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It goes like this: a hand, two hands, a touch. In a restaurant, in a hotel room, on a skating rink in South Korea. On the couch in Johnny’s apartment in front of the TV, Jersey Shore on mute.
*
Johnny feels old a lot of the time. He goes out on the ice some days, because he wants to and he doesn’t have to. He’ll try an axel, and more often than not he’ll fall, and wake up sore the next day. Galina isn’t there to yell at him, only Tara, only broken, arm, book tour. As if doing a book tour with a broken arm is on a par with skating a long program when every muscle in your body screams murder.
*
He gets up at six, drinks a vitamin shake, curls up on the couch with his laptop and writes until noon. It’s not any more or less glamorous than skating practice. People shout at him less. There’s not as much chance of injury. He’s putting on weight at an alarming rate.
It’s raining like the end of days, like the city is trying to drown itself. Johnny rewrites the same sentence half a dozen times and doesn't like it any more than he did before. His phone buzzes softly from between the couch cushions. He wrenches it free.
“New York, New York,” Stéphane says by way of greeting.
“What about it?” Johnny smiles.
“It is very wet, and my hotel is misérable.”
He never said he was coming, but Johnny has learned not to be surprised. Stéphane is at once forgetful and impulsive; the fact that he called at all is a miracle.
*
They were kids once, seated in a cathedralesque dining room behind little strips of cardboard with their names printed on them. Some sponsorship dinner, some tournament, Johnny doesn’t recall. Everything starts to blur together after a while, and what he remembers is every missed landing, every stumble. And he remembers this: being thirteen years old in a room full of strangers, the only person he knew this dark-haired Swiss boy, and Stéphane had taken Johnny’s hand under the table and squeezed, a silent I’m here.
They were kids and that’s all it ever was, holding hands under the table. The walls had eyes back then.
*
“You cannot express yourself if you do not know yourself,” says Stéphane. “Talk, talk, talk,” he says, and his hands make little talking Muppet faces. “But it comes not from here,” he presses one of his hands flat against Johnny’s chest, over his heart. “-- it comes from here.” He presses two fingers to Johnny’s lips.
Johnny should be used to this by now, but still he startles, shying away from the touch. When he laughs nervously, Stéphane frowns.
“I understand,” Johnny says, which isn’t entirely true, but he feels like he should say something. He's learning to deal with Stéphane all over again, as if they haven’t known each other forever. Stéphane does this thing where he touches people without the merest hint of an invitation, and he does this thing where he charms complete strangers without seemingly even trying. And now he’s doing a thing where he sounds like a self-help book, and Johnny wishes he were further off the mark.
*
The Olympic village was worse than high school. There were cliques and bullies and there was gossip, and then there was Galina, who Johnny's always suspected to be Stalin reincarnate. He never understood how she knew, but she always knew. His first impulse when Stéphane showed up at his door in the middle of the night was to slam it in his face, but Stéphane says “Wait! Please,” and produces something from behind his back.
Johnny’s eyes go wide.
“We can share,” Stéphane says, waving the chocolate muffin under Johnny’s nose, and Johnny crumbles.
They end up on Johnny’s bed, finishing off the delicious contraband between them. Johnny sighs and licks the crumbs off his fingers, looking at Stéphane draped beside him, eyes huge in the low light, tattered jeans riding low on his hips, and he carefully doesn’t consider all the things they could be doing if it weren’t for Galina.
Johnny stiffens when Stéphane scoots closer, dreading having to have the my coach doesn’t let me have sex ever talk with Stéphane, but he just drapes an arm across Johnny’s stomach and tugs him close.
*
He remembers Stéphane’s hands ghosting across his waist, testing, trying. He remembers being gripped firmly, being lifted into the air by those hands and, briefly, flying. Spinning and gliding, weightless like being underwater, and Stéphane’s hands steady and confident.
Stéphane remembers that, too. “I remember you wouldn’t let me fly,” he says when Johnny brings it up, a hint of petulance in his voice.
“I couldn’t lift you!” Johnny protests between mouthfuls of Chinese takeaway.
Stéphane dismisses him with a wave of chopsticks. “A true friend would have.” He pauses to frown at a Red Lobster commercial, and for a second it looks like he’s about to go off on another tangent about the perils of American advertising. “Perhaps I should have chosen my friends more carefully.” He glances at Johnny out of the corner of his eyes, smiling mischievously. “Evan Lysacek, maybe?”
Johnny glares at him. “Take that back.” Stéphane grins. Johnny pokes him in the ribs with his foot, then shoves with both feet, then pounces on Stéphane and tickles him until he begs for mercy.
*
“Talk, talk, talk,” Stéphane murmurs, two fingers pressed to Johnny’s lips.
There were reasons not to do this, and they mattered once. In retrospect Johnny doesn’t think it would have changed anything, really, but hindsight is 20/20. They were good reasons then, but here is now and everything has changed. Johnny plucks away Stéphane’s hand and holds it; he catches Stéphane’s gaze and holds it. Stéphane smiles, and Johnny kisses him.
It goes like this: a hand, two hands, a touch. Lips on lips and somewhere the soft pull of teeth. The TV blinking somewhere far off; a leg sliding between legs, a gasp. A strong hand on his back, a little unsteady, scrambling a little, nails digging in when Johnny works open Stéphane’s jeans. Johnny’s hands are steady and confident.
Stéphane got it wrong, he thinks. You cannot know yourself if you cannot express yourself.