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Yuri wasn’t used to being touched.
He’d noticed it from the beginning, the reverence, almost as if Victor thought he was the lucky one. A gentle finger under Yuri’s chin and adoring blue eyes, soft fingers gliding across his hand. Flames shot up Yuri’s chest and found home in his cheeks, burning his throat and eyes and ears, fogging his mind with its smoke.
Long after he shot away from Victor, long after the current stopped flowing through their fingertips, Yuri could still feel the gentle sparks in Victor’s eyes. Something of an inferno lived within that man, so held together but never extinguished. It came alive when he was on the ice, propelling him to new heights far more than the toepick lodged on his blades.
You don’t win if you aren’t hungry for it. Yuri knew this all too well.
Even as the touches became more frequent, nothing of that flame faded. Yuri basked in the mildness of Victor’s hugs; lazy touches, tracing his shoulders, fingers whispering I am here, I am here across the small of his back. I am here .
That was what Yuri needed. Someone to be there. And when Victor slung his arm around his shoulders or hugged him from behind, Yuri melted like wax into the touch.
And there was a way that Victor looked, under the moonlight. Like an apparition, a trick of the eye, glowing a strange ethereal light. When Yuri brought it up to him, he’d chuckled, a bit of the stars twinkling across his face. He’d grazed Yuri’s cheek with his knuckles and jawline with his fingertips, looking at him as if he was the apparition.
That was the first time he’d ever had the thought, Does Victor love me?
Just like that the whispers of Victor’s fingertips made Yuri’s heart quicken, drumming his inner ear with that question: does he love me? It was the look in Victor’s eyes before Yuri took the ice, the combination of friend and coach and competitor and lover. There was something wicked in the way he studied Yuri’s starting position for his short, not as if he’d never been satisfied in Yuri’s depiction of Eros, but as if he couldn’t get enough of it.
He couldn’t help but wonder if his eyes betrayed the same wonder when Victor took the ice, in the moments before he became a coach, the early mornings practicing his own footwork as Yuri laced his skates, jumping doubles to keep his form. Yuri wondered if Victor could hear his heart pounding from across the ice as he watched him warm up his pulls in time with Yuri’s heartbeat.
Victor was tactile in his affections; he hugged frequently and peppered Yuri in soft touches. It was all Yuri could do not to yelp or flinch each time, not because he didn’t want the affection, but because he so desperately did. And his touch was so kind, the feel of his hands sturdy across Yuri’s back, the eyes behind perfect silver strands softened with...with what, exactly? Yuri was never sure what he was to Victor, the shameless flirt and jokester. There would have been the possibility he’d been kidding all along, but for those eyes.
Holding hands while they walked down the street. A chin on his shoulder as they watched television. Nimbly tucking Yuri’s hair behind his ear. Encouraging squeezes before competition. It was exchange for seeing Victor’s impeccable on-ice personas, different every time, at 5:30 each morning. It was exchange for the elegance of the spread eagle triple Axel entry Victor demonstrated time and time again, and for those effortless quads. An exchange for the mere ability to see him every day.
But the rings, they were an even exchange. The promise of a future for the unparalleled dream of now.
Yuri could perform Eros all season, but Victor knew there was another Ancient Greek word that would suit him far better: φιλαίτατος. Most beloved.