Sara comes to Mila's hotel room in the middle of the night. They're in Sochi, but she's never felt farther from home. It's half past one in the morning and Mila's nerves are still jangling with the thrill of competition when her phone buzzes with a new text message. She nearly falls from her chair, startled by the noise, and then laughs hard enough to make her sore muscles ache anew. She thinks that if she looks into the mirror, she'll see her hair standing at attention, frizzed into a shapeless red cloud by the electricity that flows through her skates from the ice.
When she opens the door, Sara is standing in the hallway wearing pink pajamas and a pink blush across her cheeks. "I couldn't sleep," she says.
"Me neither." It feels like a secret between them – that they can wear bronze and silver and even gold, but something as mundane as sleep eludes them.
Mila uses the room's tiny coffee maker to heat water for tea. She laughs at Sara's expression. "It's something I read once," she explains. "It said that people boil their panties in the kettle sometimes, so I never use it."
Sara gags. "Really?"
"No idea, but ever since I read that, any tea I make with it tastes like-"
"No! Oh my god, stop talking," Sara squeaks, batting at Mila's shoulder like she can swat the words from the air like flies. "Ew! I mean- ew."
They drink their tea, which tastes a little like stale coffee but not at all like a stranger's underwear, sharing the single chair at the single desk. The bed is behind them; it's a queen, but it doesn't have space for Mila and Sara and the flutter in Mila's stomach as Sara giggles and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.
"Do you think we would have met if we were different people?" Sara asks. "Like, if we weren't skaters."
"Duh, the universe wouldn't dare try anything else," Mila replies immediately. "Even if I was-"
"- an American living in some tiny country town?"
"Exactly. We'd know each other since we were little, because the town would be so small that everyone knows each other. You'd start ballet and get popular and I'd try to join the junior football team, but they wouldn't let me even though I could take down any of the boys without breaking a sweat." Mila grins as Sara sticks out her tongue in mock outrage. "You'd- you'd babysit me when my parents had date night at the only restaurant for hours around."
Sara wrinkles her nose. "Babysit? I'm not that much older than you."
"Limited options?" Mila shrugs.
"I'd babysit your younger brother," Sara decides. "It would be a two-person job."
"My brother?"
"Yuri," says Sara, and she laughs at Mila's expression. "He is, don't even argue with me. Anyway, we'd team up to stop him from burning down the house, and when he got old enough that he just sulked in his room, we'd watch movies together."
"When he didn't need a babysitter anymore, maybe we wouldn't talk for a while," Mila continues. "But then you'd get a job at the gas station, and we'd talk every time I came in to buy gum. I'd buy a lot of gum."
"You'd drive a rusty old pickup truck that broke down every other week," Sara adds. "But you'd always offer to give me a ride home from work, and I'd always take you up on it, because otherwise Mickey would wait outside to walk me home. So every day, you'd come by on your way home from school. We'd spend a lot of time on the side of the road waiting for the tow truck, and we'd complain, but actually, neither of us would mind because it gave us time to talk."
"I'd tell you about my boyfriends," Mila says ruefully. "Mostly about breaking up with them. You'd wonder if I'd start to cycle through them again once I'd dated all the guys and most of the girls."
"I'd think that none of them were right for you," corrects Sara. "I wouldn't be brave enough to say so, but I'd admire how easily you opened your heart, and how you never let it turn you bitter. I'd tell you about my crush, and I'd wish I was as brave as you were, brave enough to ask them out. But I never would."
Their voices grow softer and thick with sleep until at last, Sara yawns and rubs her eyes. As she leaves, she gives Mila a small, secret smile. Their other lives, filled with fields and corn and broken-down pickup trucks, hover between them. The spell isn't broken yet.
"Goodnight," Sara whispers.
"Sleep well."
#
They talk to each other in snatched moments during practice and stolen hours of sleep. They discuss skating and music, Mila's relationships and Sara's quiet crush – but mostly, they tell stories. On the rare times they find themselves in the same city, they make tea in the hotel's coffee maker or curl up in a corner of the lobby and invent little worlds they call home until the conversation fades into silence.
Sometimes, they can't forget that the world will always rank one of them above the other, second third fourth, though they switch places so often that neither Mila nor Sara can remember who's currently on top. Their stories carry an undercurrent of tension as the main characters walk the line between allies and rivals.
Mila always thinks that this will be worst when they meet during competition, but in fact, the opposite is true. When they're alone together, they cast away the camera-ready smiles and wash off the jittery confidence painted over their makeup.
"He's a jerk," Sara says. She pouts. "He didn't seem like a jerk."
Mila thinks about Seung-gil. Silently, she disagrees. Out loud, she replies, "Lots of guys seem decent until they open their mouths."
"Oh well," sighs Sara. She shakes the disappointment off like it's nothing more than dust. "He probably has sex like he skates, anyway. Terrible PCS, I just know it."
She mimes a blank-faced thrust and Mila laughs so hard it's nothing more than airless wheezing until she chokes on her own spit and collapses to the bed, red-faced and gasping. Part of Mila wishes that she could stop and just breathe, because her chest is starting to ache and there are tears streaking down her cheeks – she looks like a hot mess, but the kind of hot that's two blocks and a bus away from anything in the vicinity of attractive. The other part of her, the bigger part, is watching Sara's expression through blurry eyes. She's blushing, just a little, and smirking, just a little, the way she always does when she makes a joke that catches Mila off balance.
Her smile drops and Mila's laughter falls too. The ache in her lungs changes into something sharper and harder and wanting. She wants Sara to smile again.
"I'll murder him for you if you promise to give me an alibi," Mila offers, rooting through her emotional pockets and coming up empty-handed.
Sara's lips quirk, but she doesn't seem to be able to shake off the darkness that coats her mood. "No," she says finally, "it's not him. It's everyone else."
"Gossip." Mila spits it out like a curse, because it is one – a curse that deserves its own curse. Competitions are the perfect breeding ground for rumors and hearsay, a bubbling cauldron of tension and anxiety and contention that come out as bursts of petty drama. They were all the center of it at one time or another, but personal experience is enough to engender grudges but not, apparently, empathy. "Offer for murder is still open."
"It's just-" Sara's hands flutter through the air. "Someone's going to talk about it, and then Mickey will throw a tantrum because he thinks he gets a say, and then it'll end up on the internet and- ugh." She rolls her eyes. They're wet. Sara's tears usually stem from frustration or anger. Mila looks away. "That whole mess. I almost wish I was dating someone just so everyone would stop talking about who I'm not dating. Maybe I should make up a story. A secret lover."
"Why a secret lover?" asks Mila. She can feel the strands of a story beginning to twist together. They're subtle, as fragile as spiderwebs, but they always are to start out. "You could put on a show. That would really keep them busy."
"Like celebrities." Sara giggles. "If we were movie stars, we'd have to ward off unwanted suitors somehow.
"Who knows how well that would actually work," Mila grumbles, "but it would give the paparazzi more juice for the tabloids than prying into, like, our shopping lists."
"I'd ask you to be my girlfriend at a huge event, like the Oscars." Sara's face is bright, and Mila's cheeks must be incandescent. "You'd act surprised, but of course this would all be according to plan."
"We'd hold hands the rest of the night to make sure all the cameras got a few good shots," she manages to reply. Flashbulbs are going off in her mind; she can feel the sleek silk of a dress that cost more than a year's rent wrapped around her hips, the pinch of shoes that were made to be art instead of footwear. She can feel the warmth of Sara's fingers twined around her own. Mila swallows, trying to clear the lump from her throat with a gulp of imaginary champagne. "Of course, we'd thank each other in our acceptance speeches."
"That wouldn't be it, though. You'd be my plus one for every party, and Mickey would have to get used to it."
"We'd go on the best dates." Mila can't stop herself from picturing quiet restaurants, packed Broadway theaters, sparkling beaches. "Nothing would be too grand for my fake girlfriend."
"You'd spoil me," Sara says. Her smile is back at full force, dreamy and tinged with depths that Mila doesn't dare explore. "No one would dare bother us because they'd all see that we were the perfect couple."
"I'd call you cutesy pet names until you couldn't keep a straight face."
"Loser laughs first?" Sara grins as a spark of competition ignites. "You could try, mi bella. We Italians have many endearments, mi cara. You'd have to work very hard, amorina, zuccherina, farfallina-"
"Did you just call me pasta?" It's hard to talk around the giggles that are beginning to bubble up. "Sara, Sarochka, Saranulochka. You underestimate me, solnyshka, my mouseling, little berry…"
They start laughing at the same moment. Mila tries to claim victory anyway, but all she can get out is a low wheeze that sets them both off again.
This is her favorite story, Mila decides.
"I never want to fake-date anyone else," Sara says once she can speak, and Mila nods. It hurts, suddenly, their glittering fairytale romance.
It's still her favorite story.
