From Lukov with Love Read online

  “Oh my God!” one of the teenagers pretty much shrieked from the other side of the room, making it impossible for me to zone her out. “You’re not joking, are you?”

  “No!” someone else responded as I unlaced my left skate, trying hard to ignore the girls.

  “Seriously?” another voice, or maybe it was the same one from the beginning, piped up. I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t like I was trying to listen to them.

  “Seriously!”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously!”

  I rolled my eyes and kept trying to ignore them.

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  Yeah. I couldn’t ignore shit. Had I ever been that annoying? That girly?

  No way.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  I was in the middle of putting in the code to my combination lock on my locker when there was a chorus of noises that had me glancing over my shoulder to glare at the girls. One of them literally looked like she was on speed, she was baring her teeth, and her hands were hanging out right at chest level as she clapped her palms together. Another girl had her fingers knitted together, palms joined in front of her mouth, and she might have been shaking.

  What in the hell was wrong with them two?

  “Hear it? I saw him walk in with Coach Lee.”

  Ugh.

  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.

  “Maybe if he retires he’ll go into coaching,” one of the girls said. “I wouldn’t mind him yelling at me all day.”

  I almost laughed. Ivan retiring? No way. There was no chance in hell he’d retire at twenty-nine, especially not while he was still killing it. Months ago, he’d won a US championship. And a month before that, he’d taken second place in the Major Prix final.

  Why the hell was I even paying attention anyway?

  I didn’t care what he did. His life was his business. We all had to quit sometime. And the less I had to look at his annoying face, the better.

  Deciding that I didn’t need to be distracted starting the first of only two hours I had in the day to practice—especially not being distracted over Ivan of all people—I made my way out of the changing room, leaving the two teenagers in there to waste their own time gossiping. This early in the morning, there were six people on the ice, like usual. I didn’t come in as early as I had before—there wasn’t a point—but every face, I’d been seeing for years.

  Some more than others.

  Galina was already sitting on one of the bleachers outside the rink with her thermos of coffee that I knew from experience was so thick it looked and tasted like tar. With her favorite red scarf wound around her neck and ears, she had on a sweater I’d seen at least a hundred times in the past and what looked like a shawl on top of it. I’d swear she’d started adding an item of clothing to what she wore every year. When she had first plucked me out of lessons almost fourteen years ago, she had been fine in just a long sleeved shirt and a shawl, now she probably would have frozen to death.

  Fourteen years was longer than some of these girls had been alive.

  “Good morning,” I said in the choppy Russian I’d picked up from her over the years.

  “Hello, yozik,” she greeted me, her eyes darting toward the ice for a brief moment before returning to me with a face that was the same as it had been when I’d been twelve, all weathered and fierce, like her skin was made of bulletproof material. “Your weekend, it was good?”

  I nodded, briefly reminiscing on how I’d gone to the zoo with my brother and niece and then gone to his condo afterward for pizza—two things I couldn’t remember ever doing in the past, the pizza part included. “Did you have a good one?” I asked the woman who taught me so many things I could never give her credit for.

  The dimples she rarely showed came out. She had a face I knew so well I could describe it to a sketch artist perfectly if she ever came missing. Round, thin eyebrows, almond-shaped eyes, a thin mouth, a scar on her chin from taking a partner’s blade to the face back in her competing days, another scar at her temple from smacking her head on the ice. Not that she would ever go missing. Any kidnapper would probably release her within an hour. “I saw my grandchild.”

  I thought about the dates for a second before it clicked. “It was his birthday, right?”

  She nodded, her gaze moving toward the rink again in the direction of what I knew was the figure skater she’d been working with since I’d left her to start skating pairs four years ago. Well, I hadn’t wanted to leave her but… it didn’t matter. It didn’t make me jealous anymore to think of how quickly she’d replaced me. But sometimes, especially lately, it bothered me. Just a little. Just enough.

  I’d never let her know that. “Did you finally buy him skates?” I asked.

  My old coach tipped her head to the side and shrugged a shoulder, the gray eyes, which had stared me down countless times, still settled on the ice. “Yes. Used skates and video game. I waited. He’s almost same age you were. Little later, but still good.”

  She’d finally done it. I remembered when he’d been born—before we’d split—and how we’d talked about him figure skating when he was old enough. It had only been a matter of time. We both knew that. Her own children hadn’t made it out of the junior level, but it hadn’t mattered.

  But thinking about him, her grandson, just starting made me feel… almost homesick, remembering how much fun figure skating had been back then. Back before the bone-crushing pressure, the drama, and the fucking critics. Back before I’d learned the shitty taste of disappointment. Figure skating had always made me feel invincible. But more than anything, back then, it had made me feel amazing. I hadn’t known it was possible to feel like you could fly. To be so strong. To be so beautiful. To be good at something. Especially something that I cared about. Because I hadn’t known that contorting body parts and twisting and turning them into shapes that shouldn’t have been possible could be so impressive. It had made me feel special to go as fast as I could around the oval shape, that I would have no idea until years later, would change my life.

  Galina’s chuckle snapped me out of my funk. At least for a moment.

  “One day, you coach him,” she offered with a snort, like she was imagining me treating him the way she had treated me, and it made her laugh.

  I snickered at the memories of all the hundreds of times she had smacked me on the back of the head throughout those ten years we were together. Some people wouldn’t have been able to handle her brand of tough love, but I’d secretly loved it. I’d thrived with it. My mom always said that if anyone gave me an inch, I’d take a mile.

  And the last thing Galina Petrov would ever do is give up a single centimeter.

  But this wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned the idea of me coaching. Over the last few months, when things had become… more desperate, when my hope of finding another partner began to shrivel up, she’d started dropping the possibility on me when we’d talk, not subtly or swiftly at all. Just Jasmine, you coach. Yes?

  But I still wasn’t ready for that. Coaching felt
like giving up, and… I wasn’t ready. Not yet. Not fucking yet.

  But maybe it’s time? Some nagging, whiney voice in my head whispered at the same time, making my stomach clench.

  Almost as if she could sense what was going on in my head, she made another snorting sound. “I have things to do. Practice your jumps. You aren’t committing, you are too much in your head, that’s why you have been falling. Remember seven years ago,” she said, her attention still on the ice. “Stop thinking. You know what to do.”

  I hadn’t thought she’d noticed me struggling since she was busy coaching someone else.

  But I focused on her words, remembering exactly what time period she was talking about. She was right. I had been nineteen. That had been the worst season of my singles career, back when I hadn’t had a partner and skated all by myself; that season had been the catalyst for the next three seasons that had led me down the path to pairs, to skating with a partner. I’d been in my head too much, overthought everything, and… well, if I’d made a mistake transitioning from singles, it was too late to regret it at this point.

  Life was about choices, and I had made mine.

  I nodded and swallowed back that old shame at the memory of that horrible season I still thought about when I was by myself and feeling more pitiful than usual. “That’s what I was worried about. I’m gonna go work on them. I’ll see you later, Lina,” I said to my old coach, fiddling with the bracelet on my wrist for a moment before dropping my hands and shaking them both out.

  Galina’s eyes quickly moved over my face before she dipped her chin gravely and turned her attention back to the rink, shouting something in her deeply accented voice about going into a jump too slowly.