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One: Olympic Village
Being here is way more than she’d imagined. Just, more. More everything. All the early morning practices and skipping time with friends for time in the gym paid off. Nile Freeman is an Olympian. Her inner six year old is screaming in delight for the whole march into the stadium during the Opening Ceremonies.
She’s got a few days to settle in before her first event. Sightseeing is off the table thanks to all the pandemic restrictions, and rightly so, but it’s still a bummer. So she makes the most of her time in the Olympic Village, dusts off her Spanish and French, and gets to work making new friends from all over the world.
The rumors about the Olympic hookup scene turn out to be extremely true. Nile spends a medal-worthy few hours with a French hockey player whose shy smiles in the lounge earlier that night had not prepared her for the shamelessly hungry way he manhandles her. She gets his number, thinks maybe she’ll text him for another hookup after she’s done with her events.
The practice ice feels amazing. She knows it’s not like magic ice or whatever, but still, it’s Olympic ice! And she’s skating on it! Fuck yes!
It’s weird, being there without her family. Her sport doesn’t draw the big crowds like figure skating or hockey or snowboarding do, but the pandemic restrictions on spectators still causes a noticeable emptiness in the stands for the speed skating events. It’s even more noticeable how it’s rattling some of the other athletes.
It’s ok though. Nile’s got this. She’s got her pre-race music to keep her company like always and she knows her mom and brother are screaming for her at whatever the hell o’clock back in Chicago and whatever happens on this ice her mom will hug her breathless in just a few weeks and tell her she’s proud of her.
Nile’s happy with her performance in her first event. Solid technique throughout. She doesn’t medal, but that’s what she expected: the plan was always for this to be a warmup for her best event later in the week.
Only, there’s one unexpected thing about her first event. A booming voice is cheering her name from a completely different part of the rink than the small gaggle of Team USA coaches and support staff and fellow athletes. She looks around as she glides to the boards and catches sight of a certain French hockey player grinning at her in the stands.
Up until now her experience with male hockey players has mostly shown them to be ice-destroying equipment hogs. Hockey players of all genders are terrible to the ice of course, and every rink seems to have at least one mean lesbian, but women and nonbinary people are usually less of a pain in the ass around the gym. She’s even dated a few not-men hockey players in her time.
This dude, though. She doesn’t know how someone so large manages to also be so soft.
Sébastien “call me Booker,” who blushes when she calls him by his given name with proper French inflection, just keeps surprising her.
He’s got a match to get ready for soon after her event, he explains a little breathlessly before asking her out on a date to the athletes’ village dining hall that night. He looks so cute standing there wide-eyed outside the locker rooms that she leans up to give him a lingering kiss on the cheek.
Their dinner date has her forgetting for whole minutes at a time that she’s in the fucking Olympic Village, which would be a hell of a thing on its own. It’s even more of a statement considering how many times they’re interrupted by a hello from one of the many new friends Nile’s made in these first few days in Beijing.
Sébastien is so genuine in his interest in her. He asks such thoughtful questions and he gets these adorable crinkles around his eyes as he reacts to what she says. It takes a little more encouragement for him to open up, but not in an annoying way, and by the time they’re finally leaving the dining hall they’ve exchanged coming-out stories and embarrassing childhood moments and hopes for their lives after their respective athletic careers come to an end.
Not that their night ends after dinner. Nile got an hour-long nap in after doing all her post-race press, but Sébastien was on the ice for all 63 minutes of his hard-won match with what was apparently a pretty dramatic overtime and he still has energy left to be guilelessly charming when he asks if he can walk her back to her room. Still has energy left to blow her back out.
They meet up again for lunch the next day, then Nile goes into pre-race laser focus. This is it. This is what she’s spent years literally busting her ass for. She’s got 48 hours to optimize every moment so she can give her very best to her sport.
Nile wakes up on race day to a shower of texts from her mom and brother, her ex turned platonic bestie Andy, her coach, about a dozen teammates and random new Olympics friends — damn, it feels good. As she’s scrolling through, reading and replying to all the cheering messages, she gets another alert: New text from contact Mr. The Book.
It’s a video from the man she’s starting to think of as her hockey player. He’s backlit by the early morning sun, sleep-rumpled and sexy and crinkling his eyes so warmly at her through the camera. “Good luck today, Nile. Not that you need it of course. I wish I could be there to cheer you on in person but I’ll be cheering in my heart under my ten kilos of gear. You’ve got this.”
And she does, doesn’t she? She’s got this race. Today is her day. And she’s starting to think maybe she’s got Sébastien too. Maybe this thing between them will keep growing after the Closing Ceremonies here in Beijing. He plays for the Capitals — Chicago isn’t far to fly from DC.
Anyway. Today is race day. Eyes on the prize.
"Nile!" comes a shout from her left amid the hubbub of the closing-ceremonies party, and she turns to see Joe al-Kaysani.
They met at a Team USA happy hour back home in Chicago where she learned that he's a damn delight and something of a local celebrity she'd been completely oblivious to. She'd said to him at the time, "No offense, but if it's not speed skating or the Bulls I don't care." Tonight she grins and waves him over.
He scoops her up in a hug big and dramatic enough to rival a pairs figure skating lift, and when he lets her go, he moves on to give Sébastien the same treatment.
"This asshole," Joe says to her about Booker, as he called him, because apparently they’re friends already, "is about to join me on the team that needs a new name."
Nile's breath catches. When she glances at Sébastien, she finds his eyes have gone impossibly wide.
Joe is biting down a smirk. Meddling bastard.
“I— Nile, I was going to tell you,” Sébastien says. “It was only finalized today, I swear.”
God, what a sweetheart. He looks so worried, and she’s so taken with him that all she can seem to do is smile like an idiot. A maybe a little bit lovesick idiot.
“My agent’s been in talks about the trade for months, but it felt presumptuous to tell you,” he’s saying, and he still looks so worried, Nile can’t stand it. She reels him in for a kiss.
“Sébastien,” she says against his lips, “would you like a private tour of my hometown?”
Oh, his smile. She’s definitely falling in love.
When they’ve got their immediate need to be all over each other out of their systems, Joe is waiting patiently, looking absolutely delighted.
“And how did things go with the biathlon guy with the murder eyes?” Nile asks, to which Joe responds with a waggle of his eyebrows.
Joe has apparently been having his own whirlwind Olympic romance, and after he shares a much more dramatic story than what Nile would consider a meet-cute, soft grin on his face the whole time, their conversation moves to other things. A hilarious recounting of the USA v France match, Olympic Village gossip, dozens of “omg did you see” comments about events they’ve caught in other sports in their off hours.
There’s friendly NHL-rivalry nonsense because of course there is, and Nile eats up this glimpse at the boisterous side of her hockey player.
Joe insists that there has to be at least one photo of “Booker cuddling the Stanley Cup like a teddy bear,” which Sébastien refuses to dignify with a response.
He does talk a little about how cool it was to be part of the winning team that year, and he talks some about what it’s like playing alongside one of the greatest hockey players of all time. “A solid captain and the person I can thank for what I’m sure will be the first line of my obituary, but Jesus Christ am I looking forward to no longer sharing a locker room with that obnoxious Putin fanboy,” Sébastien says with such a look of affront on his face that Nile laughs herself breathless.
Nile learns that Joe and his good pal Booker met each other through an athletes’ consortium pressuring pro team owners and schools to change racist team names. She’s a little embarrassed she hadn’t known about it, let alone gotten involved, but unlike some people she doesn’t get paid for her sport. She got two sponsorships this season and she stands to get a few more now that she’s an Olympic gold medalist, but she’ll never make anywhere near an NHL salary.
“Now that the Washington Football Team is the Commanders,” Joe says with a snarky gesture, “maybe it’ll start a trend, we’ll end up with some militaristic nonsense like the Corporals.”
“Hey, my dad was a Corporal once upon a time.” Nile’s tone is light but the set of her shoulders brooks no argument. “The US military’s problematic but NCOs are badass, y’all watch your mouths.”
Joe winks at her in this soft way that has her thinking he might become a very good friend. “Yes, ma’am.”
Sébastien, who’s heard just a little bit so far about her dad and how losing him shaped her life, takes her hand and squeezes it tight.
Chicago Tribune
Road to the Olympics 2026: Athletes Profiles
Nile Freeman
...When asked about her favorite Olympic memories, Freeman breaks into an ice-melting smile. "Winning gold, of course," she acknowledges before speeding into a tale worthy of a Hollywood romcom. She met her husband, French hockey player and fellow Olympian Sébastien le Livre, in the athletes' village in Beijing in 2022 and he proposed to her the night of the Opening Ceremonies in Paris in 2024. When le Livre was traded from the Washington Capitals to the Chicago Hockey Team ahead of the 2022-23 season, the two celebrated their reunion in Freeman's hometown with ice dancing lessons. Freeman reports wearing her helmet so they could try some of the riskier lifts and spins.
When asked who's faster, Freeman's smile turns sharp as her skates. "He's half a foot taller than me and I'm still faster."
Two: Lizzo World Tour
Nile Freeman has landed the job of her wildest dreams. Dressing Lizzo for the Met Gala was already a life-changing experience, but now not only is she Lizzo’s full-time personal stylist but she gets to be head of costume for her world tour.
She works her ass off in the months leading up to the tour. Long hours of visioning meetings with Lizzo and the creative team, prototyping, fittings for the dancers, shopping for a reliable production house once the design is finalized, all between her regular styling work and sketching ideas for what in another year or two will become her first couture line.
Most of the meetings are video calls, though she’s with Lizzo for some of them by virtue of shopping trips or event prep. She hires out most of the fitting work and only ends up doing fittings herself with the three dancers who live in Chicagoland. The most hands-on she gets before the tour kickoff is the two-day marathon that is lighting testing.
No point in making over a hundred bespoke garments out of expensive fabrics and trims if they don’t sparkle just right all the way to the cheap seats. She’s stabbed the hell out of her fingers and organized the ticktock down to the minute to make sure the final fabric selections coordinate perfectly with the lighting and set design.
Earlier in the tour prep she’d had a passing thought or two about the head lighting engineer’s cute smile. Turns out Booker “I’m the lighting guy not the booking agent” le Livre’s smile is just as cute in person — and he’s a goddamn brick wall.
She does not have time to notice things like that right now. She’s very busy finalizing a costume line that just might become iconic, a future emblem of the decade, pieces sought after by collectors and museums. Ok, maybe she has time for one sex dream. As a treat before she gets back to work.
Nile is backstage for every costume change the first night and it is otherworldly to stand there and bear witness to the art she’s brought to life. She’s hired support staff for each leg of the tour. She doesn’t have to be there in person for every minute of every show. Maybe someday she’ll be so accomplished that she’ll be jaded, that she’ll want to duck out of this sort of thing the moment her responsibility is done. For now, she can’t imagine choosing to be anywhere else.
Hanging around backstage as the tour wears on brings new life to her design ideas. She goes through a sketchbook a week and her mind is still bursting from all the inspiration around her. For one thing, Lizzo’s fans show up to General Admission like it’s a red carpet. She couldn’t have arranged for a more perfect way to keep her fingers on the pulse of what’s trending among regular people and not just big-name designers, editors, and the influencer class.
Other sources of inspiration may or may not include a certain lighting engineer.
She has a few flings on the road, most of them do, and for years to come she’ll be savoring the memory of her night with Layla, the hotel chef in Cairo. But her eyes keep coming back to the big white guy with the soft-looking beard and the gentle-wry sense of humor.
One evening when things are quiet between final sound check and doors, she’s getting settled in the break area with coffee and her latest sketchbook when she notices Booker a few tables away. His back is to her and she catches the Facetime layout on his tablet screen before she looks away.
He’s talking in quiet French that she does her best to ignore because privacy, and she tries to focus on the page in front of her. Her resolve disappears when a young voice blares out from the tablet. “Who’s that?” the child says in French. “She’s pretty! Is she your girlfriend?”
Booker scrambles to reconnect his earbuds — his wired earbuds. Gearheads are usually so particular about their, well, gear, and she finds it’s endearing as hell to watch this accomplished professional struggle with a 3.5 mm jack like he’s a teenager and it’s 2007.
She catches him mutter, “In my dreams,” before he clears his throat and addresses, “My sons.” Whatever he says to them (his kids! he’s a dad?!) she does her very best not to listen in on. Because she is a professional and her colleague is having a private conversation.
Quynh comes through to refill her water bottle and distracts Nile for a few minutes before she has to get back to her warmup. Others come and go as well, and a few of their colleagues sit down at the scattered tables. But when Booker finishes his conversation and takes out his earbuds it feels like they’re the only two people in the room.
Nile Freeman is braver than any US Marine. She’s done actual hard shit in her life. She can professionally test the waters with her hot coworker.
“I didn’t know you had kids, Booker!” she says brightly. “How old are they?”
He turns around to face her and, oh, he is blushing.
“I’m sorry about the noise earlier,” he says, and she waves her hand in a no-big-deal gesture. “Philippe is 13 and Jean Pierre is 8. Their mom has primary custody but I spend as much time with them as I can when I’m not on the road.”
Damn, he did not waste time telling her he’s divorced.
“I’m sure they miss you,” she says. She can’t help saying it. Not a day goes by that she doesn’t miss her dad. Now’s not the time though, so she gives Booker a smile and says, “Come join me, tell me about them?”
For a moment he looks stunned — it’s flattering, she’s not gonna lie — and then his lips tug up in one of those extra-cute little crooked smiles. He comes over and sits across from her with the kind of unassuming confidence that’s rare in this industry, and they end up talking for nearly half an hour, about his kids and the tour and all kinds of things.
He’s hot, sure, she knew that already. Now that she’s had a real conversation with him she’s realizing she likes him. Maybe this is something worth exploring.
Showtime’s approaching and before she knows it he’s got to leave. They’re both a little flustered-awkward saying goodbye, and Booker may be about a decade older than her but Nile’s experienced enough to know this kind of awkward is a good sign.
She takes a deep breath, lets it out, lifts her chin. “Booker,” she calls, and he turns back around to see what she wants to add. “If you’d like, ask me out sometime?” she says. In French. Which she speaks.
The face journey he goes on as that sinks in is absolutely priceless.
Three: Art Therapy
This gig is a pretty sweet deal. The hours are predictable to the minute, she never gets called in on her day off, her boss is demanding but fair, she always gets paid on time. It beats that ever popular art school side hustle, nude modeling, and it sure as shit beats waitressing.
Being the office manager for a pediatric art therapy practice has a major downside, though. Nile has to work with case files documenting some really brutal shit happening to children.
She’s got a routine for after she reads something especially rough, a few minutes in the break room with a cup of tea and a special prayer. And she’s got a more extensive routine for when she gets home after a long day.
But it’s not constant trauma or anything — to be honest, most of what she sees at work is hopeful as hell. She’s been working there over a year now, long enough for evidence of real healing to pile up all around her. She sees kids starting to lose that heartbreaking caginess behind their eyes, starting to shrug off the phantom monkeys weighing down their shoulders.
There’s this kid who’s been a client since before she started who today for the very first time asked her for a treat from the Special Snacks Cabinet. “Hello, ma’am, may I please have a box of raisins with Batman on it?” he’d said. His eyes glowed like he’d just climbed Mount Everest.
Probably of equal clinical significance is today’s other first: the kid’s father made more than a split-second of eye contact with her.
She’s not a creep, so she does her best not to look any longer than normal when some of the parents are hot. But she’s only human, she’s got eyes, and damn. Not that she’d ever do anything about it. This kid is in art therapy after surviving a car accident that killed his mom and then an ugly custody battle between his soft-spoken dad and seemingly cartoon-villain maternal grandparents. Jesus.
A month or two later, Nile looks up from the café table covered in her history of African sculpture homework and sees Batman Raisins Jean Pierre’s dad looking for a place to sit.
His eyes land on her and she gives him what she hopes is a non-creepy inviting smile.
“Hi,” she says when he walks over. “You’re welcome to join me if you want, just let me—” move my shit out of the way she thinks, but doesn’t quite manage to either say out loud or, like, actually do. If she tries to do anything at all right now she’s liable to spill coffee all over the wall of DILF smiling softly down at her.
“Hi,” he says, and then he takes a sip of his full-to-the-brim coffee before sitting down opposite her. The coffee mug looks so cozy in his big hands — right, he’s still holding it because she needs to move her shit.
“I’m Nile,” she says to the spray of archaeology maps and expensive color print-outs of sculpture photography all over the table.
“Nice to meet you, Nile,” he says, and God, that voice. She hasn’t been a complete hermit during grad school, right? She remembers how to flirt. She can be chill and normal about a gorgeous person paying attention to her. Right? She does at least remember how to move papers into a neat pile, and he takes another sip of his coffee before setting it down in the space she’d made on the table. “I’m Sébastien but my friends call me Booker.”
She bursts out laughing. “Your friends call you Booker, Monsieur le Livre?”
To her enormous relief, he laughs as well. “My friends have terrible taste in puns,” he says gamely. Then he gets a thoughtful little crinkle between his eyebrows and adds, “If that even counts as a pun?”
Huh. Does it count as a pun?
They share another laugh and just like that, the ice is broken.
For years to come, people will ask her what they talked about that afternoon, the day she and her husband first got to know each other. She can’t for the life of her remember. What she’ll never forget is how the butterflies in her stomach settled into this wonderfully strong feeling of cozy warm good.
Oh and of course, she’ll never forget the Batman raisins.
Four: Model UN
He’s an ancient 22 years old to her 19, but they’re both sophomores, and that makes them both the babies at this collegiate model UN summit full of accomplished juniors and seniors about to go on to illustrious careers at places like the not-model UN.
"You got held back a few times?" she says, teasing.
"Not quite,” he tells her with this adorable little smile. “My ex and I had a baby when we were 18, so it took a few years before I had time for college."
"Damn, ok, daddy."
He goes beet red.
The sex is good but the conversation is amazing, and after the summit they stay in touch. Within six months they’ve got to be honest — they're not just model UN buddies who text, they're in a relationship. They manage see each other in person for a week or two every summer, and at the annual summit of course, but that's it. By the time they've both graduated it feels like they've been long-distance for a century.
Nile’s always been a language nerd. She got to go to college without having to do a stint in the Marines first thanks to a scholarship for budding interpreters, and by her sophomore year she was fluent in English, Spanish, French, and ASL and she was falling in love with Arabic. Now she’s fluent in a few varieties of Arabic and intermediate in Romanian, Ukrainian, and Hungarian, and she’s eyeing Hausa and Yoruba next.
She graduates with a job offer from an international development organization that’s kinda bullshit, but she’ll get paid to continue picking up new languages, the benefits are good, and they’re offering to pay her moving expenses to any of a dozen major cities in Europe. She figures she’ll work there for a year or two, get the lay of the land, then move on to something a little less colonialist.
If her model UN buddy turns out to not be her soulmate — or worse, if it turns out he’s definitely her soulmate but also a terrible roommate — well, she’s not moving just for him, now is she? This is a great opportunity, the kind of job she dreamed of when she was little. Her mom is so damn proud.
She’s totally moving to Paris for him, though. Nile would never dream of asking Sébastien to move away from his kid, at least not this early in Jean Pierre’s life.
Three years later, she comes home with big news. The funding came through! She and Yusuf and Quynh are starting their language access project! Sébastien bakes her homemade pain au chocolat to celebrate and asks if she’d like a party in her honor, maybe something in a few months so her mom and brother could make the trip?
Jean Pierre is ten years old now. Practically a grownup! He insists that him and Nile reading together every night before bed isn’t a bedtime story, it’s not, he’s not a baby. They’re learning Korean together, it’s different!
Nile picks up the chapter book that Jean Pierre had dropped as he fell asleep, gives him a kiss on the forehead, and shuts his bedroom door with a quiet click. It’s funny, she thinks, how grown she is at just 25. Founding her own organization. Falling in love with this tiny person. Moving past every bit of her wariness about becoming a stepmom.
And Sébastien has not been hiding that ring box nearly as well as he thinks.
Five: Falling Inn Love
Nile Freeman is a corporate badass. She's only 26 and with the right stepping stone she could easily be on the VP track at a Fortune 500 company by the time she's 30. Too bad her boss treats her like an intern. The asshole doesn't even know which of her ideas to steal — it's like he picks at random when to listen to her.
Nile's been preparing for today's meeting for weeks, and Stephen and his cohort of bro-workers don't even show up. Fuck this shit.
Dizzy and Jay come over to listen to Nile vent, they make a sizeable dent in a box of wine, and it's cathartic but it leaves Nile no closer to knowing what she's gonna do about her disaster of a career. She has one more glass of wine when her friends leave, and that's when she finds herself opening an email about some contest to win a bed and breakfast in gorgeous coastal Tunisia.
She wins the contest. So she quits her job and moves half-way across the world. What's the worst that could happen?
Well, the strap of her duffel bag snaps a few minutes into what turns out to be a two-hour walk from town to the piece of free real estate she won from a stranger on the internet. So that's not great.
At least there's not a damn soul around to see her carrying her luggage like it's a teddy bear.
Wait, no, there's one soul there to see her embarrassment. Some white guy in a pickup truck is pulling over.
Oh no. He's hot.
He offers her a ride, and Nile's so tired and the guy's giving off major himbo vibes and seriously how did she miscalculate how long this walk would be, so she accepts. It's a quick ride and they don't really talk beyond where she's headed and thank you.
She doesn't really think about it until a few days later when she's woken up in the middle of the night by, uh, the pipes exploding? What the fuck?
The damage is a headache but not a complete disaster from what she can tell. She's toweling herself down after shutting off the water main when she remembers: the pipes bursting had woken her up from none other than a sex dream featuring that guy who gave her a ride on her first day here.
A few hours later she reaches out to Joe and Nicky, the sweet couple who run the café and her first friends in town, to ask for a plumber recommendation. And wouldn’t you know, guess who they recommend.
He’d introduced himself as Sébastien — how was she to know that the Booker her new friends raved about was the same guy? At least she’s a little more put together for her first meeting with a newly hired contractor than she’d been on the side of the road.
The near-silent rescue chauffeur of that first day is in fact a capable plumber, and it turns out he’s also knowledgeable about window repair and masonry and gardening and a bunch more things her b&b needs. She feels plenty confident in her ability to repaint her new business’s guest rooms on her own, but by the time they’ve fixed the place up enough that it’s ready for cosmetic changes she finds she doesn’t want to stop spending all this time with him. The work will go faster with another set of hands anyway.
And then they find a stack of old-timey love letters behind a loose baseboard.
It’s romantic, ok? Sitting together after a long day of working side by side and reading aloud from hundred-year-old love letters is romantic as hell.
“I wouldn’t want to leave behind vaccines or equal rights or anything else they didn’t have in the bad old days — well, maybe I would want to leave behind Instagram,” he says. Then he takes her hand, cups her fingers like he’s going to kiss her knuckles. “But I bet you, Mademoiselle, would look quite genteel indeed in period costume.”
Her first instinct is to shove playfully at his shoulder, make a joke of it. They barely know each other. He can’t really mean the way he’s looking at her, can he? But he’s still holding her hand.
“You’re just saying that ‘cause I’m paying you for all this handyman work.”
She grins at him but her stomach is churning with butterflies.
“I’m not here just because you’re paying me,” he says. And then he kisses her hand.
The next morning he shows her how to reinforce the structural integrity of a bed frame.
Months later, at her b&b’s grand opening, she’s braced for Dizzy and Jay to tease her nonstop for becoming the real-life heroine of an R-rated romcom. But then she hears her mom talking to Joe and Nicky.
“It’s so good to meet y’all,” her mom is saying. “Nile told me you’ve made her feel very welcome here, and that you introduced her to the young man who’s so talented with pipe work.”
Plus One: Canon (Divergence)
Nile bleeds to death.
She wakes up again.
There’s not a scratch on her.
Dizzy keeps looking at her like she's a thing. Jay's at least glad she's alive, but when word comes that Nile's getting transferred to Landstuhl, Jay doesn't do shit about it.
It's not until a few hours into the the flight to Germany that someone looks Nile in the eye, really looks at her, for the very first time since she died.
"Do you recognize me?" the man says quietly.
Oh shit, she does. He's one of the four strangers she dreamed when she died. One of the four strangers she dreamed of again not ten minutes ago, bringing her fitful USMC cargo flight nap to an abrupt end.
She realizes her mouth is hanging open in shock when he gives her this sad little half-smile like he knows exactly how fucked up this all is.
He says, "I'm getting you out of here before they can lock you away," and motions for her to follow him.
Well, she doesn't have a better option, now does she. Might as well follow this guy. Might as well go AWOL by jumping out of a plane.