Chapter Text
Before
It all starts again just a few shy weeks before the comeback.
There is a media inkling on low ball stations in the greater Toronto area, a sort of spark on the speculative horizon that charges a twitter inquisition, a dozen or so interview requests by various outlets and an onslaught of Instagram comments; and all within the time span of three, short days. Are they back together? Are they returning to the circuit? Have they finally tied the knot?
She supposes, having been caught red-handed at Gadbois with a pair of ratty skates around her wrist, that this is what they get for disappearing for two years without the intention of coming back. The wannabe-pap, most likely a local newsboy, had walked right up to her and snapped a picture. Tessa hadn’t even had a chance to look up from her phone before the flash of the camera doused her in light, and all her sacred secrets with it. As soon as he had come and taken the picture, the boy was gone again; no point in chasing after him in the early morning hours. Had he come even a little later, he would have found Scott sauntering out after her with a bruised banana in his hand, sweat lining his red forehead and looking curiously at her like he so often would.
He would have caught her smiling. Smiling at Scott, at their accomplishments that day- at everything.
-
She has never known a seismic reaction to any of her sportive endeavours quite like this one; watching in real time as her previous professional and personal relationship with Scott is picked apart and fawned over. Not even their first Olympic win had polarized the press in such a way, and she routinely stumbles over the reaction they had garnered, by simply showing their faces again.
They paint the internet with their likeness; programmes are rehashed, re-cut, re-watched and commentated; and the Valse triste, oh, their very fist dabble into perfection suddenly appears on her Instagram feed, neatly accompanied by a couple of tags, homages and edits. She likes the two dozen pictures of her with that atrocious red hair and his unchiselled face on their shared tag within minutes and keeps the one where she and Scott dip into their ending pose, noses brushing, in her favourites, close to her heart.
-
They’ve spent all summer on getting reacquainted with the movement and motion of the sport that brought them together in the first place. It’s the drive of a deep edge against the pull of gravity, the loss of visuals during a twizzle or the biting cold that after all these years still tingles its way up her shins and limbs and fingers like twined ivy on a willow tree; in the simplest of terms, it is a relearning of things that used to come so innately to both of them, and though dancing with him— skating with him is still the only second nature she’s ever known, it had taken some time to fall back into it headfirst, without ever even thinking about it.
The way it works is strange. Strange because she hasn’t seen this much of him since before Sochi, strange because it doesn’t feel strange at all, even though it should. It takes all but a week of ice and stretching, a week of home and blushing hands finding their way to one another under the tablecloth before they decide on carving out a schedule for it all in the welts of deep summer, their first joined commitment to each other since the end of the 14’ quad, since China and various, unimportant PR events that had cracked her heart open more times than she can count. It’s sweating in the gym (more so for Scott, than Tessa), kicking wine to the curb, balancing the secrecy of their comeback on worry-worn shoulders and fatigued evenings where the only cure for muscle pain is a grass-fed beef, the odd knock off bonnotte potato, asparagus and copious amounts of sleep.
Then of course, it begins again. The assumptions, the knowing glances on streets in sleepy towns and diners, the endless, presumptuous media articles and gossip sites firing up their hot takes; as though it were Carmen season all over again. She hasn’t missed this part of their job one bit, and yet she buys into it freely.
The media excitement is thrilling. It makes their Korean dreams seems like less of a dream and more of a tangible reality, and what with their families less than enthused by their decision of returning to the professional circuit, a little misplaced intrigue never goes amiss.
It’s not easy coming back, let Tessa tell you that much.
They don’t want them back. Nobody wants them back. Not when old and new hopefuls alike seem to have finally found their footing in her and Scott’s absence. She carries that guilt with her for quite some time, until the competitive hunger returns like in their bygone glory days and all she knows is how not to starve; how to come back, how to win again; and while she is by no means religious, it is as the age-old story goes…
And by god, do they rise on that third day.
-
They assume and assume a grand many thing about her partner throughout the years— rambunctious as he was in the early days, and even more so about her. About the way they must’ve fallen into bed together at the first games, weak like her shins in her early twenties, like they couldn’t possibly have been in love with other people at any given time. They assume she could have still loved him from her knees up then, on limbs that could barely make it down the stairs; that the pounding in her lower legs had offset the one in his heart until the end of Vancouver, that he was all hers, every moment of the games, all the time;
wrong,
wrong,
wrong.
They talk about how they must’ve lost their silver minds to everything that fell apart in the filth of the Russian trenches: raging skating wars that could never have been won with the coming and going of the seasons alone, — and how she found her way back to him, Morse coded, atop a wall in China, through touch and tremors a year and a half later.
She’s told toned down versions of these stories before, on a sleepy radio station halfway between Ottawa and Montreal, but they never seem to listen carefully enough.
When it’s old news, she tells the world they’ve come back, she tells them they’re doing it for each other this time, that they’re a funny thing in itself, because their relationship has long since been composed of things not even they know.
She guards their lack of a secret, defends it, blocking every question like it is a last grand slam set tie break; desperately, furiously, because what they have and what is yet to be had is fragile in their hands, what they have is new and strange and old all the same; what they have is theirs (for now), and this time, they will be doing everything for each other.
When they win their first competition post come back, they assume it was only their career that rose from the ashes, assume it was easy, like riding a bike or… or… falling in love.
It wasn’t.
Forgotten is the bile in her empty stomach, climbing the lining of her trachea like the rising tide, or how her breath, ragged and rattling in her chest like milk money in jacket pockets catches on every buoyant, Ceylon-and-salt-water tasting sob. Forgotten is all the chucking in sterile toilet bowls in her cold and empty home, all the tears, the bottles of expensive, post-career gifted wine and the subsequent guilt-stricken gym visits in the dead of night— forgotten is their radio silence. The deafening, deafening radio silence.
She regrets her silence more than she will ever regret opening her life up to the prying eyes of strangers; even if they claw at all the parts of her that belong to Scott and Scott Moir alone.
She regrets it more than suffering the pain of having her legs split open on two separate occasions (she holds twin, sinewy scars on either shin to prove it), more than all the days where she mourned his loss into the arms of her mother (when he abandoned her in his teenage folly), more than the love they lost and may never find again, at least not in that same, strikingly biblical way they once had. (He was simply a man now, no longer quite so young, and no longer quite the same god she used to pray to).
She regrets, and regrets and regrets so many instances and forgotten moments, but never tasting him and his lips. Never falling and falling for him like she was endlessly stupid.
Never him.
Never Scott.
Never them.
-
They assume she must have felt almost obliged to love him through it all at the finnish Worlds press conference in 2017; like time was a pendulum and the trajectory of love as linear as never touching tangents. She was never obliged, and he never would have held it against her if she didn’t; but she loved him anyway.
Most of all when there was no hope left. (No hope at all, save for a half-filled bucket of jasmine rice that had taken up prominent residence in her barren kitchen cupboards and a forgotten teenage promise, once smeared onto a ticket stub in the back of a Greyhound on their way home to Michigan, as though it was a binding contract.)
They assume she knows what it feels like to strike her hand up his spine like a matchstick, what it feels like when he ignites underneath her fingertips, growing hot and red and even hotter beneath her touch, because she’s done it on ice, because she’s done it in the press room over a half opened jacket, caressing his fingers softly, paying no mind to the weight of the stares asking -are you, aren’t you, have you, haven’t you?-
We have done everything together; is what she wants to shout.
It’s none of your business, is what he does.
So what if she knows. And so what if she doesn’t.
She holds onto a myriad more secrets tucked under her breastbone than they could ever assume.
-
They don’t know that she falls in love with his mouth first when she is seventeen, and not because it had kissed her cheeks and eyelids so softly that it felt like the wind. Back then, his mouth would hang open, admiring something from afar and then suddenly, he’d spring into action, mouthing “together”, “now”, “always”, shapes and sinewy curves of whispered words she would have liked to trace with the pad of her thumb— they don’t know she used to fall in love with his mouth because it spoke to her. Right into her soul.
She fell in love with his mouth over and over again because it (still) gets him into trouble— and trouble meant knowing stares from the boards, wicked eyes and eyebrows that shot up in amusement. Trouble meant he took her hand, softly, tightly, as he pulled her into a side corridor to whisper about the things, she hadn’t heard Marina say.
Trouble meant his mouth drifted closer, and she always did love it when he got closer: pressing right up against her breastbone and thighs until his lips brushed across the shell of her ear.
They never used to tell each other much in these moments: a few, lost words amidst their frozen sighs and rising of their chests here and there, their fingers brushing, often catching in the fabric of her costume. She used to call them secrets because the nature of their delivery felt as intimate as if he had kissed her in the dead of night, because his voice could and would catch on itself, and he’d lose himself in her freckles every now and again.
But they’re not secrets. Not at all. Scott still says the things he whispered to her in the shadow of the stands to her all the time. “You did great.”
“Your posture was impeccable.”
“We’re going to win gold.”— she likes the last one especially now that they’re back on the ice, just like she did eight, nine years ago. Back then he mused it, a whimsical dream that had suddenly taken on the shape of two adolescent skaters— she now likes their last secret best because he pins her hands above her head just... so, against the cool concrete wall, because he buries his face in her neck and lets his mouth tell her just how they’re going to win it— not like in Sochi, Sochi’s come and gone like Jess, Cass, Ryan and Pete, but PyeongChang surely.
And when he lets go of her hands, their proximity forcing her to settle them on his shoulders where his pulse points always go crazy, he looks so convinced, so utterly, completely convinced, that she half forgets the pain it used to causes her, to stand so crushed between him, their odds and the wall.
“We’re going to win it, T.”
She loves his mouth. Loves it when it says her name, all sweetly, like she’s a piece of chocolate that he just can’t wait to eat. She loves his mouth when it presses to her forehead, and even when he puts his fingers on the seam of her jawline instead, a place where he should have always put his lips.
He crosses entire state lines of boundaries when she lets him leave without knowing about the love brimming in her chest but with acute knowledge of how he makes her squirm— his mouth on her cheek and nose a last teasing goodbye before they’ll meet again in the dark hours of night.
She watched him for a while: the strain in his shoulders and arms as he’d powered through his work out— her gaze had loitered about his lips too, for old time sake, and she had never seen anything quite so red turn her quite so pink.
She loves his mouth, she’s sure of it. So sure that, even when he’ll never love her, (not the way he used to love to love her) it all hurts infinitely less than the aching in her shins ever did.
-
Tuesday evening, the 20th of February— Gangneun, South Korea
They don’t know that he gets her after the ceremony when the lights are out, and she expects him most; because he’s predictable, because he wears his intentions on his sleeve and his heart sits in his mouth, open and red, like the blood of Adam and the apple of Eve (like her back, after he makes a spectacle of it with his hands). It’s in the way he works the strain from her calves in her bedroom post media storm, in those five sinful minutes away from the rest of the world. She still cramps up after skates, not half as bad as she used to, but the strain is still there. And so are his hands.
They don’t know that there’s a real romance about his lips that tastes faintly of over-proof rum and medijool dates as she is deliciously crushed between him and the wall of her changing room, laughing right into his mouth, his ear.
They don’t know how he counts her freckles, her freckles which are each an incandescent shade of spice which one could find in her kitchen cupboards (if she ever had time to open them). Nutmeg brown, a flirt of cinnamon and the unmistakable dusting of cumin, right there over the bridge of her nose— fragrant and flavoured and decadently divine, right there under his fingertips.
They don’t know how he climbs into her like a home later, after the milkshakes and the fries, tasting of salt and winning and winning and makes her scream his name like the god she used to pray to.
They don’t know that winning it once was life changing; but twice is… twice is really something.
They don’t know.
They don’t know anything.
But she does. Yeah. She’s known for fucking forever. And so, as it turns out, does he.