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“Encore une fois,” Stéphane says, with a tiny flourish of his wrist. One more time.
He is coaching a boy who has grown glassy-eyed, his shoulders slumped. The boy does a lopsided double lutz and judders to a halt in front of Stéphane.
“It’s snowing,” the boy says.
Stéphane glances at the rink’s floor-to-ceiling windows, snow falling against the mountains like a picture postcard. The sight of it lifts his heart.
“Ah, tres beau.”
The boy makes a little sigh of resentment. Stéphane realises it’s not an observation but a prompt. It’s been snowing off and on for days, creating great drifts outside the rink. People have begun talking about what will happen “when we get cut off”. When, not if.
This boy lives an hour’s drive from the rink. His mother is hovering at the boards, manicured nails drumming.
“Three more good lutz attempts and you may go,” Stéphane says.
*
Over the next hour, the rink empties out. Stéphane’s phone beeps. A couple of people cancel, but Shoma still comes for his afternoon lesson on schedule. There is snow in his hair, but his expression is determined, his shoulders straight. He begins skating without saying hello to Stéphane. He doesn’t seem to notice there’s hardly anyone else around.
Stéphane perches on the edge of the boards, nestled deep in his coat, breathing clouds of white. It’s definitely getting colder.
Shoma goes for a quad toe-triple toe and falls. Stéphane says nothing. Shoma surges to his feet and tries again, lands it. Stéphane says nothing.
To an outside observer, it would appear Stéphane is ignoring Shoma, and Shoma is ignoring him right back. Yet Stéphane knows Shoma is aware of his eyes on him. He is skating taller because Stéphane is watching him; he is pressing deeper into the ice; he is trying trying trying. All because Stéphane is watching him.
Shoma takes off for a salchow this time. Stéphane feels a hook in his belly, pulling him upwards. Shoma jumps and, for a fraction of a second, Stéphane feels he is jumping, too. It is 2010, he is 23, and this time he will be Olympic champion. This time, he will do it.
Shoma falls, flails against the ice. Grinning, he doesn’t bother to get up.
Stéphane blinks. The connection between them breaks. He shouldn’t think this way. He shouldn’t wish for things that can never be.
He hops off the boards and glides over to Shoma. When he holds out a hand, Shoma grasps it, but only half-heartedly, leaving Stéphane to haul him to his feet. He dusts the ice from his hair, from his back. Shoma gives the tiniest of smiles.
“Encore une fois.” Stéphane touches Shoma beneath the chin, a reminder to lift, to project upwards to the people in the last row. As it happens, there is no last row, there is no one at all. They’re practically the only ones on the ice, but it doesn’t matter. “The crowd should be always on your mind,” he says.
Half an hour passes and Stéphane does lazy loops around Shoma as he skates, partly to keep warm, partly to make corrections. He calls out instructions, some of which Shoma hears and some of which Shoma pretends not to hear. More often, Stéphane drifts close and gives the instruction with his hands.
He touches his hip. He twists his shoulders. He taps his fingers against the edge of his ribcage. “See? Like this.”
Shoma nods, always, and it’s up to Stéphane to decipher which nods mean yes and which mean fuck you. Sometimes he spies a little attitude in Shoma’s eyes, hair falling across his face, a beat short of an eyeroll. Sometimes, Shoma leans in to his touch, till Stéphane can feel his solid warmth, the flutter of his breath. Then he is gone, away, skating, flying. Stéphane is on the ground and Shoma is aloft.
“Ça va vraiment mal là-bas.”
Stéphane looks up as his rink manager scurries past. He’s gesturing, speaking rapidly in French. He needs to leave, while he can still drive his car out. The snow, the storm, it’s getting bad. If Stéphane wants to stay, he will need to lock up.
Stéphane waves him off. Oui, oui, pas de souci. Out the windows of the rink, the snow is falling thick and fast. It’s obscuring the outside world, turning everything white.
“Do you want to leave?” Stéphane asks Shoma.
Shoma makes an expression like, Why?
Stéphane laughs. “It’s late.” It will be dark soon. “You can finish early.”
Shoma screws up his face. “I am” – he gestures – “here.”
Stéphane knows what he means. Shoma’s apartment is within walking distance of the rink, like Stéphane’s chalet. But Stéphane knows he means it in an intrinsic way. He is here. He is skating. This is everything. Why should he want to be elsewhere, storm or no storm?
They keep skating. For the first time, they are completely alone. The expanse of ice blurs with the snow flurries at the windows.
The overhead lights blink off, one at a time. “Hey!” Stéphane calls out, but there’s no response.
The rink manager must have done it on automatic. A couple of the lights remain on, enough to see. It creates an effect like they’re in an exhibition. Darkness and then the spotlight. Shoma strokes down the ice into the gloom and then reappears, dazzling, into the light.
The swish of blades on ice sounds louder than usual, in the quiet of the empty rink. Stéphane cues up Bolero, because it breaks the intimacy. Shoma does a full run-through, even though Stéphane can tell by the cat-like hackles that rise in his shoulders that he doesn’t want to.
“Do it on tired legs, do it when you’re exhausted,” Stéphane says, and Shoma nods. Much more of a fuck you than a yes.
Some of the choreo has slipped. When the program is over, Stéphane restarts the music. He slips in behind Shoma, who goes limp-armed, letting him manoeuvre him like a puppet.
The smell of the rink is pine-cold, but up close, Shoma smells warm, like fresh-baked bread.
Stéphane draws Shoma’s hand to his heart. His fingers cover Shoma’s. He can feel the rushing beat of Shoma’s heart as the music begins.
They are off. Stéphane dances Shoma through the program. A touch of his hip here, a tap on his thigh there. Shoma’s determination returns, his energy. That’s all Stéphane wants from him; energy, abandon.
It feels good for him, too. He lets his eyes fall closed as he strains upwards, playing to the final row. Shoma is inches from him, hot breath, a flourish as he brushes Stéphane’s arm.
In this moment, time reverses. When he was younger, this was everything. Chasing this feeling. He’d wake up in strange cities, skate to packed crowds. In those days, he fell in love easily and often, drank too much, fell too hard, got his heart broken, and got up and did it all over again.
Bolero dies, leaving behind it silence.
Stéphane opens his eyes. Here, now, in his 30s, he fears he has grown brittle. His eyes dart over to Shoma, breathing heavily at his side. He fears … He fears, full stop.
They have ended up in the dark part of the rink. Shoma is looking at him, his hand resting lightly in the crook of his elbow. Stéphane wants to brush the hair out of his eyes, because he can’t read his expression.
There’s a beep. Shoma’s smartwatch lights up.
“Coaching. Over,” Shoma says.
Stéphane forces a smile. He lets his arm fall to his side and Shoma’s hand slips away.
“Yes, lesson over. You must get home. It may be a struggle.”
“Struggle,” Shoma repeats. “Maybe.”
Stéphane wonders if Shoma misunderstood him or understood him perfectly.
Shoma looks over his shoulder in an exaggerated way. Stéphane thinks he must have seen or heard something, so he looks in the same direction. His gaze is averted when Shoma leans in close.
He inclines upwards, balanced on his toe pick. There’s a fraction of a second, their eyes meeting, when Stéphane knows it is happening and he has a chance to stop it. He doesn’t.
Shoma kisses him. His lips are cold, but his breath is hot.
The inevitability of it is thrilling. They are cars crashing. No way to avoid it.
(Yes, there is a way to avoid it, but Stéphane doesn’t.)
Shoma kisses him, and Stéphane kisses him back.
There are moments that have built up to this one. When Shoma returned to Champéry after so many months of Zoom, Stéphane hugged him and felt all the air leave his lungs.
In a restaurant, at a group dinner last month, with everyone crammed in close, talking and laughing, Shoma reached for his hand under the table. Shoma didn’t meet his eye, but his fingers grazed Stéphane’s palm like a promise. When their food came, Shoma let go.
Last week, Stéphane was weaving through the locker room after a long day. “Sho-ma,” he called, turning him into music. Shoma, wet from the shower, was completely naked. He didn’t flinch, though. He turned to meet Stéphane’s gaze. He had a towel in his hand, but he only reached up to rub at his hair. Stéphane muttered “Pardon” and stumbled away, his cheeks burning.
Later, he would remember the attitude in Shoma’s eyes. Fuck you. No. Fuck me.
Stéphane had said, on many occasions, to many people, that when Shoma’s English improved, he would be able to coach him better, explain his corrections more clearly. When Shoma’s English improved, he would be able to get inside his head. Ask him what he wanted.
That’s a lie, of course. He already knows what Shoma wants.
On the ice, Shoma makes a noise in the back of his throat and Stéphane kisses him harder. The force of it unbalances them.
As Shoma sways, he clutches a fistful of Stéphane’s coat. Stéphane inhales sharply. He feels sick with how much he wants this.
“Non,” he says.
Shoma’s grip on him slackens.
“We must not.”
There’s a flash of something in Shoma’s eyes, then Stéphane sees only lashes. His gaze drops to the ice.
“You must go home.”
They are still for a second longer. Stéphane’s fingers itch to brush Shoma’s jaw, to kiss him again.
Shoma exhales a breath, a cloud of white, and his fingers release their grip on Stéphane. He skates away, in a smooth arc, into the light at the other end of the rink.
Stéphane remains where he is. Centre-ice. Poised.
He has the insane feeling he is about to compete. The lights will flash on and the William Tell Overture will begin. There were times, during his competitive career, when he disassociated, barely coming back to himself as he crashed into the Kiss and Cry. That feeling came with the same ringing in his ears he feels now.
It was hurt that flashed in Shoma’s eyes.
On numb feet, Stéphane skates to the boards. There’s a flutter of black at the corner of his eye. Shoma has changed already, or he didn’t bother, just grabbed a jacket. There’s a howling sound as Shoma wrenches open the outside door. It bounces shut and he’s gone, without a backward glance.
Stéphane drifts to the glass door, watching his hunched figure trudge away through the snow. When Shoma disappears around a corner, Stéphane turns his attention to the light switches. The few that remain on, he methodically flips off, till he is in darkness.
It takes him a great deal of effort, but he feels nothing at all.
*
The next day, the rink is closed. Everything is closed. Stéphane gets up at 6 a.m. anyway, after a night of tossing and turning. It is cold in his chalet. He receives a flurry of text messages, all of them logistical. Suchandsuch is stuck in Geneva and soandso may not be able to get her flight. He flicks them away without reading them properly.
He doesn’t usually feel alone in Champéry. There’s always someone flying in for a visit. Skating is his family.
Today, as he watches the sun struggle up over the horizon, he wishes he lived in a city, somewhere he could lose himself in noise and traffic and people. Snow has blanketed Champéry in silence. Everything is black and white, trees stark against the blinding snow.
Yesterday’s numbness is cracking open. He wants to cry. He wants to scream.
He has hurt Shoma. Even as he has tried so hard to be the uplifting force in Shoma’s life, he has dragged him down anyway.
“Don’t fuck your coach,” one of the older skaters said, when Stéphane was barely a teenager. The skater said it in a shrugging, ironical way; don’t make the same mistake as me. Stéphane’s eyes felt huge in his head, nodding as if he understood.
Over the years, he watched it happen to his friends. The devastation. Falling in love with your coach always ends in disaster. He will not be that coach. He will not take advantage of one of his students.
The hurt Shoma feels now is better than the hurt he will feel if Stéphane lets this play out.
What about the hurt Stéphane feels? a voice whispers to him.
He tries to drown out his thoughts with classical music, played loud enough to wake the world. He wishes he had the distraction of work or friends, but his Instagram feed is full of happiness and he doesn’t want to drag anyone down with his misery.
In the kitchen, he makes an omelette. He eats it standing up. It’s rubbery in the centre and burned at the edges. How do you mess up an omelette? Too much thinking. Like in skating, too much thinking is bad for cooking. He pushes away the plate.
There’s a noise at the door.
In bare feet, he pads across the wooden floor. He’s half-convinced he imagined it. He’s half-convinced it might be—
On the step outside his door, Cashew makes another meow. Stéphane is troubled (has she been out here all night?), until he picks her up and finds her warm. The sprinkling of snowflakes on her coat is light. Peering out the door, he finds her tiny footsteps are the only blemish in the snow. They lead away from the neighbouring chalet.
Cashew has clearly been making her rounds this morning. He gives her the last of the omelette, anyway. She lingers, gambolling through the chalet and jumping onto his bed, pawing at fractured spots of sunlight. Eventually, she gets bored and slopes away, back out into the snow, onto the next house, looking for more love.
The blaring classical music is giving him a headache. He switches it off and roams the chalet like a condemned man. He feeds another log into the wood burner. At least he can be warm and miserable.
He tries to read a book, but he ends up staring at the falling snow instead.
There’s another noise at the door. A shuffling sound. Cashew again?
The tapping is light but insistent. Has Cashew learned to knock?
Stéphane knows who it is. He knows he should ignore it. He closes his eyes, breathes, for one heartbeat, two, three.
Another knock. He opens his eyes.
“Shoma!” Stéphane throws open the door and pantomimes surprise. His lips feel weird as he forces them into a smile.
Shoma is hunched against the falling snow, underdressed, in a jacket instead of a coat. No scarf, no hat, only a pair of fingerless gloves.
“Come in?” Shoma asks, shrugging.
His eyes lift to meet Stéphane’s. Stéphane feels a squirm in his stomach, a tingle in his fingertips. He steps back and opens the door wide.
“Would you like something to eat?” Stéphane asks. “I can make something … not an omelette, I am having bad experiences with omelettes today. But you must sit down.” He gestures to the sofa. “And I will make something else, a risotto, because no one can screw up a risotto …”
Stéphane’s heartbeat is loud in his ears. If he stops talking, he will have to think about the fact that Shoma has not come here for a meal, he has not come here to discuss his programs or his skating or his strategy for the Olympics.
Shoma closes the door behind him, but he does not head for the sofa.
“Snow …” Shoma gestures to the window. “How long?”
“Not long, not long. They will plough the roads by tomorrow. Then we will be free.” Laughter jumps in his throat.
“Free,” Shoma echoes.
“When I was a child, it was the opposite. You were free for as long as the snow remained and the schools were shut.”
Shoma angles his head, listening.
“We’d go skiing,” Stéphane continues, “or sledding, or skating on the river. Hoping the ice wouldn’t break.”
Shoma considers this and gives a tiny nod. Stéphane can’t resist tugging at his sleeve.
“Take off your jacket. We can sit and eat and talk.” And nothing else. We will do nothing else.
Shoma shrugs out of his jacket and hands it to Stéphane to hang up. When their fingertips brush, Shoma’s are like icicles. Stéphane captures his fingers, trapping them inside his own warm hands. He rubs vigorously and, as if by magic, two spots of pink appear in Shoma’s cheeks.
“You’re freezing,” Stéphane says.
“Not too bad.” Shoma reveals a glimmer of a smile.
They stand like that, hands clasped, for too long, too long for Stéphane to keep up the pretence that this visit is normal.
Finally, Shoma steals his hands away. Stéphane feels the loss, gulping down disappointment.
Shoma slips his phone from his pocket, warmed fingers darting across the screen.
When he holds up the phone, Stéphane can see what he’s been typing. It’s Google Translate.
We can continue until the snow melts.
The sentence has the tortured effect of a bad translation, but Shoma is looking at him intently. Willing him to understand.
“Continue?” Stéphane asks. The word comes out hoarse.
“Encore une fois,” Shoma says. His inflection is dead-on, considering how little French he speaks.
One more time.
Until the snow melts.
Shoma drops his phone back into his pocket. There is a single furrow between his eyes, like he is sure Google has failed him and Stéphane cannot understand.
The chalet feels dimmer than it did an hour ago. Stéphane has lost track of time. Is it early or late? The snow is coming down harder than ever; it’s difficult to see anything but a glut of white through the windows. The rest of the world might have disappeared for all he knows.
Without thinking, Stéphane reaches for Shoma hand. He places it over his heart, an echo of how Bolero begins. His heart is racing.
When Shoma leans up to kiss him, he feels his heart may explode.
Tomorrow, the snow ploughs will come. Tomorrow, the world will come rushing back. But, here and now, there is only Stéphane and Shoma, Shoma and Stéphane.
The end.