this one had something more contained. He watched the exchange with dark eyes that gave away very little. He looked like someone who'd been running calculations since the moment he walked in.

"Okay," you hummed, though you wanted to say more.

"Okay," he echoed, and something in his tone made it very clear he wasn't agreeing with you so much as acknowledging that the conversation was over.

You put your earbud back in and returned to your step sequence.

For the next eighteen minutes you were aware of them the way you were aware of weather. Like something happening at the edges of your attention that you'd decided not to engage with directly. They settled in the first row of the lower bowl, some of them leaning over the boards to watch, some on their phones, one of them already half-asleep against the shoulder of the one next to him.

The one who'd said we'll wait with that gruffy yet smooth voice didn't sit down. He stood at the boards and watched you skate.

You knew because you could feel it. It was that particular weight of someone's attention when they were actually paying attention. It wasn't just the casual glancing of someone killing time but focused and specific. You'd performed under enough high-stakes scrutiny to know the difference.

At 11:01, you stepped off the ice without looking at any of them.

"Good session," the easy-smile one offered as you passed.

"Thanks," you said, not breaking your stride.

You heard the ice door open behind you as they filed out, the sound of blades, someone doing a warm-up lap with long, aggressive strokes that vibrated through the boards. And then, just before you pushed through to the corridor, that same quiet voice from earlier.

"You're dropping your left shoulder on the back end of the sequence."

You stopped and turned around slowly. Seriously?

He was already on the ice, ten feet from the boards, like he'd said it in passing and had no particular investment in whether you heard it. Was not at all looking at you now. Running a slow circle with his stick trailing behind him.

Every instinct told you to let it go.

"You skate hockey," you scoffed.

"Yeah."

"What would you know about my shoulder?"

He stopped the circle. He stared at you across the ice with an expression that was frustratingly calm. "I know that you ran that sequence nine times and it fell apart in the same place every time, and right before it fell apart your left shoulder dropped about two inches. Might be nothing. Might be why you keep losing the flow at the back end." A pause where those shoulders of his shrugged. "Like I said. Might be nothing."

You stared at him for a long moment. He held your gaze without any apparent discomfort, which annoyed you more than it should have.

"Thanks for the input," you said, and walked out.

In the locker room alone, you pulled up the video your coach had sent from that afternoon's session. Scrolled to the step sequence. You watched the back end three times.

Your left shoulder dropped two inches right before the transition fell apart. Fuck. You put your phone face-down on the bench and sat there for a minute.

Then you picked it up and added a note to your session log: left shoulder—check before back-end transition. You did not think about the hockey player who'd told you.

You were very deliberate about that.

𝑰𝑰𝑰.

You learned their names by accident, the way you learned most things at the rink—through Lia, who had apparently absorbed every available fact about all five of them within the first week and distributed this information whether you asked for it or not.

Keonho was the easy smile, the one who'd spoken to you first—loud by default, the kind of person who treated every corridor like a stage and every interaction like a bit he was already in the middle of. Seonghyeon was the one beside him, who had this way of smiling at you that was slightly delayed, like he'd processed whatever you said, found it good, and only then let his face catch up. A little awkward in the specific way of someone who genuinely meant everything and occasionally didn't know what to do with that. Juhoon was the one who'd been quiet since the beginning—not cold, just watchful. You got the sense he filed everything and said very little of what he actually thought, which made the things he occasionally said feel worth paying attention to. Martin had strong opinions about almost everything and delivered them all with the same measured certainty regardless of whether the topic warranted it, which was either a gift or a liability depending on the day.

And James—

James was the one who'd told you about your shoulder.

Zhao Yufan, Lia told you, like you'd asked. Top-five pick, NJ Devils, deferred entry for the development year. Originally from Hong Kong, grew up in Taiwan. Spoke four languages, according to his player profile, which Lia had clearly read in its entirety. She delivered all of this with the specific tone she used when she wanted to communicate that something was interesting without admitting she found it interesting.

"You looked him up," you said.

"I looked all of them up."

"Right."

"He's good," she added. "Like, really good. I watched some of his development league footage and the way he reads the ice is—"

"Lia."

"What?"

"I don't care."

She gave you a look across the stretch mat that said she didn't entirely believe you. You ignored it and went back to your hip flexor stretch, and you were very careful over the next two weeks to maintain exactly the level of professional indifference you'd established at the beginning.

It worked, mostly. You had different ice times. Your paths crossed in the corridors occasionally—a nod, a passing acknowledgment, nothing that required you to think about afterward. The rink was big enough that you could exist in it without orbiting each other.

And then the scheduling conflict happened.

It was a Tuesday in late October. Your regular 8 PM slot had been bumped by a junior invitational that ran long, which pushed you to the auxiliary rink on the B-level—smaller, older ice, the kind of surface that felt slightly different under the blade. Coaches called it character building. Skaters called it a pain in the ass. You'd been told you had it from 9 to 11.

What you hadn't been told was that James had been given the same slot.

You found out when you stepped onto the ice at 9:03 and he was already there.

He saw you at the same moment you saw him. A beat of mutual stillness.

"They gave you this slot?" you asked.

"Nine to eleven," he confirmed.

"They gave me nine to eleven."

He looked at you and you looked at him. Neither of you looked particularly thrilled.

"I'll call the rink manager," you said, reaching for your phone.

"I tried. She's not picking up."

You stared at your phone. Then at the ice. Then at him. "There's enough room to run separate sessions."

"Barely."

"Can you stay in the far end?"

Something shifted in his expression—not quite offense, but adjacent to it. "Can you?"

"I was here first."

"By three minutes."

"Three minutes is three minutes."

He was quiet for a moment, that contained quality from the boards working itself through the calculation. Then: "We split it. You take the near end for the first forty minutes, I take the far end. We switch at ten."

It wasn't a question. A proposed solution delivered in the tone of someone who'd already run the numbers and decided this was the most efficient answer.

You thought about arguing. You genuinely considered it, because something about the way he operated—like every situation had a logical answer and he'd already found it before you'd finished forming an objection—made you want to disagree on principle.

"Fine," you said instead, because you had a program to run and no time to waste on principle.

For forty minutes you ran your short program on the near end and he ran drills on the far end and you were professionally, deliberately indifferent to each other. The auxiliary rink was smaller than the main surface, the ceiling lower, the acoustics different—sounds carried in a way they didn't in the main arena. You could hear his blades. The sharp stops, the acceleration on straightaways, the way the sound changed when he was running something technical versus something full-speed. You didn't listen. You were very focused on not listening.

At 9:44 he called a water break and you both ended up at the boards at the same time. You grabbed your bottle. He grabbed his. You both stared at the far wall.

"Your short program," he said after a moment.

You glanced at him.

"The entry on the flip. You're telegraphing it." He took a drink. "Your free leg swings out about half a second early. Judges at this level are going to clock it."

Your jaw tightened. "Do you make a habit of this?"

"Of what?"

"Analyzing skaters."

He looked at you then, something unreadable in his expression. "I watch how people move on ice. I've been doing it since I was twelve. It's not a habit, it's—" He paused. "I notice things."

"I have a coach."

"I know."

"She's the one who gives me notes."

"I know that too."

"Then why—"

"Because you've run that entry six times and it's been the same every time," he said evenly. "You can tell me to mind my business. That's fair. But it's there."

You stared at him. Your first instinct was to do exactly that—tell him to mind his business, put your earbud back in, go back to the far end when the clock hit ten. You were very good at shutting things down when they started to feel like more than you'd signed up for.

But the shoulder note was still in your session log. And your coach had said the same thing about the flip entry last Thursday without you managing to fix it.

"Where exactly," you said slowly, "is my free leg."

He set down his water bottle and turned to face the ice. "I'll show you the timing."

"You're a hockey player."

"I know what telegraphing looks like regardless of the sport." He stepped back onto the ice, skated a slow half-circle without the stick, and then approximated the approach—not the jump itself, obviously, but the body position in the three seconds before. He paused at the moment. "Here. Your free leg wants to go here."

He was right. You could see it even in the approximation, the way the hip opened too early and gave the whole thing away.

You hated that he was right.

"Half a second earlier than it should be," you said.

"Yeah."

You stepped back onto the ice and ran the entry twice. On the second attempt you felt the difference—the discipline of keeping the free leg contained until the last possible moment, the way it changed the energy of the approach entirely.

"Better," he said, from somewhere behind you.

You turned around.

He was leaning against the boards with his arms crossed, watching with that same quality of attention you'd felt from the stands during your first session. Up close it was worse. More specific. Like being under a microscope held by someone who'd decided you were the most interesting thing in the room without making it feel like a compliment.

"Why do you do that," you said.

"Do what."

"Watch people like that. Like you're filing it."

Something moved across his face. Not quite discomfort, but a shift—like you'd pushed on something that had more give than he'd expected. He looked back at the ice. "When I was coming up I was always the outsider. New team, new country, new language half the time. Watching people was how I figured out where I fit."

You didn't say anything.

"It's not—" He stopped. "I'm not trying to be weird about it."

"I didn't say you were being weird."

"You looked like you were thinking it."

"I was thinking you're observant."

"That's diplomatic."

"I'm very diplomatic," you told him, and something in your tone made the corner of his mouth move—barely enough to count as a reaction, but enough that you clocked it.

At 10:01 you switched ends. At 11:00 the ice time ended and you both stepped off at the same time and walked toward the B-level corridor in silence that was different from the silence at the beginning of the night. Smaller, somehow.

At the fork where the corridor split toward the separate locker rooms, you stopped.

"Thanks," you said. "For the flip thing."

He looked at you. "You would've figured it out."

"Probably," you agreed. "But faster this way."

He nodded once. You turned toward your corridor.

"Same time Thursday?" he asked.

You looked back. "We have the same conflict Thursday?"

"Scheduling's backed up all week apparently."

You considered this. Thought about the ways it could complicate things, the ways it was already complicated, the fact that you'd been running a two-week policy of professional indifference that had just developed a significant crack.

"Same time Thursday," you said.

You walked to your locker room and told yourself it was just ice time. A practical solution to a scheduling problem. Nothing that needed to be thought about any further.

You thought about it for the entire drive back to your apartment.

𝑰𝑽. the vending machine

The B-level vending machine was a relic. An old unit shoved into a utility alcove across from the auxiliary rink entrance, stocked irregularly and with no apparent logic—sometimes it had three flavors of sports drink, sometimes just two, sometimes the left column sat completely empty for days. The light inside flickered when the compressor kicked on, casting everything in a color that was technically white but felt more like 11 PM on a Tuesday specifically.

You discovered it the second week of the scheduling conflict, when you'd finished a session, were too wired to go home, and needed something that wasn't water. What you wanted were the chips in slot B6—honey butter, the kind Lia kept in her skate bag and that you'd been eating off her since October. You put your money in. You pressed B6.

The machine made a sound like it was considering it.

Nothing came out.

You pressed B6 again. The spiral turned a quarter rotation and stopped. The bag was right there—sitting on the edge of the coil, tipped forward, not dropping. You could see it. You pressed B6 a third time with significantly more force than the situation technically warranted, which accomplished nothing except making the machine rattle once and go quiet.

"B7," said a voice behind you.

You turned around.

James was standing at the entrance to the alcove with his bag over one shoulder, jacket half-unzipped, hair still slightly damp from the shower in the way that meant he'd stayed late too. He was looking at the machine with the same analytical quality he applied to everything—like it was a problem that had already been solved and he was simply reporting the solution.

"What?" you said.

"Press B7." He nodded toward the panel. "Then B6. The mechanism resets. It'll drop both."

You looked at him. Then at the machine. Then back at him with the specific expression you reserved for people who felt the need to explain things to you unprompted. "Do you always feel the need to troubleshoot things you weren't asked about?"

"When I know the answer," he said, without particular defensiveness.

You turned back to the machine. You considered, for a moment, the principle of the thing. Then you pressed B7. The spiral turned, dispensed a bag of plain chips you didn't want. You pressed B6. The honey butter dropped into the tray along with it.

You reached in and retrieved both.

When you stood back up, James had moved into the alcove and was reading the options with the unhurried focus of someone who made decisions the same way in every context—deliberately, and without apparent self-consciousness about the time it took. You used these seconds to do what you'd been doing since the auxiliary rink without really admitting it: you watched him.

He was taller than your brain kept accounting for. Something about the way he moved in smaller spaces—the hallway outside Mira's office, the boards during water breaks, here—made the scale land differently than it did on the ice, where everyone just looked like their sport. He had the build of someone who'd been athletic so long it had simply become how he was shaped: the set of his shoulders, the way he stood with most of his weight on his back foot without seeming to think about it, the particular stillness of his hands while the rest of him evaluated something.

His jaw had a very slight tension in it when he was concentrating. You'd noticed that in the rink too. It wasn't the tension of stress—more like the specific engagement of someone filtering a lot of information at once and choosing which pieces mattered. Right now he was choosing between a protein bar and a sports drink with that same quality of attention, which was objectively not a decision that required it, and somehow you found that more interesting than it had any right to be.

He pressed a button. Retrieved a water. Turned around and found you looking directly at him with a bag of plain chips in each hand.

Neither of you said anything for a moment.

"You have two bags," he observed.

"I'm aware."

"You wanted the honey butter."

"And now I also have these." You held up the plain ones. "Consider it a bonus."

The corner of his mouth moved—that almost-thing, the one you'd started to suspect was the closest he got to openly finding something funny. He leaned against the wall beside the machine, unscrewed the cap on his water, and drank without breaking eye contact, which should not have been as unsettling as it was.

You leaned against the opposite wall. The alcove was narrow enough that you were maybe four feet apart. The compressor kicked on and the light did its flicker thing and in the brief weird quality of it you could see him clearly—the line of his throat when he swallowed, the way his lashes were longer than you'd clocked from any distance, the particular expression he had when he was looking at you and not bothering to perform anything about it.

"How's the flip entry?" he asked.

"Better."

"Your coach notice?"

You pulled open the honey butter bag. "She asked what I changed."

"What'd you tell her?"

"That I figured it out."

A pause—long enough that you knew he'd caught exactly what you hadn't said. He took another drink of water. Put the cap back on.

"The Devils' season opener is in three weeks," you said, not entirely sure why you said it. It had been sitting somewhere in the back of your mind since Lia mentioned it—the awareness that there was a clock on this, on all of it. The residency had an end date. This whole arrangement had an expiration built in from the beginning.

"Yeah," he responded.

"Is that weird? Watching it from here?"

He was quiet for a moment. His eyes dropped to the water bottle in his hands, turned it once, set it against his thigh. "When the footage is good it's harder." He looked back up. "But I wanted the year. I made the decision and I wanted it."

"For what specifically?"

He glanced at you, that considering quality again—deciding how much of the sentence to give you. His thumb was tracing the edge of the bottle cap without him seeming to notice. You noticed.

"To be ready in the ways that actually matter," he said. "When it stops being development and starts being permanent."

You understood that with more precision than you intended to show. The specific gap between being good at something and being prepared for what being good at it actually cost—the pressure that arrived when the stakes went from significant to real, the way it changed the inside of a program or a game entirely.

"How much longer?" you asked.

"Seven months."

Seven. And then the residency ended and he went to New Jersey and whatever this corridor-and-alcove-and-auxiliary-rink arrangement was, it ended with it. That was known information. You'd known it from the first week.

Knowing it in the abstract and standing in a utility alcove at 11:30 PM with the flickering light and the honey butter chips and James Zhao four feet away looking at you like you were something worth looking at—those were different things, it turned out.

"I should go," you said.

"Yeah."

Neither of you moved.

You watched him watching you. You were aware, in a way you'd been trying not to be for two weeks, of the specific quality of his attention—that thing he'd told you at the boards, I notice things, and the way it felt to be one of the things he noticed. It wasn't comfortable. It also wasn't uncomfortable. It was something for which you did not currently have the correct word and that was, in itself, a problem.

You pushed off the wall. Picked up your bag. He didn't move, just watched you collect yourself with that same unhurried patience.

"Thanks," you said, at the door of the alcove. "For the B7 thing."

"You would've figured it out."

"Probably," you agreed. "But faster this way."

He tilted his head slightly at that—something shifting in his expression that you couldn't quite categorize before it settled back into neutral. "Same time Thursday?"

"We have the conflict Thursday too?"

"We have it all week."

You stood in the doorway and thought about the ways this was already more complicated than you'd intended. About the shoulder note in your session log and the flip entry and the way he'd stood at the boards and watched you for eighteen minutes the first night without once making it feel like anything other than simple attention.

"Same time Thursday," you said.

You walked to the stairwell and took the stairs slowly and told yourself, with complete conviction, that this was still nothing. Two athletes at the same rink. Overlapping schedules. A vending machine that required a workaround.

Completely containable. You were in control of this.

You thought about the way his thumb had moved on the bottle cap all the way home.

𝑽. november

The thing was—and you would spend a significant amount of time later being annoyed at yourself for not catching it sooner—it happened gradually and then all at once in the specific way that only happened when you weren't paying attention.

November arrived and the scheduling conflict resolved itself. The junior invitational series ended, the regular schedule was restored, and there was no practical reason for you and James to keep occupying the same ice at 9 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

You did it anyway.

Neither of you discussed this. One Tuesday it just happened—you showed up to the auxiliary rink and he was there and the rink manager, who had figured out months earlier that monitoring B-level after 9 PM was above her pay grade, said nothing. It became a thing the way things became things when two people with no business establishing a routine went ahead and established one—through accumulated small decisions that were each individually defensible and collectively impossible to defend.

What it looked like from the outside, if anyone was paying attention to B-level at 9 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays: a figure skater running programs and a hockey player running drills on opposite ends of a rink, occasionally stopping to rehydrate, occasionally ending up in the alcove afterward with the flickering vending machine light doing them no favors.

What it was: harder to categorize.

You talked. That was the part that surprised you most, looking back—not that it happened, but how easily. James wasn't a talker in any conventional sense. He wasn't Keonho, who you'd had enough corridor encounters with to understand that his default mode was volume and enthusiasm. James was economical with words in a way that could read as cold until you'd been around him long enough to understand that it wasn't coldness, it was selectivity. He said things he meant. He didn't say things he didn't mean. It made the things he actually said land differently—heavier, like they'd been considered before they arrived.

He talked about hockey the way you talked about skating: not as a job, but as the primary language his body thought in. He talked about reading ice in a game context, how the geometry of a play developed three seconds before it materialized, how the best players weren't the fastest but the ones who understood space. He talked about his development coach, a retired NHLer who communicated exclusively through corrections and had never in four years told James he'd done something well, and the way he said it made clear he respected this rather than resented it.

He asked about your programs the way someone asked about something they were genuinely curious about. Not the performed interest of someone being polite—actual questions, specific ones, the kind that required you to think before you answered. What a GOE deduction felt like from the inside. How you decided which music to skate to. Whether there was a difference between performing when you wanted to win and performing when you needed to.

That last one you sat with for a long time before you answered.

"When you want to win," you told him, one night in the alcove with your back against the wall and the vending machine humming beside you, "you're in it. You're present. Everything is information. When you need to win—" You stopped. "It gets smaller. Everything contracts. You stop skating the whole program and you start skating each element separately, trying not to make a mistake, which is the worst way to skate a program."

He was quiet for a moment. "That's what I do in games. When the need takes over from the want."

"What does it feel like?"

"Like the ice gets smaller." He looked down at the water bottle in his hands. "Like I can feel everyone else's expectations as a physical weight."

You understood that with a clarity that sat somewhere south of your sternum—so specifically that for a moment you didn't say anything, because it felt too close to something you usually didn't let people near.

"What does your team think about the deferral?" you asked instead.

Something changed in his expression. Not quite closed, but carefully rearranged. "They're supportive."

The way he said it made obvious that wasn't the whole answer.

"James."

"It's complicated," he said.

"I didn't ask if it was simple."

He looked at you. Then back at the floor. "My last team wasn't—the dynamics were bad. Two years ago, development league. I made some decisions that weren't popular and the fallout changed some things." He was choosing words with even more deliberation than usual, which for James was saying something. "About how I approach people. About how much I let in."

You didn't ask him to elaborate. You just sat with it.

"Is that why you watched people instead of—" You paused, finding the right word. "Instead of being with them."

He was quiet for a long time. "Probably."

You didn't say anything else. Neither did he. The vending machine hummed. Somewhere above you, the main rink was still running, the sound of blades carrying faintly through the ceiling.

"I don't really do this," you said eventually.

"Do what."

"Talk. Like this. To people I'm not—" You stopped. "I'm not good at it."

"You're doing fine."

"I'm being very honest and I don't usually do that either."

He turned his head to look at you and you were suddenly aware of how small the alcove was, how close you were sitting, how the light made everything softer and more incriminating than it had any right to be.

"Why are you telling me?" he asked. Not challenging—genuine.

"Because you're leaving in seven months," you said. "So it feels lower stakes."

He held your gaze for a moment. Something moved in his expression that you couldn't fully read.

"Yeah," he said slowly. "Sure."

The way he said it made you think he didn't entirely believe you. The worst part was that you didn't entirely believe yourself.

𝑽𝑰. the first time

It started with a fight.

In retrospect, this was fitting—the two of you had an argument before you had anything else, and whatever came after was partly built on the fact that you'd learned something about each other in the middle of it that you couldn't unlearn.

It was a Thursday in late November, 9:20 PM. The auxiliary rink light had been flickering for two weeks and your third maintenance request had gone unanswered, and James had looked at the ceiling during warmup with the particular expression he had when he'd already decided something and was only waiting for the right moment to act on it.

"I'm going to find the rink manager's office," he said.

"I've emailed her twice."

"In person is different."

You looked at him. He looked at you. You could tell by the set of his jaw that the decision had already been made and this was the courtesy notification—which was exactly the thing you'd called out two weeks ago and which he'd acknowledged and which he was now doing again with the minor adjustment of telling you first.

"Fine," you said. "I'm coming."

He looked mildly surprised by that. Good.

The rink manager's office was somewhere on the administrative level—you'd been told this during orientation and had never needed to know it specifically until now. There was a directory near the main lobby that neither of you had ever looked at. You found it, read it, took the elevator to the third floor, and walked down a hallway that felt immediately wrong. This hallway was too quiet. Too dark at the far end, the overhead fluorescents switching to motion-sensor mode and clicking on in sections ahead of you as you moved.

"This is the wrong floor," you said.

"The directory said three."

"The directory said the admin office is on three. That doesn't mean the rink manager's office is the admin office."

James stopped walking. He’d consulted the photo he'd taken of the directory with the expression of someone reconciling conflicting data. "The admin suite is at the end."

"Those are supply closets, James."

He looked at the doors. Of course, they were—unmistakably—supply closets.

You turned around. He fell into step beside you and you were suddenly, unavoidably aware of how much space he took up in a narrow hallway—the width of his shoulders, the particular way he moved, elegant even when he was wrong, which was its own specific category of aggravating.

"We can find her tomorrow," you said.

"The light has been broken for two weeks."

"I'm aware. I've been the one submitting the requests."

"Right, and submitting requests hasn't—"

"Don't." You stopped walking and turned to face him. The motion sensor clicked on overhead, flooding the section of hallway between you in flat white light. "Do not finish that sentence."

He stopped. You were three feet apart, the hallway narrow enough that three feet felt like considerably less. He was looking at you with that contained expression—the one that gave nothing away on the surface—but you'd been watching his face for two months now and you could see what sat underneath it. The slight tension working through his jaw. The quality of his attention sharpening around the edges and that squint in his eyes.

"What's that going to accomplish that I didn't already accomplish," you seethed.

"Sometimes things get done faster when—"

"When what?" You crossed your arms. "When a man asks?"

He paused. To his credit, he didn't immediately backtrack—he seemed to actually consider whether that was what he'd been about to say. "When someone follows up," he amended with a little head tilt. "The maintenance request was two weeks ago."

"I know how long ago it was. I submitted it."

"Then I'll follow up on it."

"I'm capable of following up on my own maintenance request."

"I know you are," he said, and somehow that landed more aggravating than if he'd disagreed—because it made clear he wasn't questioning your capability, he was just planning to do the thing anyway, which was worse.

"You know what your problem is," you huffed and crossed your arms.

He looked at you with an expression containing raised eyebrows and said he suspected he was about to find out.

"You decide the most efficient solution to a problem and then you implement it without checking whether the other person wanted you to implement anything." The words had more heat than you'd planned for, bouncing off the low ceiling of the hallway and sitting there between you. "You observe, you calculate, you intervene. And it doesn't occur to you that the other person might not want to be intervened on."

"The shoulder note bothered you," he said.

"No—"

"And the flip entry."

"I'm talking about a pattern—"

"You're talking about the shoulder note."

"I'm talking about the fact that you make decisions about what I need without asking me what I need."

Silence.

Somewhere at the far end of the corridor a door seal was bad and cold air was getting in—you could feel it at your ankles, this thin current of November working its way through the building. The light above you hummed. James was very still in the way he went still when he was processing something he hadn't anticipated, and you'd said too much or exactly enough, you couldn't tell which.

Then something rearranged itself in his expression. The contained quality was still there but underneath it something had shifted—like you'd pushed against a door he'd thought was locked and found it had more give than either of you expected.

"You're… right," he said eventually. Surprisingly.

That was not what you were expecting.

"I do that," he continued, more slowly, like he was being careful with the words. "It's not—I'm not trying to undermine you. It's a reflex. When I see a problem I want to fix it and I don't always stop to check if the fixing is wanted." He held your gaze steadily. "That's fair to call out."

You opened your mouth and closed it. The argument had built enough momentum that you'd expected to still be in it, and finding the ground suddenly absent under you was disorienting in a way you hadn't prepared for. You were good at arguments. You were significantly less good at people who met them cleanly and said you're right without making it feel like a concession.

"Okay," you conceded finally.

"Okay," he repeated and kept staring at you.

The tension didn't dissolve—it changed composition. It transformed into cooler and more specific replacing the heat of the previous two minutes, and you were aware, in a way that was getting harder to be casually aware of, of the precise distance between you. The hallway was narrow. The light was doing you no favors. And James Zhao was standing three feet away looking at you like he was filing something important away.

"The shoulder note," you said, not entirely sure why. "The first night. Why did you actually say it? You didn’t even know me."

He looked at you and squinted. Again, with his tongue poking his inner cheek, like he was struggling to think of a response to you.

"The real reason," you said. "Not because you notice things."

A pause. He pulled one hand out of his hoodie pocket—the tell, the one you'd catalogued six weeks ago, this thing he did right before he said something he hadn't planned to say. He rubbed the back of his neck once.

"Because you were running the same sequence over and over," he said, "and every time it fell apart in the same place and you skated back to the start without stopping to figure out why. Just—kept going. Like if you ran it enough times it would fix itself." He looked at the floor for a half-second, then back up at you. "I do that. In games. Like, i keep running the same play, same approach, except nothing changes because the problem isn't in the execution." A pause that had weight to it. "I said it because I recognized it."

The hallway was very quiet.

You looked at him—at the flat light catching the angle of his jaw, the particular stillness of his hands when he'd said everything he was going to say and was waiting to see what you did with it. Two months of Tuesday and Thursday nights. Notes in your session log. The alcove at 11:30 PM. All the things that had accumulated in the sealed compartment you'd been so deliberate about maintaining, pressing against the walls of it now.

"Okay," you breathed.

"Okay," he said.

Neither of you moved save for your eyes. Two pairs drinking each other in like you couldn’t tell whether you would strangle or jump each other’s bones.

Then you did—closed the distance in two steps without making a decision about it, and he met you halfway. That was the thing you'd argue about later, with the stubborn insistence on accuracy that defined most of your interactions: that neither of you could honestly claim to have stood still while the other moved. There was no clean answer. It was simultaneous. Both of you arriving at the same point at the same time, the way you'd been arriving at the same points all along without either of you naming it.

His hand came to your jaw first. Not grabbing but framing, his thumb settling at the hinge of it with a deliberateness that was entirely him, tilting your face up slightly. Like he'd considered the exact angle. Like even now he was being precise about it. You got one second of looking at him up close—the unhurried quality of his attention with nowhere left to redirect it, what you'd been on the receiving end of for two months finally with nowhere to hide behind—and then his mouth found yours and the argument and the wrong corridor and the flickering light dissolved completely.

It was not smooth. You'd known somehow that it wouldn't be—there was too much pressure behind it for smooth, two months of managed distance arriving all at once in a motion-sensor hallway in the wrong part of the building.

He kissed you the way he did everything: with complete intention. No hesitation, no tentativeness, nothing that suggested he hadn't already decided exactly what he was doing. His other hand found the back of your neck, fingers pressing into your hair, and you got a fistful of his hoodie and pulled without thinking about it.

He made a low sound against your mouth that did something significant to your ability to think at all.

You kissed him back with the specific accumulated weight of every session note and every vending machine night and every almost-said thing you'd managed not to say. The contained quality he carried everywhere— fuck, that particular reserve, the way he watched from a distance until he was sure—you could feel it come apart degree by degree. Not gone, never entirely gone, but loosening. It felt like watching ice at the edges in early spring: the structure still there but the rigidity leaving it. His thumb traced the line of your jaw and you felt it with a precision that was almost embarrassing, the specific warmth of it, the way his hand held you like he'd made a decision and intended to follow through on it completely.

You pressed closer. He shifted his weight, walking you one step back until your shoulders found the wall—it was deliberate with the same quality he brought to everything—and the wall was cold through your practice jacket and he was not and you catalogued that contrast with the part of your brain that was apparently still running observations even now.

When you finally pulled back you were both breathing unevenly. His forehead dropped to yours. His hand stayed curved at the back of your neck, your fist still loose in the front of his hoodie, neither of you moving away. Up close like this, eyes closed for one unguarded second, he looked different. Endlessly less contained. Like something had been set down that he'd been carrying for a long time without realizing how heavy it was.

He opened his eyes and you looked at each other.

"This is a bad idea," you said, which was true and came out significantly less convincing than intended given that you hadn't let go of his hoodie.

"I know," he said.

"I mean it."

"So do I." His thumb moved once more along your jaw—absent, almost, like he wasn't fully tracking it. You were tracking it precisely. "We're not pretending it didn't happen."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good. Because I don't do that."

"Neither do I."

He exhaled slowly through his nose. His hand dropped from your hair but he didn't step back—stayed close enough that you could still feel the warmth of him, the cold from the door seal at your ankles making the contrast sharper than it needed to be. 

You released his hoodie and smoothed the fabric flat with your palm once, deliberately, a gesture you didn't look at too closely while you were doing it.

He watched your hand. The tension returned to his jaw. It was different from before, quieter.

"The rink manager is probably on two," you said.

His face flickered. Not a grin, but he wasn’t frowning anymore. "Probably."

"We should go back down."

"Yeah."

Neither of you moved. He licked his lips and stuck his hands in his jean pockets.

"James."

"Giving it a second," he said, mild as anything.

You looked at him. He looked back with that patience of his—the same patience that had let him stand at the boards for eighteen minutes on the first night without once making it feel like pressure, like he could wait as long as the situation required and had no particular feelings about how long that was.

"Same time Thursday," you said finally.

He exhaled. "Yeah."

You turned toward the elevator. He fell into step beside you. The motion sensor lights clicked off behind you in sections as you moved, the hallway going dark again in your wake, and you walked back toward the elevator in a silence that was built differently from the one you'd arrived in. It was smaller, and more loaded, and something you were going to have to figure out what to do with.

At the elevator, you both looked at the panel.

"Two," you said.

"Two," he agreed.

You pressed the button. The doors opened. You stepped in together and stood on opposite sides of the elevator with the distance between you that was the arrangement, and you watched the numbers change and said nothing.

You were in control of this.

You kept saying it. You were going to keep saying it for a while yet. Though you were less and less sure it was true.

𝑽𝑰𝑰. four months in

Here was what you and James were.

You were ice time on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the auxiliary rink, the arrangement that had technically resolved itself months ago but that you'd both continued anyway. You were the B-level vending machine at 11:30 PM—the bad sports drink and the water, sitting in the alcove with your backs to the wall while the light flickered. You were text messages sent after midnight about session notes and program adjustments and links to footage that were ostensibly about skating and hockey and were also, on some level, not about that at all.

You were: his jacket left in your car after he'd asked for a ride back when the van was unavailable and which was still there three weeks later, which you had not mentioned and he had not asked about. You were the one time you'd run your short program three times back to back and he'd stood at the boards without saying anything until you'd finally stopped and he'd simply said that was the one about the third attempt, and the feeling that produced in your chest that you were still working through weeks later.

You were also: the fight about the Zamboni schedule in mid-November, three days of clipped texts and loaded silences in the corridor, resolved eventually not through discussion but through both of you showing up to the auxiliary rink on a Thursday like nothing had happened and the tension dissolving somewhere over the first hour. You were the fight about the overhead lights which had started everything else. You were the ongoing argument about whose session notes were more useful—yours, which were technical and precise, or his, which were brief and oddly accurate in ways that annoyed you more than they should.

You were: driving each other home. This had started practically—the team van had a recurring availability problem and you lived close enough to the rink that you'd offered once without thinking too hard about it, and once became a pattern the way everything between you became a pattern.

Tuesdays were usually him dropping you, pulling up outside your building with the heat on low and the city quiet at that hour. Thursdays were usually you—parking outside his building on a street that went calm after midnight, and sitting there in the specific silence of two people who'd just spent four hours in each other's orbit and weren't quite ready to stop.

Sometimes that silence lasted ten minutes. Once it lasted forty-five, the two of you parked and talking about nothing in particular until you'd both noticed the time and laughed at the same moment. The kind of laugh that happened when something was absurd and also undeniable.

You were: the cold of his car in December, the heat clicking on slowly, the city moving past the windows. The way he drove—one hand on the wheel, that same unhurried patience he carried everywhere. The specific thing it did to you, being in a small space with him when neither of you had anywhere to be.

You were not: a relationship. This was established. You'd both said the words—I'm not looking for anything serious, I don't have the bandwidth, this is the year I have and I need to focus on the work. You'd said yours first. He'd nodded like he'd expected it. Then he'd said his version, and you'd nodded. It was very mature. Very straightforward. You were both adults who understood exactly what this was.

And it was the most complicated simple thing you'd ever been involved in.

Because here was the part that didn't fit cleanly into the arrangement you'd agreed on. The part you kept running up against and then backing away from, because examining it directly felt like standing too close to something hot.

James didn't let people in. You knew this now—not from what he'd told you, which had been economical, but from what you'd observed across four months of closer proximity than either of you had planned. He was warm with the other four in the specific way of people who'd built something real together and weathered some things and come out the other side. With people outside that circle he was polite and contained and gave very little away. You'd watched him navigate hundreds of small interactions with coaches, staff, journalists who occasionally showed up to document the residency—consistently cordial, consistently unreachable.

With you, he was different. You couldn't fully articulate how, because it wasn't obvious at all. He wasn't suddenly open, wasn't a different person. But there was an access to him that you understood, by observation, wasn't available to most people. The way he'd told you about the development team and what that year had changed in him. The way he sometimes looked at you in the alcove when he thought you were looking at something else—this brief unguarded thing that disappeared the moment you moved.

The physical familiarity had arrived gradually and then all at once, the way most things between you arrived.

It started small. The way you'd learned the particular tension that lived in his left shoulder when he'd been drilling for too long—a tightness that changed the line of his neck slightly, visible from across the ice if you knew what you were looking at. The way he'd learned that when your landings started going heavy on the back edge it meant your hip flexor was complaining, not your technique. You'd both absorbed these things without discussing it, and then they started showing up in how you moved around each other.

There was the Tuesday in late November when he'd come off the ice after a particularly brutal session and you'd been at the boards stretching, and he'd stopped beside you and without either of you saying anything you'd pressed your thumb into the muscle above his shoulder blade, the specific spot, and he'd gone still under your hand and let out a slow breath. Like he'd been waiting for it. Like his body had already learned what yours knew to do.

He'd looked at you afterward, and you'd looked at him, and neither of you said anything about it.

There was the Thursday two weeks later when you'd been running the step sequence and something had caught wrong in your hip—not painful, just a tightness, the specific kind that presaged a bad session if you didn't address it. You'd paused on the ice, barely, a half-second break in your rhythm. Across the rink, James had stopped what he was doing and looked over. Not asking, just: present, watching to see if you needed something. You'd shaken your head once, so small a movement it barely registered. He'd gone back to his drills.

The knowing without asking. That was the part that had snuck up on you.

There was the night you'd come in from the cold with your hands white at the knuckles and he'd been in the corridor outside the auxiliary rink and he'd just taken your hands without preamble, both of them, and wrapped them inside his for thirty seconds while you both stared at the middle distance like this was a completely normal thing to do in a hallway. Then he'd let go and you'd both walked into the rink and said nothing about it.

And none of these things were supposed to count. That was the arrangement. But they had accumulated anyway, all of these moments of being known by someone in ways that didn't fit inside the box you'd drawn, and the box had been getting less useful by the week.

You weren't supposed to notice these things. You were also completely incapable of not noticing them, because whatever else you were, you were observant, and four months of Tuesday and Thursday nights had made you fluent in the specific language of James Zhao in ways you hadn't entirely consented to.

The not-touching-in-public rule had emerged naturally rather than explicitly. The rink was a small world. People talked. You both had profiles to maintain—you as a nationally competitive skater, him as a high-profile prospect with a team watching his every move. Whatever was happening between you on B-level was genuinely separate from everything else, a sealed compartment, and you'd both agreed to keep it that way without ever having the conversation about it.

For instance: the Friday afternoon three weeks ago when Lia had come out of the auxiliary rink at the same time as you and James, all three of you carrying bags, the situation unmistakably legible. The expression on her face had been a very specific kind of carefully neutral that you recognized as her processing something she'd suspected and just had confirmed.

She hadn't said anything in the moment. But she'd said plenty later.

"So," she'd opened, in the locker room, with the tone of someone who had been waiting to have this conversation and was determined to have it calmly.

"Don't," you'd said.

"I'm just—"

"I said don't."

She'd looked at you for a moment. Then: "Does he know about our sessions together?"

She meant the Tuesday mornings. The early ice, when Lia trained alongside you sometimes, when you ran programs and she ran her own and you occasionally exchanged notes. The sessions that had been happening since August, three months before any of the hockey boys arrived. The sessions that meant Lia had a closer view of your life at this rink than almost anyone.

"No," you'd said.

"Is that intentional?"

You'd thought about it. "Probably."

Lia had been quiet, turning this over.

"He's leaving in seven months," you'd said, not because she'd asked but because it still felt necessary to say aloud regularly. "It's contained. I'm not—it's not what you're thinking."

"What am I thinking?"

"That it's more than it is."

She'd looked at you for a long moment with the expression she had when she was deciding how honest to be.

"Okay," she'd said finally. "If you say so."

The conversation had ended there. You'd pushed it to the back of your mind and gone back to the short program.

The short program was, objectively, going very well.

𝑽𝑰𝑰𝑰.

The Thursday nights had their own gravity separate from everything else. After the rink, after the alcove, after the drive—sometimes you went up. This was how you thought about it, in the specific language of understatement you'd both adopted for anything that didn't need to be named directly. Sometimes you went up. He had an apartment two floors above a dry cleaner on a quiet street, tidy in the way of someone who'd moved often and learned not to accumulate—minimal, functional, everything where it belonged—except for the shelf.

The shelf ran floor to ceiling on the wall beside his desk, and it was entirely Lego.

Not the starter sets. The architectural series, the complex builds, the kind that came with three-digit piece counts and required several evenings and a specific category of patience. The Eiffel Tower, completed. The Colosseum, completed. A Formula 1 car mid-build that had been sitting half-finished on the second shelf since before you'd started coming over, which you'd watched in various states of progress every Thursday since.

"You don't finish them," you'd observed once, trailing your finger along the edge of the car.

"I finish them eventually."

"That one's been half-done for six weeks."

"It's not going anywhere." He'd said it from the kitchen, not looking at you, doing something with the coffee maker that required both hands. Mild. Certain. The tone he had for things he'd already thought about.

You'd looked at the half-built car on its shelf. Then at him across the apartment.

You'd thought: that's the same thing you'd say about everything.

You hadn't said it out loud.

The Lego was the official reason, when a reason was needed. You were looking at the new set. He was walking you through the build sequence. This was a normal thing, looking at someone's things, it meant nothing specific. You'd repeated this to yourself enough times that you'd mostly stopped needing to.

What it actually was: the only space where the sealed compartment existed outside the rink as a container. His coffee, his lamp on the desk casting the room gold at midnight, the window that looked out over a street that had gone quiet, and the particular quality of a Thursday that had run long and was still running. The rest of the city somewhere else entirely.

It meant more than you were calling it. You both knew that. That was still the arrangement—to know it and not say it and keep showing up on Thursdays anyway.

It was the second Thursday of December, past midnight, and the lamp on his desk was the only light left in the apartment.

You were tucked against his side with your cheek pressed to his chest, his arm around you, the room quiet in the specific way of somewhere that had been loud recently and had settled. His heartbeat was steady under your ear. Slower than it had been. You'd been listening to it long enough that you'd stopped consciously tracking it and it had just become the sound of the room. It felt like the radiator in the corner, like the city outside the window, like something your body had decided to organize itself around without asking you first.

His hand was resting at your waist. Still, not absent—the particular quality of his stillness that you'd learned meant he was awake and thinking rather than drifting. You knew the difference now. Four months of proximity had made you fluent in things you hadn't signed up to be fluent in, and the specific weight of his hand when his mind was somewhere versus when it wasn't was one of them.

The ceiling had a hairline crack running from the light fixture to the wall. You'd memorized that too. 

Neither of you had spoken in a while. That silence was its own kind of information. It was different from every other silence between you, less constructed, like whatever version of yourselves you maintained for the rest of the world had been set down somewhere and neither of you had bothered to pick it back up yet. You were aware of how much skin was touching skin. Of how naturally you'd ended up here, which was the part that should've unsettled you more than it did.

"Okay," you said eventually, to nothing in particular. Just: the sound of being awake at midnight in someone's room and not wanting to be anywhere else, which was its own problem you were choosing not to examine tonight.

James's chest moved under your cheek—it wasn't quite a laugh but more the physical equivalent of acknowledging that okay covered a lot of ground right now.

"Yeah," he sniffed.

His heartbeat kept its pace under your ear. Steady, like him. You closed your eyes for a moment and let it just be what it was—the lamp, the radiator, the city, his hand at your waist—without running the calculation on what it meant or how to file it or what happened in six months when the clock ran out.

Just this. Just for a minute.

Then he spoke. "The qualifier," and the minute ended, and you were back.

"Four weeks," you hummed and traced the pattern of his grey comforter.

"How's the free skate?"

You thought about it honestly. "The second half is where I want it. The first half has one element that keeps—" You moved your hand in the air above you, a gesture for something not quite landing. "It's close."

"The lutz."

You looked at him sidelong. "How do you know it's the lutz?"

"Because it's always the lutz. You give it a half-second more setup time than everything else. Barely. But it's there."

You went back to looking at the ceiling. The radiator kicked on in the corner of the room, the sound it made, this a low metallic settling. It wa sfamiliar enough now that you didn't register it as noise anymore, just as the room shifting into a warmer register.

"My old coach used to say the jumps you're most confident in are the ones that take the most out of you," you explained to him. "Because you stop thinking about them and start assuming them."

"That's true for shots too." A pause. "The ones I've been making since I was fourteen are the ones that go wide when the game matters."

"Because your body thinks it already knows."

"Yeah."

Silence. It was comfortable in the way that still occasionally surprised you—the fact that you'd arrived here, at a version of this where the quiet between you wasn't loaded with things unsaid but just quiet. Mostly. There were still things unsaid. You were both very practiced at leaving them there.

You turned your head up to look at him. He was still looking at the ceiling, the lamp throwing soft light across the angle of his jaw, the line of his throat. You'd spent four months cataloguing his face in motion—on the ice, in the alcove, in the narrow corridor where it had finally happened—and it was different in stillness. The deliberateness still there but the surface of it gone, like whatever he showed the rest of the world had been set down somewhere near the door and melted away when you kissed him.

You looked back at the ceiling before he caught you.

"Can I ask you something?" you said.

He chuckled and turned into your hair. "You're going to regardless."

"The development team." You felt rather than saw him go slightly more still. "You said the dynamics were bad. You don't have to—I'm not asking you to tell me the whole thing. I just wonder sometimes if—" You stopped and reorganized your thoughts. "Whether it changed how you skate. Or play. Whether it's still in there."

A long pause. The radiator settled again.

"It changed how I enter a room," he said finally. "I walk in expecting to have to prove something. I don't always know I'm doing it until someone points it out." He was quiet for a moment. "Martin pointed it out. In the first week here. He said I looked like I was waiting for something to go wrong."

"Were you?"

"Yeah." Simply, without self-pity. "I'm better at it now. But it doesn't go away completely. The calibration just—shifts." He turned his head toward you, and you were looking at each other now, the lamp between you and the low ceiling and his knee still pressed against yours. "I think that's why the year away mattered. Being somewhere where the room didn't already have a version of me in it."

You looked at him. At the specific quality of his expression in the dark—open in the way he only got when it was late and the rink was behind you and there was no particular reason to maintain the distance.

"I do that too," you said and then clarified. "Enter rooms ready to prove something."

"I know."

"I'm not—I don't know if it's the same reason."

"It doesn't have to be the same reason to be the same thing." His eyes stayed on yours. "You walk into a rink like you already know everyone's doubting you and you've decided it's fine. Like you did the math on being underestimated and found it workable."

Your chest did something complicated. "That's very specific."

"I told you. I notice things."

"You do notice things," you echoed, and your voice came out soft. You watched him hear it—the slight shift in his expression, the thing that moved across his face when you accidentally showed him something you hadn't planned to.

The room was warm now. It meant the radiator had done its job.

You looked away first, which was unusual—normally he was the one who redirected, who filed the moment and moved past it with his characteristic efficiency. But tonight the ceiling felt safer, and you took it.

Your eyes landed on his bedside table. The half-finished Lego car in its place on the shelf. And beside it, sitting on the corner of the desk itself, a pair of headphones.

They weren’t the cheap ones. They were the kind that came in a specific case, the newer Apple ones, the over-ear model that had been everywhere lately. You'd seen them on the subway, in cafés, on athletes at the rink who had sponsorships to maintain or just enough disposable income to justify it.

You reached over without thinking about it, the way you'd gotten comfortable reaching for things in his space over the past few weeks. Your hands picked them up and turned them over in your hands.

"Are these the new ones?" you asked. "The over-ear ones. I keep seeing them everywhere—I've been thinking about getting something for the gym, my old ones finally died."

He looked over at what you were holding and his face morphed into…well, not alarm, just a specific attention. He reached out and took them back from you, not roughly, just took them. Set them back on the desk with a deliberateness that was characteristic of him with things he cared about.

"Don't touch those," he scolded like you were some child and not the girl he’s been secretly fooling around with for a comical amount of time. The audacity.

You raised an eyebrow.

"I don't let anyone use them." This was said the way he said things he'd already decided—not a rule he was making up on the spot, a position he'd had for a while. "They're calibrated to how I listen. Someone else uses them and it changes the ear cushions, the settings. It throws everything off."

"Calibrated to how you listen," you repeated, almost ready to giggle.

"The EQ. The fit." He glanced at them on the desk, then back at you. "Music is specific. I don't share it."

You looked at the headphones on the desk. Then at him. "That might be the most James thing you've ever said."

The corner of his mouth moved—the almost-smile, more genuine than the full version ever looked on other people. "I'll take that."

"Are they good?"

"Yeah." He settled back onto the pillow and motioned for you to pull back into him. "They're good. Get your own."

You lay back down beside him, and the conversation moved on, and you filed the headphones away in the catalogue of things you knew about James Zhao: the way he drove, the shelf of unfinished builds, the shoulder tension, the development team, the patience that looked like coldness until you'd been on the inside of it long enough to know the difference.

The lamp stayed on for another hour.

When you finally left—clothes on, keys found, the familiar ritual of the end of a Thursday—he walked you to the door the way he always did, leaning in the frame while you did up your coat in the corridor. Not saying much. Just: present, the way he was present, with that quality of attention that had nowhere else to be.

"Thursday," you hummed, at the elevator.

"Thursday," he confirmed.

You rode down alone and stepped out into the cold December street and told yourself, as you had been telling yourself for four months, that this was contained. That you had it. That the box was still intact.

The box had long since become theoretical.

You were starting to think you'd known that for a while.

The other four—you'd learned them too, by proximity and by simple accumulation of time.

Juhoon had been the first to actually talk to you properly, in a way that established something beyond nodding in corridors. It had happened in the main rink lobby one morning when you'd both arrived early and the building wasn't open yet, the two of you on the sidewalk in the pre-dawn cold, and he'd offered you half his convenience store purchase—a triangle kimbap he'd clearly been eating on the walk over—with an easy familiarity that assumed you were already friends. You'd taken it. That decision had somehow settled your status with the group in a way you hadn't been planning on.

After that you were simply someone they knew. Not faking warmth in their direction, not hockey fame-adjacent in the way most people at the rink seemed to want to be—just present, occasionally, in the ways that happened naturally when five people and one other person occupied the same building at the same hours over several months. Keonho included you in conversations as if you'd been part of them from the beginning, which was either a genuine personality trait or a very refined social skill and you'd stopped trying to determine which.

Seonghyeon had once spent twenty minutes asking you specific questions about competition prep and the mental side of high-stakes performance, with the seriousness of someone doing genuine research. Martin had strong opinions about almost everything and deployed them at regular intervals, and occasionally your opinions were the opposite of his, and you argued about it, which he seemed to regard as a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Tuesday afternoon.

None of them, as far as you could tell, had any particular knowledge of what was happening between you and James on B-level. This was partly your compartmentalization working correctly and partly—you suspected—because James was very good at keeping things in sealed units, and whatever you were to him fit in a unit he kept separate from everything else.

You tried not to think too hard about what exactly that unit was labeled.

What you noticed, because you couldn't stop noticing: the way James was with them was different from how he was with anyone else. He wasn’t open in the way you'd come to understand as specific to the alcove and the late nights—but there was an ease to it, something built over a long time and weathered and come out the other side.

When Keonho said something catastrophically stupid, which happened on a regular schedule, James's expression shifted in a way that was almost imperceptible but clearly fond. When Seonghyeon got into his head during training, James had a specific approach—it wasn’t fixing it directly, not saying much, just positioning himself where he'd be visible, being a steady presence until whatever was happening internally resolved.

The development team, two years ago. The difficult environment. The decisions that weren't popular.

You thought about it sometimes. About what had happened that had turned him into someone who watched from a distance for a year at a new rink before deciding it was safe. Who built walls with such structural integrity that most people probably didn't even realize the walls were there.

You thought about it and then thought about the alcove, and the fact that he'd told you about the development team at all, and you very carefully did not draw any conclusions from that.

𝑰𝑿. december —macklin

He arrived on a Thursday, mid-December, which you knew because Lia texted you before you'd gotten to the rink.

lia bear !! [7:20 PM]  macklin celebrini is doing supplemental training here for two weeks. post-olympics decompression thing. just fyi since you're there tonight.

You read it, put your phone in your pocket, and didn't think much about it. Post-Olympics training guests weren't unusual at high-profile facilities. You had a qualifier in four weeks and the mental bandwidth for exactly one thing.

You ran into him at the main rink during your afternoon session—or more accurately, he nearly knocked over your water bottle coming off the ice, caught it with the reflexes of someone whose entire career was built on being faster than the situation required, and handed it back with an apology that was genuinely sheepish. Like, actually embarrassed, which was not what you'd expected from someone who'd just come off an Olympic podium.

"Sorry—I'm still—" He laughed slightly, a laugh that was directed at himself. "The orientation period after the Olympics is real. My spatial awareness is completely off."

You took the bottle back. "How long were you in the village?"

"Three weeks. Plus two weeks of comp." He ran a hand through his hair, still damp from the session. Up close he looked younger than the broadcast footage suggested—not young, exactly, but unguarded in the specific way of someone who'd just been through something enormous and hadn't yet reassembled all the usual armor. "You lose all track of everything. It's a very specific kind of disorientation."

"I'd imagine."

He stuck out his hand. "Uh, I’m Macklin."

"I know who you are." You shook it. "I'm—"

"I know who you are too," he said, and smiled—and that was the thing about Macklin Celebrini that you discovered immediately and filed under dangerous, the smile. It was not a performance of warmth but the actual feeling, this one that arrived in his eyes first and his mouth second, the kind that made you feel like you'd said something worth smiling at even when you'd said almost nothing. "Nationals qualifier. Your short program score from the regional was—"

"Don't quote my scores at me."

He laughed again, fuller this time. "Fair. Sorry." 

He picked up his bag from the boards, relaxed and with the ease of someone who'd been navigating high-performance environments since he was sixteen and had long ago made peace with being watched in them. "I looked up the skaters training here before I arrived. Research habit. I like knowing who's in the building."

"Why?"

He considered the question like it was worth considering. "Because the best athletes in any sport are doing something I can learn from. Doesn't matter the discipline." He glanced at the ice, then back at you. "The way figure skaters approach edge work is something hockey players should study more than they do. The precision of it." A pause. "The way you were running that step sequence earlier—the back half especially—there's a flow management thing happening that I've been trying to figure out how to apply to—" He stopped himself and smiled. It was slightly rueful. "Sorry. I do that. Go too far into it."

You looked at him. You'd had exactly this experience before—someone watching you on the ice and seeing something specific in it, something technical, something that meant they'd actually been paying attention rather than just observing. It had happened before from exactly one other person in this building and you were careful not to follow that thought any further.

"The back half is a work in progress," you chuckled and cracked your neck.

"It didn't look like it."

"It always looks better than it is from the outside."

He tilted his head slightly, studying you with an open curiosity that didn't have any performance in it. "Is that specific to skating or a general philosophy."

The question caught you off guard in a way you didn't particularly like—not because it was intrusive but because it was accurate. It was a question that got underneath something without trying to. You felt the corner of your mouth move before you could decide whether to let it.

"Probably both," you said.

He grinned. "Yeah. Same."

You picked up your water bottle. The session was supposed to resume in four minutes and you had a step sequence to fix and no good reason to still be standing at the boards talking to someone you'd met six minutes ago.

"Are you in the evening sessions?" he asked. "I've got the eight o'clock."

"Nine."

"Maybe I'll see you around."

He said it the way people said things they meant without needing to make a production of it—easy and direct with no particular agenda in it—and moved toward the exit with that relaxed confidence of his, the specific gait of someone who'd spent their whole life being the best person in most rooms and had somehow not let it make them smaller.

You watched him go for exactly one second longer than necessary.

Then you stepped back onto the ice and went back to the step sequence and told yourself it was nothing. New person in the building. Polite exchange and completely unremarkable.

You thought about the question—is that specific to skating or a general philosophy—for the rest of the session without meaning to. The way it had landed. The way you'd answered honestly without deciding to.

He'd gotten through, was the thing. Barely, and you'd realized it the moment it happened, but he had. And you were practiced enough at maintaining distance that the fact of it registered like a small alarm—not loud nor urgent, just… noted. Filed. Something to be aware of.

You finished the session and went to find the vending machine and didn't mention it to James that night in the alcove.

That felt like its own kind of information.

𝑿. the vending machine —december

It was 11:45 PM, two days after Macklin had arrived, when you found out that James had registered his presence in a way that went beyond neutral.

You were already in the alcove when you heard his footsteps coming down the B-level corridor. You knew his walk by now—the particular rhythm of it, the sound of someone who moved through spaces like he'd freaking owned them. You'd been in this building long enough to identify half the staff by footfall alone. That you could pick his out from the stairwell was a fact you kept in the same drawer as several other facts you'd stopped examining directly.

You didn't turn around until he was there.

He came into the alcove and looked at the machine the way he always did—reading it first, like it might have changed since last time, like the options were worth reassessing. Got his water. Cracked the cap. Drank half of it standing up, his back half-turned to you, and you watched the line of his throat when he swallowed and looked away before he turned around.

"Macklin Celebrini," he acknowledged.

It wasn’t loud.  It was almost offhand, the name dropped into the quiet of the alcove like he was reading it off a list. You looked at him. He was looking at the machine, not at you, his expression doing that thing where it gave nothing away on the surface and you'd long since learned to read what was underneath.

"What about him?" you asked, though you wanted to laugh at the outwardness of it.

"He talked to you after the afternoon session."

It wasn't a question. James had a way of presenting verified information in the shape of a question—stating the thing he already knew as though he was asking about it, which was a quality you'd identified early and never stopped finding aggravating, partly because it was so effective.

"He nearly knocked over my water bottle and apologized," you said. "That's a conversation in the loosest possible definition."

"He's here for two weeks."

"I'm aware. So are you basically."

James looked at the wall across from the machine. The compressor kicked on and the light did its flicker and in the brief shift of it you could see his jaw clearly—the tension that lived there when he was working through something he didn't particularly want to be working through. Almost invisible if you didn't know what you were looking at. 

You knew what you were looking at.

You leaned your shoulder against the wall and watched him. This was something you'd gotten less careful about over the past month—the watching. Early on you'd been deliberate about redirecting it, making sure your attention had somewhere else to be when he was close, a mechanism to try and act like you didn’t care as much as you did, surely. Somewhere around week six you'd stopped bothering, and he'd never said anything about it, which meant either he hadn't noticed or he had and had filed it the same way you'd both been filing everything else.

"Okay," you said slowly. "What is actually happening right now?"

"Nothing."

"James."

He looked at you then. Full on, which he didn't always do when the conversation was about something he was managing—usually he looked adjacent to you, at the machine or the wall or the middle distance, and let you infer. When he looked at you directly it meant he'd decided to be in it rather than around it, which was either a good sign or a warning depending on the night.

"You’re doing the thing," you told him with a wave of your hand.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you have a feeling, you know you're having a feeling, you've decided it's inconvenient, and you're attempting to compress it into a shape where it doesn't take up any space, and meanwhile it is taking up a tremendous amount of space, especially around me."

The alcove was quiet.

"I don't have a thing about Macklin Celebrini," he said finally.

"Then why did you open this conversation with his full name? No how was your session? No did you take my advice this time?"

He didn't answer that. James looked back at the wall. His thumb was moving on the water bottle cap—that tell, the one you'd first catalogued in the alcove two months ago, this habit that occurred when he was processing something he hadn't decided what to do with yet. You watched it without pointing it out.

"I'm just noting," he scoffed, "that he's personable. And that you responded to him."

You stared at him. "I received an apology for an almost-spilled water bottle. That's not a response, that's basic social functioning."

"You were friendly."

"I'm friendly sometimes. To some people."

He looked at you with an expression that communicated, without a single word, that he had four months of data on your baseline demeanor and had formed opinions about the word friendly in that sentence. You were forced, in the privacy of your own head, to concede the point.

"Okay," you huffed. "I was—whatever. Normally human."

"Right."

"Which is not a crime."

"I didn't say it was."

"But you're standing here… bringing it up."

He was quiet. His gaze was at the wall again, jaw tight, water bottle in his hands. You pushed off the wall and moved to stand beside him—not in front of him, beside, close enough that your arm almost touched his, looking at the same wall he was looking at. You felt him register the proximity without moving. That was its own thing, the way his stillness changed quality when you were close to him. Like the air pressure shifted slightly.

"James," you approached, more carefully. "You don't get to do that."

He turned his head toward you. And that gaze of his immediately dropped to your lips.

"You don't get to be weird about someone being normally nice to me." You kept your voice even, not unkind. "We said what this was. And I meant it and so did you, and it works because we both meant it. But this—" You didn't gesture this time, just let the word sit between you, let the alcove and the proximity and the 11:45 PM do the work of defining what this referred to. "This doesn't fit inside what we said."

"I know," he grumbled.

You looked up at him. He was close enough that you could see the tension working through his jaw, the slight furrow between his brows that meant he was being honest with himself about something he'd rather not be honest about. His eyes were on yours and not moving away, which was the thing about James when he was actually in a conversation rather than managing one—he didn't look away. He held it. Almost like looking away would be a concession he wasn't willing to make.

"So…" you plagued.

"I know," he hushed again. Quieter.

"Do you?"

He exhaled. A long, controlled breath that he'd clearly been holding for longer than this conversation. He looked at the ceiling for a moment—the tell that meant he was doing the calculation, running the numbers on how much to give you—and then back down.

"Yeah," he digressed. "I know. I'm not making it your problem. I just—" He stopped. His thumb stilled on the bottle cap. "I noticed it. That's all."

You held his gaze for a moment. You were very aware of how small the alcove was. Of the fact that you'd moved to stand beside him and hadn't moved back. Of the specific quality of his attention right now, which was the unguarded version, the one that showed up when it was late and he'd run out of energy to keep it managed.

"Okay," you said finally.

"Okay," he conceded.

Neither of you moved for a moment. The light flickered once—the compressor cycling—and in the half-second of it his face was closer and more visible than the steady light made it, and you looked at him the way you looked at him when you were pretty sure he wasn't tracking it, and then the light steadied and you both looked back at the wall.

You finished your chips. He finished his water. You left the alcove two minutes later without touching, which was the arrangement, which had never felt more like a technicality than it did tonight.

On the drive home, you thought about the noticing. Not about the possessiveness—you had every intention of not encouraging that, of not letting it mean what it wanted to mean. But the specific feeling underneath it. The way something caught in your chest when the world reminded you that this arrangement was, by design, limited. That there was a clock you'd both agreed to and that agreeing to it hadn't made it feel any smaller.

You thought about Macklin's question—is that specific to skating or a general philosophy—and the fact that you'd answered honestly, and the fact that you hadn't told James about it.

And you thought about James saying I noticed it. That's all, with his thumb still on the bottle cap and his eyes on yours, and the specific feeling that had produced somewhere behind your sternum that you were very deliberately not giving a name.

You were fine about it. You were almost certain you were fine about it.

The almost was doing a lot of work.

𝑿𝑰. lia

Who was Lia?

Aside from being someone your current fling was beginning to warm up to—which was a sentence you were not examining—Lia… was one of the most technically precise skaters you'd ever shared ice with and also had the social awareness of someone who should have gone into a different profession entirely. She noticed things the way you noticed things, which was part of why you'd gotten along from the beginning and also occasionally made her exhausting to be around.

It was a Sunday morning in mid-December. You were both doing off-ice conditioning in the training room, a practice you'd started together in September when you'd both realized your respective coaches had identical opinions about cross-training. The room was mostly empty at this hour—one of the junior skaters doing resistance work in the corner, the assistant coach for the development program passing through with a coffee—and you'd claimed the cable machines along the far wall the way you always did, by arriving first and saying nothing about it.

"You know I actually know about Tuesday and Thursday nights," Lia said.

You kept your eyes on the cable machine. "Lia."

"I'm not about to give you a speech." She moved to the mat beside you and started on her stretches with the methodical focus she applied to everything—deliberate, thorough, like she'd decided at some point that half-measures were a waste of time and had never revisited the position. "I just think you should know that I know, and that it's obvious, and that some of the other people in this building have eyes."

"Noted."

You reset the weight and pulled. The cable machine offered its familiar resistance and you focused on the mechanics of it—the specific engagement of the muscle, the controlled return—because focusing on the mechanics of something was a technique you'd been using your whole life to not focus on other things.

"Also," she said, in the lighter tone that meant she was changing direction, "I've been spending time with him. With James. Since a couple weeks ago." A pause in her stretching, brief, like she was choosing the next part. "He helped me with some edge work, we ended up talking after, it's been—" Another pause. "It's been nice. He's thoughtful. Different from what I expected."

You kept your face completely neutral.

This took more effort than it should have. The thing that moved through you in the half-second after she said it was fast and specific and not something you had a clean name for—not quite jealousy, because you had no right to jealousy and you knew it, but something adjacent, something that lived in the same neighborhood. The specific sensation of hearing someone describe access to a person you'd assumed was yours to have access to, in a tone that suggested it had been going on for a couple weeks, which meant it had been going on while you'd been in his apartment on Thursday nights and his arm had been around you and you'd been listening to his heartbeat.

You pulled the cable. Released. Kept your eyes forward.

"That's good," you said.

Lia looked at you for a moment—you could feel it without turning your head, that particular quality of her attention when she was deciding how much she believed you.

"He talks about you sometimes," she added. "Not a lot. Just in passing. Your programs come up."

You didn't say anything.

"I thought you should know that too," she said quietly. "Since you both seem committed to maintaining the fiction that this is casual."

You finished your set. Reset the weight. Took a breath that you made sure was the same as every other breath.

"What makes you think it's fiction?" you said.

"The fact that he showed up to watch morning practice last week—the session you don't know about because you were in off-ice training." She glanced at you, not unkindly. "The fact that the rink manager told me someone requested the auxiliary rink lighting be fixed as a priority maintenance item and gave the requester's name as James Zhao." A moment. "Casual people don't do that."

You stared at the cable machine for a moment.

The lighting request. You'd known about it—he'd told you he was going to follow up, had told you in the specific way he'd arrived at after the argument, informing rather than asking, and you'd said fine, thank you, and that had been the end of it. You hadn't thought about what it looked like from the outside. You hadn't thought about the fact that his name was attached to it in a building full of people who paid attention to exactly this kind of thing.

"It has an expiration date," you shrugged and stretched your back.

"Most things do," Lia replied, with the serenity of someone who'd made peace with impermanence in a way you hadn't. "That doesn't mean they don't mean anything while they're happening."

You wanted to argue with her. You had a whole architecture of reasons why what she was describing was fine and contained and manageable—why the expiration date was a feature rather than a flaw, why the not-naming-it was protection rather than avoidance, why two people could be this far inside each other's lives and still keep it from being the thing it was starting to look like from the outside.

You were getting less convinced by your own architecture by the day.

"You like him," she commented. It wasn't a question. She said it the way she said things she'd already verified. It was gently, without pressure and just putting the fact in the room.

"I have a nationals qualifier in four weeks."

"Sure."

"And a program that's still thirty points short of where I need it."

"Absolutely."

"I don't have space for—"

"You don't have to convince me," she said mildly. "I didn't ask."

You looked at her. She was doing hip stretches with the serene expression of someone who'd said exactly what she intended to say and was now completely at peace with the outcome, which was one of the most aggravating qualities a person could have and also, you were aware, something you'd thought about James in roughly the same terms approximately forty times.

You went back to the cable machine.

You did not think about James Zhao requesting the auxiliary rink lighting as a priority maintenance item. You were very disciplined about that.

You were also, without meaning to, thinking about the way Lia had said it's been nice. He's thoughtful. The specific warmth in her voice, which was Lia's default register, which you'd never had cause to find threatening before. 

You thought about the Thursday nights. The shelf. His hand at your waist in the dark. The heartbeat.

You thought about the fact that he'd been talking to Lia about your programs.

It took approximately four minutes for the discipline to fail. Then you reset the weight again, pulled harder than necessary, and spent the remainder of the session being extremely focused on your form.

𝑿𝑰𝑰.

You were aware, in the abstract, that James had been spending time with Lia.

You'd registered it without making it mean anything—Lia was easy to spend time with, shared the early morning schedule, was approachable in all the ways you tended not to be, and she was a good enough skater to offer the kind of cross-discipline perspective he'd found useful from you in the beginning. It was practical. It made sense.

Then you came down to B-level at 11 PM on a Tuesday and found the auxiliary rink dark and empty, and followed the sound of voices to the corridor, and found James and Lia at the vending machine.

Not the alcove—just in the corridor in front of the machine, Lia holding a sports drink and James holding his water. The two of them were mid-conversation, the easy rhythm of something that had been going on for a while. Lia was laughing at something. James's expression had that fractional softness it got when he was comfortable—the thing you'd catalogued over four months, the thing you'd only ever seen directed at the four boys and at you.

You stopped at the end of the corridor.

Neither of them had seen you.

The feeling that moved through you in that moment was something you recognized immediately and didn't like recognizing at all. It was precise and uncomfortable and it had no business being there given the architecture you'd constructed. You'd specifically built the architecture to prevent this. You'd said the words, you'd meant the words.

You turned around and took the stairwell up to the main level and told yourself you were fine.

You texted James at 11:45 PM: not coming tonight. program stuff.

He responded in eleven minutes.

james yufine [11:55 PM]  okay

One word. The kind of response that could mean anything or nothing or everything depending on what he'd been doing when he received it and what his face had done when he read it, none of which you would ever know.

You put your phone face-down on your kitchen counter and went back to your program notes and did not think about the specific way Lia had been laughing. You did not think about the fact that she was warm in all the ways you struggled to be, approachable in all the ways you deliberately weren't. You did not think about the fact that James had spent years getting burned by people he'd let in and had spent four months slowly, carefully letting you in anyway, and that some part of you had started to rely on the symmetry of that—two people with the same damage, the same sealed-compartment approach, the same stubborn insistence on containment.

You were in control of this.

You kept saying it. You kept saying it.

𝑿𝑰𝑰𝑰. nationals

The night before nationals you didn't sleep.

This wasn't unusual. You rarely slept before competitions, your body running on that specific anxious current that came from months of work arriving at its singular moment. You'd made peace with it years ago—with the lying awake and running the program in your head in the dark, every element in sequence, every transition, every place something could go wrong and the correction you'd execute if it did.

What was unusual was that somewhere in the dark at 2 AM, your phone lit up.

james [2:04 AM]  good luck tomorrow ur ready

James. No preamble, no context, just that.

You stared at it for a long time.

Then: how do u know

His response came three minutes later.

james yufine [2:08 AM]  cuz ive watched u run that program like 80 times and the last 10 were perfect not to glaze or anything and ur the kinda person who forces herself to be ready deadass it's not luck it's basically architecture atp

You read it twice.

Then: architecture?? wtf is that supposed to mean

james yufine [2:08 AM]  the way u build things always with this like structure already in place before anyone can see it idrk how to explain

You put the phone down and stared at the ceiling. The program ran through your head—every element, every transition, the Rachmaninoff building to that final spin. Eighty times. He'd been counting.

You picked the phone back up.

are you going to be there, you typed. Deleted it. Typed it again. Stared at it.

Sent it.

The response came in two minutes:

james yufine [2:14 AM]  maybe

One word. The architecture of something you still didn't have a name for.

You put the phone on the nightstand and lay in the dark and thought about the alcove and the vending machine and the argument that started everything and the seven months you'd been so careful about, all the ways you'd kept this contained and controlled and still somehow ended up here—lying awake the night before nationals because a hockey player had texted you you're ready and it had landed somewhere much deeper than it had any right to reach.

You thought about Lia laughing in the corridor. About the look on his face in the alcove when he'd brought up Macklin, that jaw-tension, the carefully compressed feeling. About four months of Tuesday and Thursday nights and I'll follow up on it and that was the one.

About section C, four rows from the back, left side.

You didn't sleep until past 3AM. When you finally did, the last thing in your head was the specific quality of his attention from across a crowded arena. He was not cheering but just watching, like he'd needed to see it for himself.

In the morning, you went out and skated the best program of your life.

𝑿𝑰𝑽. gold, reprise

Your score flashed on the board and the arena broke open and your coach was saying something in your ear that you couldn't fully process because your brain was still catching up to the fact that the number was real.

First place. Nationals. The goal you'd been building toward for eleven months.

You pressed your hand to your chest. You let yourself feel it—just for a second, before the obligations started.

The kiss-and-cry. The interview. The photograph with the medal heavy around your neck, the weight of it more literal than you'd expected, like the thing you'd been chasing had actual mass. Your coach squeezing your shoulder and saying something about the second half that you'd replay later when your nervous system had returned to a normal register. The federation rep with the itinerary for the evening, the group dinner, the schedule for tomorrow's remaining events.

You moved through all of it on the specific adrenaline plateau that followed a clean program—not high exactly, more like everything had sharpened, every detail more present than usual. The lights in the corridor outside the kiss-and-cry were very bright. The carpet was very red. Someone handed you water and you drank it without tasting it.

It wasn't until you were back in the changing area, the noise of the arena muffled through two sets of doors, that you let yourself stop moving for a moment.

You sat on the bench with your skates still on and your hands in your lap and breathed.

The door opened.

You looked up.

James filled the doorway the way he filled most spaces—like he'd calculated exactly how much room he needed and taken precisely that. He was in a dark hoodie, hood up, hands in the front pockets. He looked at you across the changing area with that particular quality of attention, the one you'd been on the receiving end of for four months, and for once you didn't try to catalogue it or file it or look away before he caught you looking back.

"You're not supposed to be back here," you warned though it had zero bite to it. In fact, your tone sounded inviting if anything.

"I know." He came in anyway. Let the door close behind him.

You looked at each other.

"Section C," you said.

"Row four from the back."

"You could've sat closer."

"I know where I can see clearly." He crossed the room and stopped in front of you, close enough that you had to tilt your head back slightly to look at him, which you did. "Row four from the back works."

You held his gaze. The changing area was very quiet—the noise of the competition a distant thing, someone else's moment now. Just the two of you and the overhead light and the medal still around your neck.

He reached out and picked it up with two fingers, turning it once, the metal catching the light. He didn't say anything. Just looked at it for a moment, then let it rest back against your chest, his fingers brushing your collarbone on the way back.

The touch was light yet tt landed like something much heavier.

"I want to say something," he said.

"Okay."

He was quiet for a moment, choosing words with that precision of his, the deliberateness that meant whatever came next had been considered from multiple angles. "I've been careful. With people. For a long time." His eyes stayed on yours. "And I know you've noticed that, because you notice everything, which is—" The corner of his mouth moved. "That's a problem for me, that you see that clearly."

You didn't say anything.

"I just want you to know," he said, "that careful stopped applying. Somewhere. I don't know when exactly. But it did."

The corridor outside was quiet. Somewhere further in the building a skater was finishing a program—you could hear the muffled swell of the crowd through the walls, the particular rise of it that meant something had gone well.

"That's not low stakes," you said.

"No," he agreed. "It's not."

"I don't know what to do with that."

"Neither do I." He held your gaze. "I'm not asking you to do anything with it. I just—you deserved to know."

You looked at him for a long moment. At the face that had been the most consistently unreadable thing in your immediate world for four months and was right now, in this particular moment, not unreadable at all. Showing you something it kept for very few people, maybe no people, maybe just you.

"I noticed the thing about Lia," you said quietly.

He went very still.

"The vending machine. A couple weeks ago." You held his gaze. "I saw the two of you and I had a feeling about it that I have no right to have given what we said, and I've been managing it."

A silence. Then, "It's not—Lia and I are—"

"I know," you shook your head. And you did know, or you were choosing to know, which sometimes amounted to the same thing. "But I'm telling you because you were honest and I'm trying to be honest back, and I don't—" You stopped and started again. "I'm very bad at this part."

"I know," he smiled but it wasn’t mockingly. And then quieter: "You're doing fine."

The echo of it—early November, the alcove, you would've figured it out—landed somewhere below your sternum and stayed there.

He reached up and tucked a loose piece of hair back from your face. Slowly, like he had all the time in the world, like the competition wasn't still running somewhere above you. His hand stayed at your jaw after, the way it had in the corridor on the wrong floor, that same deliberate framing. His thumb moved once.

"The seven months," you blurted, sounding like a squeaky little teenager. You hated it.

"What about them?"

"I don't know what happens at the end of them."

"Neither do I."

"That should probably bother me more than it does."

"Yeah," he agreed softly. "Me too."

You looked at each other for one more second.

Then you reached up and closed your hand around his wrist—not pulling  and not pushing away, just holding. And he looked down at your hand on his wrist and something moved across his face that you felt in your chest like a key turning.

"The hotel's ten minutes from here," you notified him.

He met your eyes.

"I know," he hummed.

𝑿𝑽. after

The hotel room had that specific quality of somewhere temporary—neutral walls, blackout curtains, the silence of a building full of people who'd arrived from somewhere else and would leave again. You'd stayed in enough of them that they'd stopped feeling strange.

This one felt different. That wasn't about the room.

The lamp on the nightstand was the only light. You'd set the medal down somewhere without looking at where. Your competition jacket was on the floor and you weren't thinking about it.

James was standing by the window with his back half-turned, looking out at the city through the gap in the curtains. He did this sometimes—went quiet in a way that wasn't absence, just processing, turning something over. You'd learned not to fill it. You sat on the edge of the bed and watched him and said nothing and the room held both of you without requiring anything yet.

He wore this vintage hoodie and sweats. One day, you peeked into his closet and saw his his regular clothes which you rarely saw, obviously being that he was in athleticwear at the building at all times. He owned a lot of henleys

"You were different today," he said. Still looking out the window. "On the ice."

"Good different or bad different."

"Just different." A pause. "Like you had a different kind of purpose in winning."

You didn't answer that. You weren't sure you could without saying something you'd have to stand behind.

He turned around. Looked at you across the room with that expression you still didn't have a clean name for after four months—not warm exactly, not cold, something that lived in the space between wanting and not letting himself want. You recognized it because you'd been making the same face at him since October without realizing it.

He crossed the room and stopped in front of you. Close. You looked up at him and he looked down at you and neither of you said anything and the not-saying was its own conversation by now, the one you were both fluent in whether you'd agreed to be or not.

His hand came up to your face. It was slower than usual. His thumb moved along your jaw—the same path it always took, like it had learned the route—and you felt your eyes close for half a second before you caught yourself.

"James," you said.

"Mm."

"What are you doing."

He was quiet for a moment. His thumb traced the same path again, unhurried, not going anywhere.

"I don't know," he said, and kissed you.

It was different from the corridor, different from the Thursday nights. Those had urgency underneath them—the pressure of things unsaid finding a physical exit. This was quieter and slower. His hand still at your jaw, the other finding your waist, and you felt in the way he touched you what he wasn't saying, which was the problem, which had always been the problem. You could read it too clearly. The wanting underneath the control, the way his hands told the truth his mouth didn't.

You pulled back and looked at him. He looked back at you.

There were things that could have been said. Neither of you said them.

He let you look. That was the thing—he let you, which was not nothing, from someone who spent most of his life being very deliberate about what he showed people.

He reached over slowly and found your hand where it rested on the bed between you. He turned it over. Ran his thumb across your palm once, studying it like it was interesting. Then he leaned in and kissed the corner of your jaw, your cheek, the side of your neck, with that same elegant quality—methodical, thorough, like he had a specific idea of what he wanted and intended to get there without being rushed about it.

His hand slid from your waist to your knee. It stayed there. His thumb moved in a slow arc and you were very aware of the weight of it, the deliberateness, the fact that he was watching your face while he did it.

"We're supposed to go watch the other programs," you protested with a hint of a smile while weakly pushing him away. 

"Right," he said into your neck, which meant nothing and everything.

His hand moved a fraction further and stopped. You could feel him almost smiling against your skin. "We have time."

"James—"

"We have time," he said again, quieter, and you stopped arguing about it.

His hand moved, tracing slowly up the inside of your thigh, and stopped. It was waiting. His eyes on yours the whole time, not asking out loud, letting the question exist in the air between you.

You should have said something. Something honest—about the 2 AM texts and the eighty times and careful stopped applying and all the weight that had been accumulating in the sealed compartment for months. Something that acknowledged what tonight was, what this room was.

But you'd just won nationals and his thumb was on your jaw and you didn't want to come down from something that felt this good with a conversation that had no clean ending.

You pulled him back down instead.

Some things could wait.

𝑿𝑽𝑰.

An hour later you came down in the elevator side by side, not touching, which was still the arrangement, though it felt even more like a technicality than usual tonight.

The hotel lobby was bright after the dim of upstairs—all that neutral lighting doing its best to approximate cheerful, the low hum of a building in the middle of a competition weekend, skaters and coaches and federation people moving through in various states of post-event wind-down. You'd been to enough of these that you knew the rhythms of it: the ones still in competition gear heading to late sessions, the ones already changed heading to the group dinner, the ones in the corners on their phones getting scores from other venues.

James had his hands in his hoodie pocket. You had yours crossed over your chest. You were navigating toward the corridor that led to the main event venue, where the ice dance pairs were midway through their program, because that was the plan and you were both people who kept plans.

You were also, underneath the plan, in a version of the past hour that hadn't quite settled yet. The lamp. His hand. The way he'd kissed the corner of your jaw like he had a specific idea and no intention of being rushed about it. All of it sitting in your chest alongside the medal and the score and the text at 2AM, adding up to something you still didn't have a clean name for but that was getting harder to keep unnamed.

You were thinking about telling him something. You'd been composing it in the elevator, the shape of it—not a declaration, nothing that blew up the architecture of what you'd agreed on, just: an honest thing. The depth of honesty you'd been managing not to say for four months and that felt, tonight of all nights, like it might actually be sayable.

You opened your mouth.

"Hey—"

"Oh my god, you were incredible today."

You turned.

Lia was crossing the lobby toward you, already mid-sentence, bright-eyed in the way of someone who'd watched a good competition and hadn't come down from it yet. She was in street clothes, hair down, moving with the easy warmth that was just how she existed in the world. She came straight to you and hugged you, and you let her, and over her shoulder you could see the lobby going about its business.

"That second half," she said, pulling back to look at you with genuine delight. "The spin at the end—I was losing my mind, I was sitting next to two of the junior coaches and I think I grabbed one of their arms—"

You laughed, and it was real, because it was Lia and she meant it. "Thank you. It finally came together."

"It didn't just come together, you built it—" She stopped. Her head looked past you to James, and her face shifted into something warm and uncomplicated, the smile she had for people she genuinely liked. "Hey."

"Hey," James greeted with a wave of his hand.

"I didn't know you were coming." She said it easily, not an accusation, just a fact she was noting. Then she reached into the bag on her shoulder. "Actually—I was going to text you about these. I've been meaning to give them back since Tuesday." She produced the headphones—his headphones, the ones from the corner of his desk, the case he'd taken back from your hands and set down with that deliberateness, the ones he didn't let anyone use—and held them out to him. "Thank you for letting me try them, by the way. You were right about the volume thing, I actually noticed the difference—"

"No problem," James said, and took them. Tuesday.

The exchange was just like that. Natural. The same hands that had been in your hair an hour ago taking the headphones back from Lia like it was nothing, like the case didn't represent the exact thing he'd said to you: I don't let anyone use them. Music is specific. I don't share it.

You kept your face very still.

You were good at keeping your face still. You'd been doing it your whole career—the landing face, the performance face, the face you showed the judges that had nothing to do with what was happening in your body. You used it now, in a hotel lobby in the middle of a competition weekend, while Lia said something else you didn't fully process and James responded and the two of them had a thirty-second exchange that was perfectly normal and completely unremarkable to everyone in the lobby except you.

The honest thing you'd been composing in the elevator was gone.

You smiled at something Lia said. You weren't sure what.

James glanced at you once. It was a brief thing, a look that on another night you'd have catalogued and analyzed and filed. Tonight you didn't hold it. You looked back at Lia and said something about the ice dance pairs starting soon and it came out normal, fine, like a person who was fine.

"I'll walk over with you," Lia said and fell into step with you.

The three of you crossed the lobby together and you kept your eyes forward and your face arranged into something easy and you told yourself what you always told yourself.

You were in control of this.

The difference was that tonight, for the first time, you didn't even almost believe it.

lovhyeon © 2026