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The walk back to the Village feels like skating through fog—thin, shimmering, feverish. Like stepping through the inside of a snow globe someone has just shaken—glitter still suspended, glitter still falling. Dripping down his jaw. Glinting on his collarbones.
He is twenty-one, silver around his neck.
He hears the crowd even now, their roar echoing down the concrete throat of the hallway—dampened by distance, distorted by memory. They sound like an ocean eating a coastline. Erosion.
Like approval leaching into his spine, fingers running down each vertebrae. And it’s sensual, but a little too desperate.
The corridors are too bright and his pupils are still blown from the lights of the rink, from the applause, from the adrenaline that hasn’t yet drained out of his bloodstream. His body is buzzing, hovering, overheated beneath the embroidered German tracksuit that still smells faintly of resin, hairspray, and whatever expensive cologne his coach pressed into his neck earlier.
He can still feel fingers there. Long, elegant. Gold ring.
“You’ll skate clean,” the man had murmured, voice warm and breath cold. “You owe me that.”
Every step away is perfectly balanced, razor-calm, his bones remember the blade’s edge. Imitate it. The truth is far less pretty—his thighs ache from the quads, his stomach is hollow with nerves, and his mouth tastes like the champagne he shouldn’t have accepted from the French pairs team three minutes ago.
But they offered with easy smiles, and he never turned down anything.
Now he’s outside the stadium, breath fogging in the cool night air. The world smells like fried food from vendors, like wet asphalt, like camera flash residue, like thousands of strangers’ excitement cooling all at once.
The ice sheet, sliding out ahead of him. And every step is more wobbly than he’s ever been in the rink.
People scream his name from behind barriers.
Cato.
Cato.
Cato.
His thoughts aren’t here. They’re looping his performance frame by frame, annotating, critiquing, slicing it open to analyse the arteries.
The quad toeloop in the opening could have been tighter.
The camel spin dipped two degrees.
His final step sequence bled too much want.
The want always betrays him.
Judges smell it like sharks in water.
They require discipline, not desperation.
Athletes drift in and out of buildings with lanyards swinging. Perfume and sweat. Everyone pretending they’re not here for anything other than sport. Beautiful bodies with beautiful discipline.
He fits in.
He steps into the elevator just as the doors start to close, and a hand stops them—long, elegant fingers, a gold ring. His stomach tenses before his shoulders do.
His coach steps in after him, wearing that smoothed-over expression that always means trouble. His suit jacket is unbuttoned.
Cato keeps his eyes forward.
“Good show,” the older man says, voice soft enough not to echo.
Cato doesn’t answer. It is not a compliment. It is a command. They both know this. He can feel the weight of the man’s stare sliding along the line of his throat, down to the faint bruise forming beneath the collar of his shirt.
He feels his fingers twitch. Forces them still. Blankness.
“Cato,” the coach says again, tone smoothing like lacquer, “look at me.”
He does. Slowly. For he is nothing if not obedient. The coach’s smile curves, pleased. He reaches forwards and lifts the medal from Cato’s neck. The rightful owner. Holds that warm, round gleam between those elegant hands. For a second, Cato holds his breath. Then grey eyes drag back up to dark, obsidian brown.
“Well done.”
The praise makes something in his stomach twist—hunger, dread, need. They’re indistinguishable by now. He doesn’t want words. Words from this man always come with hands, with conditions, with teeth.
Cato wants the silence back.
The elevator begins to rise, and with each floor the space shrinks. air thickens. Something coils low in his gut. His breath fogs faintly on the mirrored wall.
He feels the shift before it happens—the coach stepping closer, the deliberate brush of fingers at his lower back, just above the elastic of his tracksuit. A touch hidden from the angle of the security camera.
Awfully familiar. Lazy in its confidence.
Cato’s easy. He doesn’t move away. Why would he? Moving only drags the game on.
“You’ve been distant,” the man murmurs, close enough now that Cato can feel his breath ghost along his cheek. “Distracted. You know I don’t like that.”
Cato feels himself laugh softly—breathless, humourless.
“Maybe I’m tired.”
“You’re never too tired for me.”
He’s right.
A floor ticks past. Another. They’re almost at Cato’s stop. His coach’s hand slides to his hip; Cato lets it. Always lets it. What resistance would Cato have, anyway? His body—traitor that it is—responds with a familiar spark. Tightens. Sharpens. Like he’s back on the ice with the entire world watching.
“Come to my room,” the man murmurs, a blade dipped in honey. Thick, amber, dribbling from the knife. Poised above the jar, twirling the excess off.
Cato tilts his head back against the mirrored wall, breathing in through his nose.
He smells sweat, cologne, the faint resin of the boards. He smells the metallic tang of his own nerves and the expensive wine on his coach’s breath.
“Why?” Cato hums, lidded eyes turning toward him. “You already had me today.”
A dangerous smile. “And you think I’m satisfied?”
Cato’s mouth twitches. He feels the itch, the tug beneath his ribs, the same twisted instinct that makes him push harder in every program: provoke, provoke, provoke. See what breaks. See who breaks first.
He whispers, soft as the honeyed blade’s kiss:
“You’re old, coach. I wasn’t sure you had the stamina.”
The man’s fingers tighten sharply at his waist—enough to warn, not enough to bruise.
The reaction warms him. Ugly. Addictive.
He’s so easy to wind up.
“There it is,” the man breathes, leaning in, lips grazing Cato’s jaw. “That mouth of yours.”
The elevator dings.
Cato doesn’t move for a long second. He lets the moment stretch, tight and dizzy, an elastic band pulled to snapping.
Then he steps out. The band snaps.
The coach follows.
The hallway is dark, lit only by soft gold sconces. Cato walks without looking back, hearing the older man’s breath hitch slightly as he keeps pace. The tension is thick, shivery. They pass closed doors, muffled laughter, the clink of glass behind a wall. Somewhere, someone is celebrating their bronze.
Cato doesn’t care.
As he leads them to his room, he feels a pang go through him.
He imagines in one universe, a different one, he kept his own room clean. His bed—sacred. Untouched by other’s hands.
Perhaps in that universe, he also had the strength to leave.
Instead, he feels the coach step inside behind him.
Feels the door click shut.
No more applause.
No more bright lights.
No more ice.
Only the two of them.
And the familiar, sinking feeling of inevitability.
He doesn’t think about tomorrow. He only thinks about how quiet the Village becomes when the door finally shuts.
And how small he feels inside his own room.
And yet—
there he is.