Of course. Who the hell else would they be talking about?
I didn’t bother sighing or even rolling my eyes as I turned back to my locker and pulled my gym bag out, unzipping it the moment I set it on the bench beside me so I could dig out my phone, keys, flip-flops, and a tiny bar of Hershey’s I kept in there for days like today. I took off the wrapper and stuffed that thing in my mouth before grabbing my phone. The green light on the screen blinked, telling me I had unread messages. Unlocking it, I glanced over my shoulder to see the girls there still squawking and making it seem like they were on the verge of having a heart attack over The Asswipe. Ignoring them, I took my time reading through the group chat messages I had missed while practicing.
Jojo: I want to go to the movies tonight. Anyone in?
Tali: Depends. What movie?
Mom: Ben and I will go with you, baby.
Seb: No. I’ve got a date tonight.
Seb: James doesn’t want to go with you? I don’t blame him.
Jojo: The new Marvel movie.
Jojo: Seb, I hope you get an STD tonight.
Tali: Marvel? No thanks.
Tali: I hope you get an STD too, Seb.
Mom: WOULD YOU ALL BE NICE TO EACH OTHER?
Seb: All of you can eat shit except for Mom.
Rubes: I’d go with you but Aaron’s not feeling well.
Jojo: I know you would, Squirt. Love you. Next time.
Jojo: Mom, let’s go. 7:30 work?
Jojo: Seb- [emoji of a middle finger]
Jojo: Jas, you in?
I looked up as the girls in the changing room made noises I wasn’t sure I was capable of, wondering what the hell was going on with them. Jesus Christ, it wasn’t like Ivan didn’t train here five days a week for the last million years. Seeing him wasn’t that exciting. I would rather watch paint dry.
Scrunching up my bright pink-colored toenails, I took them in and purposely ignored the bruise I had right alongside my smallest toe and the start of a blister I had beside my big toe from the seam of a new brand of tights I’d worn the day before.
“What is he doing here?” the teenagers kept going, reminding me that I needed to get out of the room as quickly as possible. I’d already reached my limit for how much I could handle today.
Glancing back at my phone, I tried to decide what to do. Go home and watch a movie or suck it up and go to the movies with my brother, mom, and Ben—or as the rest of us called him in secret, number four?
I would rather go home and not hang out in a crowded movie theater on the weekend, but….
My hand fisted for a second before I typed up a response.
I’ll go, but I need food first. Going home now.
Then I smiled and added another message.
Seb, I third you getting an STD. Aim for gonorrhea this time.
Setting my phone between my legs in the meantime, I grabbed my car keys from the pocket of my bag and snagged my flip-flops, then carefully set each of my skates into a custom protective case lined with a faux-fur over thin memory foam that my brother Jonathan and his husband had bought me years ago. I zipped my bag back up, slid my feet into my sandals, and got to my feet with a sigh that made my chest feel tight.
Today hadn’t been the best, but it would get better, I told myself.
It had to.
The good thing was, I didn’t have work tomorrow, and I didn’t usually come skate on Sundays either. My mom would probably make pancakes for breakfast, and I was supposed to go to the zoo with my brother and niece since he was picking her up for the day. I’d missed enough moments in her life because of figure skating. Now that I had more time, I was trying to make up for it. It was better for me to look at it like that than get hung up on why I had more time on my hands. I was trying to be more positive. I just wasn’t that good at it yet.
“I don’t know,” one of the girls said. “But he usually doesn’t come in for a month or two after the end of the season, and it’s been what? A week since Worlds?”
“I wonder if he split up with Mindy.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. Why did he split up with any of the rest of them before her?”
I’d already known from the moment one of them said Coach Lee’s name whom they were still talking about. There was only one man left at the LC—what most of us called the Lukov Ice and Sports Complex, or the Lukov Complex for short—that these girls would give a crap about. It was the same guy everyone gave a shit about. Everyone except me at least. And anyone else with a brain. Ivan Lukov.
Or as I liked to call him, to his face especially—the son of Satan.
“All I said was that I saw him. I don’t know what he’s doing here,” a voice said.
“He never comes over randomly, Stacy. Come on. Put two and two together.”
“Oh my God, are he and Mindy splitting up?”
“If they are, I wonder who he’ll skate with.”
“It could be anybody.”
“Shoot, I’d pay to partner with him,” a girl said.
“You don’t even know anything about pairs, stupid,” another girl said, snorting. I wasn’t actively listening, but my brain continued stringing together the pieces of their comments as they went in one ear and out the other.
“How hard could it be?” the other voice rattled off proudly. “He’s got the greatest butt in the country, and he wins with everyone. Sounds like a walk in the park to me.”
I rolled my eyes again, especially at the butt part. The last thing that idiot ever needed to hear was someone compliment it. But, she had missed the most relevant parts of Ivan. How he was the figure skating world’s sweetheart-slash-dreamboat. The World Skating Union’s poster boy for pairs skating. Hell, for skating in general, really. “Skating royalty” as some called him. “A prodigy” people had used when he’d been a teenager.
He was the man whose family owned the center I had trained at for over a decade.
The brother to one of my only friends.
The man who had not once said a kind word to me in over ten years. That’s how I knew him. As the ass who I’d seen daily for years and had only ever bickered to me over the dumbest shit from time to time. The person I couldn’t have a conversation with without it ending in one of us insulting the other.
Yeah… I didn’t get why he was at the Lukov Complex barely a week after he’d won his third world championship, days after the season had ended—when he should have been resting or vacationing. At least that was what he’d done every year for as long as I could remember.
Did I care he was around? Nah. If I really wanted to know what was happening, I could just ask Karina. I just didn’t. There was no need to.
Because it wasn’t like Ivan and I were going to compete against each other anytime soon… or ever again, if things continued the way they were going.
And something told me, even if I didn’t want to believe it—never, ever, ever—as I stood there in the same changing room I’d been using for more than half my life, that that was the case: that I might be done. After so long, after so many months of being by myself… my dream might be over.
And I had not a single fucking thing to show for it.
Chapter 2
“Did you hear the news?”
I gave the laces on my boot an extra tight squeeze in the changing room before looping the ends into a knot tight enough to survive the next hour. I didn’t need to turn around to know there were two teenage girls down the bench from me in front of their lockers. They were there every morning, usually farting around. They could have had more time on the ice if they didn’t talk, but whatever. I wasn’t the one paying for their ice time. If they’d had my mom for their own, she would’ve gotten them out of that standing-around habit real quick.
“My mom told me last night,” the taller of the two said as she got to her feet.
I stood up and kept my attention forward, rolling back my shoulders even though I’d already spent an hour warming up and stretching. Maybe I wasn’t skating six or seven hours a day like I used to—when stretching for at least an hour was absolutely necessary—but old habits died hard. And suffering for days or weeks from a pulled muscle wasn’t worth the hour I’d save from skipping my warm-up.
“She said she overheard someone say that they think he’s retiring because he’s had so many problems with his partners.”
Now that caught my attention.
He. Retiring. Problems.
It had pretty much been a miracle that I’d graduated from high school on time, but even I knew who they had to be talking about. Ivan. Who the hell else? Other than a few younger boys, and the three years that Paul had spent training at the Lukov Ice and Sports Complex with me, there was no other “he” that anyone here would talk about. There were a couple of teenage boys, but none of them had the potential to go very far, if anybody gave a shit about my opinion. Not that they did.