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Celestino watched carefully as Phichit tried again to land the quad loop. He had all the pieces, he had the confidence and the drive, so it was just a matter of putting it all together and getting a good takeoff, good position in the air, and a good landing all on the same jump. All he had to do was practice, and he’d get this together. He could do it, he just needed to do it.
The takeoff was the best Celestino had seen out of Phichit all week, the air position flawless… and then the landing was exactly what he needed to do. The edge placement was where it needed to be, and he didn’t have too much power on the landing and lose control. Phichit skated to a stop and turned to look at Celestino, face lit up in a beautiful smile. “Tell me you got that on camera.”
“Assuming nothing went wrong, three different angles,” Celestino confirmed. He stopped the recording and held up Phichit’s phone. “For sure, it’s on here. Where do you want it?”
“Instagram for sure! You don’t mind?” A lot of coaches would want to keep this under wraps. It was certainly no secret that Phichit was working on adding a new quad, but keeping the competition guessing about whether he had it yet or not or holding it to surprise the fans were both common practice. Even Celestino advised that for some of his skaters.
Not Phichit, though. “You’re not exactly good about keeping secrets, you know,” he teased. Phichit was of the opinion that if it wasn’t on social media, it wasn’t real. He opened up Phichit’s Instagram, raising an eyebrow when he saw the number of notifications. Even for Phichit, it was abnormally high.
Phichit came skating over and stuck his tongue out at Celestino. “I can keep a secret if it’s important enough, and you know that perfectly well.”
“And this isn’t that important.” Celestino handed the phone to Phichit. “Your notifications are blowing up, you might want to check that.”
“Uh-oh. Last time I saw numbers this high, there was that almost plausible rumor about Viktor and Yuuri divorcing.” Phichit scrolled through, face growing grimmer as he looked. “Shit. Um. About me being able to keep a secret if it’s important enough…”
Celestino took the phone Phichit was holding out, not surprised when he saw it was open to a picture of the two of them in Florence watching the sunset from a hotel balcony. “You can keep a secret. Looks to me like we’ve got a leak.”
“You seem rather calm about this,” Phichit said. “Are you actually okay, or should we call off practice early?”
“We said when this began that the one thing we absolutely were not going to let this do was affect how we approached your skating. Get back out there, it won’t change anything if we get looking into this now or an hour from now. If you can still concentrate, give the loop another couple passes. If not, do some steps or edgework drills until time’s up.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Phichit got back out on the ice, and Celestino went to check the camera he’d set up to record practice in high quality. It was fine; they should have great looks at the loop attempts to analyze and use for training. Then he checked his own phone. He had footage from Satsuki, as well as several texts that he assumed were about the leaked picture or whatever else was out there with it. Those could wait, too.
After practice, Celestino and Phichit went back to their apartment. On the way home, Phichit looked through social media. “Okay, it’s not as bad as I’d thought, Chris’s messages made it sound like a sex tape had gotten out or something.”
“Do we even have a sex tape?” Celestino had to ask. He didn’t remember one and was sure Phichit wouldn’t record him secretly, but he could easily believe that they’d thought it was a great idea when they were drunk together, and Phichit might assume he knew about it or just delete it without telling him about it.
“Not that I know of, but neither of us took that picture on the balcony, either. Someone bribes the right hotel employee to set up a camera in our room…” Phichit shook his head. “Anyway, it’s all just speculation from you and I sharing hotel rooms all the time when we could easily afford separate rooms and you moving to Thailand when I decided to go home and us living together here. They don’t even have pictures of us holding hands, let alone anything clearly romantic. Still means you’re probably going to have a lot of questions to answer, but nothing you couldn’t lie your way out of.”
“Is that the plan, then? I lie my way out of this?” He’d do it if that’s what he and Phichit decided together, but it wasn’t a decision he was going to make on my own.
Phichit hesitated. “I know that’s probably the easiest for you, but… we know there’s a leak out there. This time they didn’t have anything too juicy, but I don’t know.”
“Next time we might not get so lucky, and if we’ve lied to get out of this one, it makes it look that much worse for us.” Phichit nodded. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. Right now, we can say that we kept it secret because we didn’t want it to become a distraction, not because we felt we were doing anything wrong. It’s true enough, anyway.”
“Yeah. But if we lie, that goes out the window. And…” Phichit looked up from his phone, and Celestino wanted to pull the car over to hug him. “If we lie here, I think I would start to feel like we were doing something wrong, you know? If we’re not, then why keep hiding now that it’s a distraction and your reputation is going to take the hit anyway? Because no matter what, there will always be people who believe this.”
“Agreed. As soon as we get home, I’ll check in and see who I need to talk to, you figure out who you need to talk to, and then we’ll come up with a statement to put on social media.” Celestino reached over and took Phichit’s hand. “I know what I said earlier about not minding you putting the quad loop up on Instagram, but it might be a good idea to wait a week or so. So it doesn’t look like you trying to bury this.”