Chapter Text
Scott can’t keep his hands to himself. He can’t help the handsy notion when he pick-pockets a sliver of her skin as they stroke on Olympic ice, nor the way his eyes linger, darkly, deeply, on all the parts of Tessa Jane that are nary covered by black Adidas sweats and the préambule of frostbite all along the seam of her berry-coulis tasting lips. He keeps preventatively stuffing them into his pocket, or worse, starts gnawing at his right thumb’s fingernail, like the pre-competition jitters have swallowed him again.
Of all the days she could have picked to make him feel like he’s about to combust right then and there, Tessa chooses the god forsaken early-hours of Wednesday morning, post gold medal win; the one where he’s sleep deprived, red-eyed, mouthing his disbelief into her neck every ten minutes, like he can’t quite grasp the concept, like bed-side prayer into the shell of her ear will make it any more real than the feel of precious metal weighing down his fist.
They have approximately one collective hour of alone time that whole day, and most of that hour was either spent catching up on precious sleep or kissing her knuckles and cheeks.
He commits them to memory the way he did eight years ago in Vancouver; just as happy, but not yet as wise, the feel of her skin burned into every ridge and crater in the landscape of his lips.
Like after Sochi, with no less enthusiasm than now. But he hadn’t quite belonged to her then. And silver, let Scott tell you, tastes as bitter as you would dare imagine.
-
It was hard enough rink side, to detangle himself from her; all red sequins and flush with a scarlet-winner’s blush. He wanted nothing more than to run his hands along her new-moon waistline, crash his teeth upon the shores of her thighs and whisper all the red-blooded chants of a victor into her skin. Poetry en-masse, on the swell of her ass… Something like that, yeah.
Scott had practically turned her back into a spectacle after their music had stopped, the yards and yards of her ivory-pale skin covered in his hand prints and indentures. Or the curve of her jaw, now looking quaint under a layer of make-up, bruised by his lips in the shadows of the catacombs before and after they had taken the ice
Spoils of war , she said, crushed between him and the wall of her changing room, laughing right into his mouth, his ear. Like a god.
A young god with dancer’s thighs and hanches de dieu— a symphony of muscles working under skin he was most ardently acquainted with, due to the nature of their free skate. He wishes now, pressed up and slotted against every inch of her, that he did not know them quite so intimately.
-
In the moment, Scott had chalked it down to the sheer unimaginable amount of Olympic-induced adrenaline coursing through his veins— he was slick with it, had been touching her arm, the bow of her hip, anything amenable and decent-enough to still tether along the lines of their imaginary boundaries since they touched down in Korea, a scant three weeks ago.
But it wasn’t just the full-throttle-anticipation, had never been just that between Tessa and him. There was always more there, something that was once written on a piece of paper, and then got lost among the filing cabinet, only to be found a decade later and for him to read it anew, with different eyes.
The cameras had certainly caught every inch of his gossamer affection, be it on D-day or any moment leading into it. They replayed it constantly and cut it up, a thousand times over, so that every inch and angle of their flirtation with history-making was put on display.
In some versions Scott is hugging her, baseless fire and pride printed on him like a billboard poster. Others just show their stares, the secret smiles, a thousand unspoken words knotted into the simple arch of her cardinal-bitten lips, while she bewitches him from across the rink.
It means nothing, there on the big screen. Not when he has the real thing looking at him in the early hours on a nondescript Tuesday in Korea.
But what he does see in the disproportionately big and larger than life screen versions of themselves, is not a tale they hadn’t not hand crafted. It was simply other, perhaps plucked out of their usual context.
In all of them, Scott thinks, they fail to catch their relief.
In all of them, he sees the end of twenty years of hard work.
-
Wednesday morning, the 21 of February— Gangneun, South Korea
He’s had one too many, standing in the brightly lit oval entryway of an overcrowded McDonald’s. He knows this because he’s swaying, like daisies in the wind. The irony is as deafening as the cacophony of laughter to his right.
It’s well past three AM, he’s dog tired and buzzed but the great majority of Canada house, including Scott and Tessa, had decided they were all drunk enough to crave a slice of grease and some paper dry, too-salty fries, in the name of celebration.
It had rained proverbial and literal gold for the red and white and maple leaf— ice dance and team event medals of the highest order, and many, many more that deserved praise and glory.
And though can’t-keep-his-hands-to-himself Scott would rather have shot himself in the foot with a bow and arrow than spend another minute, trying and failing at keeping his distance from Tessa, he goes with the motions, lets himself get dragged along by Eric Radford and Patrick Chan, both pushing him out the door and into the cold at either side of the expanse of his shoulders.
He thinks of her, the Mahler dress and everything in between the last eight years and this exact moment while they usher him. He’s not quite sure how they made it this far. But Scott is thankful.
He thinks of her while they queue, while she’s but a shadow behind the pooling curls of Kaitlin’s blonde hair, a ghost popping in and out of view, bobbing along the ocean’s surface like a life line he can’t quite get to, while Chan surges into the worst drunk-karaoke version of Oh Canada he’s ever heard in the name of patriotism,
while,
while,
while.
They lace hands once she manages to cut her way toward him, quick fire steps and iron ice determination that make her wind through couplets of people. He catches her eye. She smiles, a fraction, a promise, eyes open and bright green like she’s not exhausted and exalted.
I know
He wipes the sleep from her eyes with a half-frozen thumb, guiding the light in those eyes over his own face so that he may revel in the unassuming reverence of her presence. For all the moments this exposure won’t allow him to have, she does exceptional things to him with nothing but her fluttering lashes.
He aches to touch her face. And It’s incredibly stupid, he knows. She’s right there beneath his fingertips.
But he aches all the same.
The hand holding business a short-lived pleasure, over all too soon with the roar of delight as their collective order arrives.
I know
She reaches for some sticky, sugary ice-cream concoction in favour of his hand and the moment’s over; a lifetime of longing and wrong time-right place realisations but a hand print memory forever burned into the side of his prefrontal cortex.
I know
And though he wants to reach for her, wants to wrap his arms around her waist and breathe her in, it is enough to know that even now, with ten people pushed between them, Tessa is only looking at him.
He cannot be trusted to keep his hands to himself. So, he pockets them again. Solemnly, softly, before Tessa tempts him otherwise.