Tumblr support denied all my 4 appeals regarding the Mature Label on my account. Honestly, I'm not even surprised anymore but the disappointment is there ngl.
I've spent so much time building a community here only for these b*ts and this app's AI system to slap my account with a Mature Label and refuse to have an actual HUMAN review my appeals.
I always abided by their Terms and Conditions, and I'm very disappointed and annoyed by this. Either way, I decided to officially MOVE to another account.
My new account is xxfrozenpearlsxx if anyone wants to follow! I'll love to have everyone there~🌸 It's going to take a while to repost everything, but I decided to give Tumblr a second chance with that account.
Thank you all who followed this account and everyone who showed support by commenting/liking and reposting and I loved interacting with all of you so so much!💗 Unfortunately, this account came to an end.
i’m not sure if you were posting any tag lists on your other account, but tumblr seems to be deleting blogs that post tag lists because they think it’s spam. maybe that’s what happened?
oh really? yeah... i used my taglist for the recent two fics...
that is so fucking bullshit man... what the fuck. i just hope they'll respond and give me the acc back
we can't find your new account, did you deactivatee???? How will I enjoy your bar and I wanted to talk about ice skater Rafayel to youuuuu 😭😭😭 you replied & I was about to yap moreeee
— raf’s 🍰
THEY NUKED MY ACCOUNT 😭😭
i don't even know what happened??? i am in another country rn on vacation and just woke up to people dming me about my acc being gone😭
didn't receive anything about it! no warning, no email, NOTHING. i am soooo fucking pissed off rn....
i emailed tumblr support twice and hopefully they'll respond. if not... sigh, i'll either come back to this account (which is still labeled as mature bcs tumblr support didn't help me after 5 appeals) or i will make another account...
Synopsis: You find yourself unable to deny Rafayel's invitation to accompany him as his plus-one at a social gala, and when the last night in Jakarta concludes, this thing between you becomes more complicated than it ever was.
Content warnings: Angst, hurt/comfort, kind of unresolved feelings, forced proximity, emotional repression, trauma triggers, reconciliation, denial of feelings, mutual pining, sexual tension, making out, realization of feelings, explicit sexual content, consensual sex, kind of guilty sex at first, slight escapism (in sex), fingering, praise and slight dirty talk, creampie, insecurity, emotional sex.
Word count: 8.5k
the tags will change with each chapter. next chapter will change the rating to E.
The roar of the crowd is a wall of sound that vibrates through the floorboards of the backstage area. You stand just inside the shadows of the wing, as promised, a fixed point in the chaotic swirl of stagehands and camera operators.
Out on the ice, under the blazing lights, he is so different to the man pacing the dressing room an hour ago. All that restlessness and anxiety has been forged into something breathtaking. He moves with a liquid, predatory grace, each jump a defiant eruption of power, each spin a vortex of controlled emotion. The oceanic music swells, and he is its master, a storm given human form.
Watching him now, you are suddenly, violently thrown back to the stale cold of the White Dove Arena months ago. The night you sat anonymously in the stands, nursing an old wound, watching a legend. You had seen the artistry then, yes, but through a filter of bitterness. You had seen the prodigy who left you behind.
Now, you see through a different lens.
You see the hollowness he confessed to, the deep well of loneliness that fuels such poignant expression. You see the mask of the untouchable artist, and you know the cracks in it intimately—the frustration in Kyoto, the fear in the stands, the vulnerable boy who needed a hand to hold. You see the cost of every seemingly effortless flight, a cost you now understand in your very bones.
He launches into his final combination, a sequence so difficult it steals the breath from the audience. He lands the last jump, not with a sigh of blades but with a sharp definitive screech that echoes your own heartbeat. He isn’t just performing for the thousand of people. He is speaking in a language of strain and beauty only the two of you, in all this screaming crowd, can fully decipher.
As he strikes his final pose, chest heaving, arms outstretched to the darkened ceiling, his head turns. Not to the judges or to the adoring crowd. His gaze, sharp and searching, cuts through the glare of the spotlights and finds you in the shadows.
Your heart contracts, a painful sweet squeeze. It is just a second. A fleeting connection in the thunderous applause. But in that second, the ice, the crowd, the years of silence, all of it falls away. There is only the recognition, raw and electric, passing between you.
Then the spell breaks. He bows, the superstar’s polite smile back in place, and is swallowed by a wave of flower-bearing attendants and his team. You turn away, your own duties calling. The post-show logistics are a blur of coordinating media, securing equipment, confirming the next day’s travel. You are deep in conversation with the venue’s head of security when you see him across the hall.
He is still in his performance clothes, the black fabric damp with sweat, a towel draped around his neck. His hair is tousled, his cheeks flushed from exertion. Thomas and Elara are at his elbows, speaking rapidly about the sponsor gala starting in forty minutes.
His eyes, however, are locked on you. He looks... jumpy. Agitated in a way that has nothing to do with the post-adrenaline crash of the show and everything to do with you standing ten feet away, talking to someone else.
He extricates himself from his team with a murmured word and crosses the space in a few strides.
“You’re coming.” The statement lands between you like a gauntlet.
You finish your sentence with the security head and turn to him fully. “To the gala? Of course. I’m the liaison. I’ll be there to ensure everything runs smoothly—”
“No.” His voice goes low and intense. “Not as my staff. As my plus-one.”
You blink, the professional calm you have clung to fracturing under his gaze.
“Rafayel, that’s... I can’t. And I don’t have anything to wear to something like that, anyway. My suit is for coordinating, not for...” You gesture vaguely at the idea of champagne and caviar.
“That’s been taken care of.”
Before you can process the meaning of his words, his hand is at the small of your back, a firm guiding pressure steering you away from the curious glances of the staff and back toward his private dressing room.
“What are you doing?!” You hiss it, but you don’t dig your heels in. His touch on your smaller back runs a shiver up your spine, and you’re too aware of it.
He pushes the door open, ushers you inside the now-familiar space, and closes it, leaning against it. The sudden privacy is overwhelming. The room still holds the scent of his cologne and whatever tension held between you before the show.
“I had a feeling...” His gaze is unwavering, locked on yours. “…That if I left it to chance, you’d find a reason to be anywhere but at my side tonight. So I removed the reasons.”
He nods toward a garment bag hanging from a hook on the far wall, pristine and out of place among the skate equipment and scattered towels.
Your mouth goes dry. He has... planned this. Bought a dress for you. The implications are a tidal wave. This isn’t a last-minute impulse. It is a declaration, and an intentional one at that, which makes your heart pick up the pace in an unfamiliar way.
“You can’t just—” The protest stalls in your throat.
“I can.” His voice softens just a fraction. The intensity in his eyes shifts into something more pleading, more vulnerable. “For once, please... don’t coordinate. Don’t liaise. Just—be there with me.”
He pushes off from the door and walks to the garment bag, unzipping it with a slow deliberate pull.
The dress inside is not what you expected. It isn’t the dramatic sequined affair a star might choose for a date. It is a deep twilight blue, simple in its elegant lines, the fabric falling in a soft liquid shimmer. It is understated. Beautiful. It looks like something you would actually choose.
He turns to you with the dress in his hands, a silent question in his eyes that is more terrifying than any demand. The space between you hums with the weight of his searching gaze from the ice, of every unspoken thing that has piled up since that night at the White Dove. In the quietness of the room, with the future hanging on your answer, all your objections die in your throat. The only thing left is the terrifying, thrilling truth.
He wants you there, not as part of his world but as a part of him. And a part of you, the part that had sighed on the ice and cried in his arms, wants that too.
You stare at the dress in his hands, the twilight blue fabric seeming to shimmer even in the dull light of the dressing room. The offer feels more intimate than the kiss, more vulnerable than the embrace. It is a bridge, and he is waiting on the other side, his expression unreadable but his eyes holding a question that makes your breath catch.
Flustered, you avert your gaze, focusing on a scuff mark on the floor before forcing yourself to look back at him. Wordlessly, you step forward and take the hanger from his hands, your fingers brushing his. The touch is a spark.
“Okay.” The agreement comes barely audible.
His intense gaze doesn’t waver. You see it travel over your face, lingering on your lips before dropping to the column of your throat, where you know your pulse is visibly hammering. You swallow, a nervous habit he had always teased you for, and his eyes track the movement with a focus that makes your skin feel too tight.
Before you can muster another word—a protest, a question, anything—he steps back. He gives a curt, almost-businesslike nod, turns, and is out the door, leaving you alone with the rustle of the garment bag and the roaring of your own heart in your ears.
You sag against the vanity, releasing a shuddering sigh of relief so potent it leaves you lightheaded. The silence is a reprieve, but it is quickly filled by a swarm of nerves and confusion.
Why this? Why now?
The gala is work. Your presence is mandated. To ask you as his plus-one, it is public. It is personal. It is a line crossed in front of everyone, and you have a terrifying thrilling guess as to why.
The dress fits as if it had been made for you. The twilight blue drapes perfectly, elegant and understated, making you feel like a version of yourself you had forgotten. You avoid your own eyes in the mirror.
The black car is idling at the private exit. You slip into the back, and there he is.
He has changed into a suit that is a shade darker than midnight blue, the cut impeccable. He looks like a prince from a shadowy fairy tale. The partition behind the driver is already up, sealing you into a world of soft leather and tense anticipation.
“You look...” His voice is hushed, but doesn’t finish. He seems to decide actions are better.
He reaches across the space between the seats as the car pulls away, his movements tentative, and takes your hand in his. His fingers lace with yours when you don’t pull away, warm and sure. The simple contact sends a jolt through you, making you more flustered than any grand gesture could.
The confusion and nervousness spill out, because you can’t help but address them.
“Why did you ask me?” The words blurt too loud in the quiet cabin. “As a plus-one, I mean. You know I had to be there anyway.”
The hurt that flickers across his face is swift but deep. He looks down at your joined hands, his thumb stroking your knuckles.
“Do you?” His gaze lifts back to yours, vulnerable and raw. “Would you rather be there as staff? In the background, making sure the canapés are timed? Or… would you rather not be by my side at all?”
You stare at him, your heartbeat a frantic drum against your ribs. Your palm grows damp in his, but he doesn’t let go. You have no answer. The truth is a tangled mess in your chest.
His eyes drop to your mouth again, and this time you notice the intent instantly. A hot blush creeps up your neck. You tear your gaze away, turning to look blindly out the tinted window.
“It’s... it’s hot in here.” You mumble it, fumbling for the window button.
A soft low chuckle escapes him. He doesn’t call you out on the obvious lie. Instead, he leans forward slightly and speaks to the driver. “A little air, please.”
The partition slides down an inch before sliding shut again, granting you privacy once more.
He doesn’t retreat back to his side. He stays close, the heat of his body a new presence in your personal space. Then, with a gentleness that belies the intensity in his eyes, he reaches up. Two fingers press softly under your chin, tilting your face back toward him.
You have no choice but to meet his gaze.
“You are…” His voice is a velvet rumble, his eyes tracing your features as if memorizing them. “…So devastatingly beautiful it’s unfair. Especially when you’re flustered. It’s my favorite sight.”
The compliment, so specific and tenderly teasing, steals the air from your lungs. Your lips part on a silent gasp.
He doesn’t kiss them. He leans in, but instead of his lips on yours, you feel the soft brush of his lips against the blush heating your cheekbone. A featherlight touch. Then, his mouth grazes the sensitive line of your jaw, a whisper of contact that makes you shiver.
He draws back just enough to look at you again, his gaze heavy-lidded and focused entirely on your mouth. You can feel the warmth of his breath mingling with yours.
“I’ve wanted you here all along.” The whisper is meant for the infinitesimal space between you. “Not near me. Here.”
And then his lips are on yours. This kiss isn’t desperate or angry or a product of shattered emotions. It is deliberate. Slow. A deep searching pressure that holds the echo of his compliment and the weight of his confession. He kisses you as if there’s no rush and no intention to rush this, as if the gala, the past, the future, mean nothing compared to this single point of connection.
When he finally pulls back, it is only by a fraction, his lips hovering over yours, still sharing the same air.
You are frozen, suspended in the warmth and the shock of it, your mind, your whole world reduced to the feel of his mouth and the pounding of your own heart.
“Why did you...” You whisper it against his lips, the words forming in the haze before your thoughts can catch up. “...kiss me?”
You are achingly aware of the moving car, the partition, the fact you can’t just run this time. He couldn’t have chased you in that hotel corridor, but here, you are trapped together in the best and worst way.
He chuckles softly, the sound a warm vibration you feel through his chest where your hand still rests. His fingers brush a strand of hair back from your temple, tucking it gently behind your ear. The touch is so tender, so domestic, it sends a tingling shiver straight down your spine.
“D’you not want me to?” His voice is a low thrum in the intimate space.
You can’t answer. The denial won’t form. He seems to know it, his thumb stroking the damp curve of your lower lip where his kiss had just been, a silent confirmation of his victory.
Your fingers curl slightly against the fine fabric of his suit jacket. You are leaning into him before you consciously decide to move, drawn by a gravity that has been pulling at you for months. Your heart is a wild roaring thing in your ears, your gaze locked on his mouth, that familiar sharp curve now softened and parted.
“I don’t know.” The breath comes helpless and honest.
It is all the permission he needs, or maybe it is your permission to yourself. You close the last inch between you, your lips meeting his again. This time, you initiate it. A slow tentative press that he immediately deepens, his hand settling firmly on your waist, anchoring you as the car sways gently. He stabilizes you, but it feels like he is the only solid thing in a spinning world.
The kiss is not hungry, but it is deep. Slow, achingly so, as if you had all the time in the world hidden in this rolling sanctuary. It is a kiss of exploration, of tasting the truth you had both been avoiding. It draws the air from your lungs and colors your cheeks a matching feverish pink.
It is the wrong place, the wrong time, on the way to a public event, in the back of a car, but every rational thought dissolves under the languid passionate sweep of his mouth over yours.
You melt. There is no other word for it. The tension that had held your spine rigid, that guarded your heart, simply liquefies under the patient and consuming heat of him. The boy who left, the girl who was left, they blur into ghosts. The abandonment, the fear, the years of misunderstanding, they lose their sharp edges, softened in the warm, shared darkness behind your closed eyelids.
A quiet, desperate gasp escapes you into his mouth, a sound of pure sensation. He swallows it, his own breath hitching in response, telling you he is just as unmoored, just as affected.
He pulls back just enough to speak, his lips brushing yours with each whispered word.
“Still hot?” His voice is breathy and laden with a tease that is utterly devastating.
You are caught off guard, a new shiver wracking you as his hand, which had been firm on your waist, now travels lightly slowly up the bare line of your spine.
The touch is incendiary.
“Rafayel...” The weak protest ends in a sigh as he dips his head, bypassing your lips to press a soft, open-mouthed kiss to the frantic pulse at the base of your throat.
Suddenly, you are drowning in him, in the oceanic note of his perfume and sweat scent of his skin, in the overwhelming warmth of his body cradling yours, in the exquisite torture of his lips charting a path along your collarbone. Your head falls back of its own accord, giving him better access, a silent surrender you fight even as you make it.
It feels too good. His lips on your skin, the slight scrape of his teeth, the soothing pass of his tongue. It is a sweetness you had forgotten could exist, a pleasure of the body so intense it threatens to short-circuit every defense you have left against him. You try to hold onto a shred of will, a memory of why this is dangerous, but it is like trying to grasp smoke.
In the back of the moving car, with the city lights streaking past the tinted windows, the only real things are his mouth, his hands, and the terrifying glorious feeling of finally, finally letting go.
The world outside the car has ceased to exist. You are lost in a silent, breathless universe of your own making, where the only truths are the heat of his skin through his suit and the damp tender ache of your lips meetinf again and again.
The two sharp raps on the partition are a distant alien sound. It takes a long moment for the meaning to penetrate the haze. You break apart just enough to stare at each other, your faces mere inches apart. His eyes, usually so sharp and controlled, are now dark, unfocused pools of pure want. You know yours mirror them perfectly. Your lips feel swollen, sensitive, and the frantic rhythm of your heart seems to shake your entire body.
He blinks slowly, as if swimming up from deep water. A soft almost-disbelieving breath escapes him. Wordlessly, his hands come up, his thumbs gently wiping at the corners of your mouth where his kisses had likely smudged your lipstick. His touch is agonizingly tender, a stark contrast to the passion of moments before. He smooths the silk of your dress over your hips, his fingers lingering for a heartbeat, then carefully straightens the strap that had slipped down your shoulder.
You sit motionless, letting him tend to you, your own hands trembling too much to be of use. You can’t ignore the small, utterly captivated smile that plays on his kiss-reddened lips. It isn’t smug. It is... awed.
It flusters you beyond measure, sending a fresh wave of heat through you, and you have to look away, focusing on the pattern of the leather seat.
With monumental effort, you compose yourself. You draw a shaky breath, squaring your shoulders, even as your legs feel like water and a deep restless warmth pools low in your stomach. You are hot, bothered, and thoroughly kissed, and you have to walk into a room full of cameras and celebrities, acting like none of this has happened.
The car door opens. The cold night air hits your heated skin like a slap. Then his hand is there, presenting itself for you to take. You place your hand in his, and when you step out, you somehow match his posture, chin up, expression smoothing into one of poised neutrality.
Together, you are a vision. The legendary skater and his stunning, enigmatic companion. The very picture of glamorous, professional calm.
No one could have guessed that minutes before, you had been melting against each other in the darkness of his car.
Throughout the glittering gala, Rafayel is nothing short of possessive in his presence. He rarely leaves your side. His touches are minimal but deliberate, a guiding hand on the small of your back to steer you through the crowd, his fingers briefly brushing yours as he hands you a champagne flute, his shoulder solid against yours as you stand listening to a patron drone on about art investments. Each point of contact is a live wire, a secret reminder of what had transpired in the car, and it sets your heartbeat kicking wildly in your chest.
You are relieved, though. His nearness is a grounding force in the swirling chaos of your mind. Your head is a mess of conflicting impulses, the old wound, the new longing, the shocking intimacy of his mouth on your throat, and the terrifying yet wonderful fact that he seems as affected as you are.
You are painfully aware of his every movement. And apparently, so is he. You catch him watching you, that same little sheepish smirk tugging at his lips when you do something unconsciously intimate, like leaning closer to hear him over the music, or nodding intently as he explains a technical skating point to a fascinated guest. He sees your awareness, and it delights him. It is a silent, shared joke in a room full of strangers, a game of glances and barely-there smiles that makes your heart stutter.
The gala is a blur of crystal chandeliers and chatter, but the only conversation that matters is the one you are not having. The one about what this is, and what comes next. It hangs between you, palpable as the tension in the air before a storm. But for now, amidst the clinking glasses and the blinding flash of cameras, there is only this. The warmth of him beside you, the memory of his slow kisses, and the silent screaming agreement that for tonight, talking can wait.
Feeling, however, is unavoidable.
The gala ends in a final crescendo of applause and farewells. The return to the hotel is a silent journey, but the air in the car is no longer charged with tentative exploration. It is thick with heavy awareness, like the quiet after a summer storm. You stare out the window, seeing nothing, every nerve ending still humming from the memory of his hands, his mouth, the whispered heat between you.
Walking through the hushed hotel corridors feels surreal. Your heels click on marble, the sound too loud in the silence stretching between you. At your door, you both stop. The moment of parting hovers, immense and awkward.
“Well.” Your voice comes faint. “Goodnight, Rafayel.”
He doesn’t move from his spot, make sno attempt to leave. He looks at you, his expression in the dim hallway light unreadable, but his eyes hold yours with an intensity that allows no escape.
“It’s our last night in Jakarta.” His voice is even, as if you might have forgotten. “The tour... concludes tomorrow.”
The finality of it wraps around your throat. Tomorrow, the contract ends. Tomorrow, the chaos that had forced you together will dissolve. Tomorrow, he will fly to who-knows-where for his next spectacle, and you will return to your life before him.
“I know.” The whisper barely escapes your lips.
He takes a small step closer, not touching you yet, but the space between you becomes intimate, charged with all the unsaid things the gala had temporarily muffled.
“We still need to talk.”
A spike of panic, sharp and familiar, shoots through you. Talking means definitions. Talking means revisiting the wound with new information. Talking can ruin the fragile, beautiful haze you are still floating in.
“It’s late.” You deflect, fumbling for your key card.
His hand closes over yours on the card, stilling your movement. Not forceful, but firm. Warm. “Please.”
That single word, so softly spoken, undoes you more than any demand. You look up at him, and in his face, you see the same exhaustion, the same wary hope, the same fear of the coming silence that echoes in your own chest. He is just Rafayel right now, standing at your door, asking you not to shut him out.
With a sigh that comes from the very depths of your weariness, you turn and open the door. You don’t invite him in. You simply walk inside, leaving it open behind you.
He follows, closing the door with a soft click. You stand in the middle of the room, your back to him, hugging yourself.
“What happened in the car...” You begin, then falter.
The silence after the unfinished words stretches, thin and brittle. You can’t bear to look at him, to see the confirmation of your own feelings in his eyes.
Instead, you walk to the floor-to-ceiling window, the glittering lights of Jakarta at night spreading out before you like a map of a foreign land. Your fingers find the simple necklace at your throat, the cool metal a focal point as you fidget with the charm.
You hear him move, following your path, a quiet shadow drawn to your space. He stops behind you, close enough that the heat of his body is a palpable presence against your back, but not yet touching.
“A lot.” You finally murmur it, your breath fogging the glass. “We have a lot to talk about.”
You hear a soft hum of acknowledgement rumble in his chest, a vibration you feel in the air between you.
“Do you want to?” His voice is low and impossibly close to your ear. “Talk about everything? Right now?”
As he speaks, you feel the lightest brush of his fingers against the nape of your neck, tracing the line of the necklace’s chain. Then, with a deftness that steals your breath, his fingertips find the clasp. There is a tiny definitive click. The necklace loosens, and he gathers it away, the metal whispering against your skin as he draws it free.
A full-body shiver races down your spine. You swallow, the sound loud in the quiet room, but you don’t stop him.
“I’m just... tired.” The excuse comes feeble even to your own ears.
His response is a murmur against the shell of your ear, his lips so close they brush the sensitive skin with each syllable.
“Tired of talking? Or tired of me?” A pause filled with the pounding of your heart. “Or just tired of trying to push down everything you feel when I’m near you?”
You sigh, a shaky release of air, and let your eyes fall closed. His fingers, now free of the necklace, brush your hair aside, tucking it gently over one shoulder, exposing the length of your neck. At the same time, his other hand lifts, his touch tentative at first, then settling with certainty around your waist, his palm spreading possessively over your belly.
You can’t help it. A fraction of your weight leans back into him, seeking the solid warmth of his chest. A soft, approving hum vibrates through him, and he rewards the slight surrender by pressing his lips to the newly bared skin just below your ear, a kiss so soft it is almost a sigh.
“I know…” He breathes it against your damp skin, his voice thick with an emotion you can’t name. “…You may never forgive me for before. You may never trust me again. You have every right.” His hand flexes gently on your stomach, pulling you infinitesimally closer. “But I’m sorry for this, too. For... for needing to be this close to you right now. So if you truly want to talk... tell me now. Before I...”
He doesn’t finish, but you already know where he’s going with this.
His meaning unfolds in the heat of his body, in the slight yet insistent pressure of his hips against the curve of your back. You feel the undeniable ridge of his arousal pressing against your ass through the layers of fabric. A weak, trembling gasp escapes you as your legs seem to lose their strength. Your free hand comes up, bracing against the cool glass of the window for support as you lean forward slightly, a silent invitation.
He follows the movement without hesitation, his body curving over yours, caging you gently between the cold window and the heat of him. His chest presses against your back, his hips snug against your ass, the proof of his desire a shocking electric brand where it settles at your back.
Talk? The word dissolves in the feverish haze of your mind. Words are the weapons of the past, the tools that had built walls and carved wounds. What throbs between you now is a raw, wordless need. It isn’t about forgiveness or the future. It is about the desperate truth that after years of cold silence, you are both starving for this connection, for this proof of life in each other’s arms.
Arousal, hot and slick, pools low in your belly, a treacherous aching pulse that echoes between your thighs. You feel the damp evidence of it staining your underwear, a secret he can’t see but you are certain he can sense in the way you tremble against him.
He isn’t far behind. A rough groan escapes him as he nuzzles into your neck, his lips and the barest scrape of teeth mapping a path along your shoulder.
“This dress,” He whispers it between kisses, each word a hot puff of air that makes you shiver. “is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen you in. And all I wanna do is get it off you.”
His hand, which had been splayed on your belly, begins a slow, maddening ascent. It slides over the silken fabric, up the plane of your ribs, until his palm cups the full weight of your breast through the dress. He squeezes gently at first, then with a firmer kneading pressure that draws a low involuntary moan from your throat.
The sound seems to ignite him. His hips jerk against you in a sharp, reflexive thrust, grinding his erection into the softness of your backside. A ragged curse breathes against your skin.
Driven by your response, he uses his lips and teeth to gently tug the thin strap of your dress down your shoulder. The fabric gives way, slipping down your arm. His roaming hand follows, sliding down from your breast to gather the material at your waist. With agonizing slowness, he drags both the dress and the fine layer beneath it down, baring your torso.
The cold air of the room kisses your exposed skin, pebbling your flesh and tightening your nipple into a stiff peak. A sharp gasp is torn from you at the sudden sensation, the combination of the chill in the roon, the vulnerability of the moment, and the intense heat of his gaze on your naked back.
“So damn perfect.” He rasps it, his voice wrecked. His hand returns, not to the fabric but to your bare skin. His palm is searing as it covers your breast again, this time skin to skin. His thumb swipes over your taut nipple a few times before he pinches it lightly, rolling the sensitive bud between his fingers.
Pleasure, bright and shocking, arcs through you, making you arch your back and press your ass more firmly against his confined cock. The world narrows to the cold glass under your palm, the hot and demanding pressure of his arousal behind you, the exquisite friction of his touch on your breast. Words are a forgotten language. There is only this hunger, this frantic communion of bodies seeking to bridge, at least for tonight, the vast and wounded distance between you.
You are trapped between the cold unyielding glass and the scorching heat of his body, every nerve alight. His fingers toy with your nipple, a casual pressure that has your whole body trembling. You bite down on your lip to stifle a moan, your forehead resting against the windowpane, your vision blurring the city lights into streaks of gold and white.
Behind you, he buckles his hips in slow, relentless thrusts against the curve of your ass, the hard ridge of his erection a blunt promising pressure, clearly needing some sort of release. Despite yourself, your spine arches, pressing back into him, seeking more of this new feeling.
“We...” You gasp, the words fragmented, breathless. “We really... shouldn’t...”
His mouth is at your ear, his lips trailing hot wet kisses down the sensitive cord of your neck. He sucks your earlobe between his teeth, a gentle tug that sends a violent shiver through you and has you slick your underwear even more.
“Why not?” His voice goes a dark rasp that vibrates against your skin. “We’re not kids anymore. Not chasing gold medals or each other’s shadows on the ice.” He presses a firmer claiming kiss to the juncture of your neck and shoulder. “I have different dreams about you now. Vivid ones. Involving this window... This dress on the floor... You, naked and trembling against me, needing more of my touch, until I have you cum and pleased and cling to me like I cling to you.”
His words are a match to the gasoline already pooling in your veins. The last shreds of resistance, born of old hurt and fear, disintegrate. The need is too profound, too physical. It is a hunger that has festered for a decade, and it demands to be fed.
A low shuddering breath leaves you. “Fuck it.” The whisper comes out and the surrender is complete. “Just for tonight, fuck it.”
The words fuck it are a key turning in a lock you had kept sealed for a decade. They unleash something primal inside you, a matching puzzle piece to the lust in his own veins.
You grab his face, your fingers pressing into the sharp angles of his jaw, and pull his mouth back to yours, kissing him with a ferocity that is all raw need and zero finesse. It is a claiming, a desperate rasp against his lips, because he got you to a point where you need him, even though it hurts to admit. Your body is screaming to be touched and consumed by his warmth, his desire.
“Stop talking.” You breathe it into him, the command muffled by the crush of his mouth.
He groans, a dark approving sound that vibrates from his chest into yours as he grabs your jaw, deepening the kiss. You feel his smirk against your lips, a flash of arrogant triumph that only makes the heat inside you burn brighter. His hand, which had been teasing the inside of your thigh, finally moves.
His fingers brush the soaked fabric of your panties, a soft and torturous stroke upward that makes your hips jerk. You are so wet it is embarrassing, the slickness undeniable even through the fabric, your hole clenching as it gushes more slick at the feeling of his fingers probbing.
“F-Fuck.” The curse leaving his lips has your hips jerking over his fingers. His eyes, when you manage to open yours, are nearly black, his pupils swallowing the blue and pink. His cheeks are flushed as deeply as yours feel. With a sharp tug, he pulls the delicate lace aside, baring you completely to the cool air and his scorching gaze.
The first direct touch of his fingertips against your swollen dripping folds draws a shattered cry from your throat. His touch is not tentative at all, surprising you in its intent. It is deliberate, a slow circling pressure on your throbbing clit that makes your knees buckle. He holds you up easily, his other arm a steel band around your waist, caging you between his body and the window. You are completely at his mercy, and the realization only makes you wetter.
“So fucking responsive...” The murmur comes as he watches your face contort in a frown of pleasure, his fingers sliding through your slickness and gathering it, spreading it from your hole to your clit, and then back down again. He traces your entrance, teasing slowly as he circles it, driving you mad when he makes no attempt to push inside. “All these years apart... and you feel like this for me. Dripping down your thighs... Tell me you want this.”
You can’t form a sentence. You can only cling to him, your nails digging into the shoulders of his shirt, your forehead pressed against his as you pant harshly. Your body is a lit fuse, sparking under his skilled touch. Every broken moan that escapes you seems to please him immensely. You feel the curve of his smile against your temple when he takes note of your hips jerking in his grasp, clearly getting desperate to have his feeling inside, especially when your face winces when he denies you of it.
“Want me to stop?” The rasp is hot in your ear, a sensual timbre that has you clenching around nothing. His finger presses more insistently against your throbbing nub, circling with a rhythm that has your hips chasing his hand frantically.
“No...” The word comes torn from you.
“Want me to leave? Go back to my room?” His voice is a low, tempting devil at your ear, even as his finger dips lower, sliding through your folds to press lightly at your entrance.
“No... don’t leave! Please don’t leave...” You feel as if you’ll explode and fade to dust if he leaves you like this, needy and desperate. You might have to fuck yourself on your fingers if he does, if only to soothe the ache he lit so easily. But you know he won’t.
The plea comes raw, stripped of all pride. It is the girl from the hospital speaking, the woman from the empty stands, begging the one person who had always been her center of gravity not to vanish again.
He grabs your face and molds his lips over yours, tongue probbing inside your mouth to shut you up, kissing you as if drinking your surrender.
“Never.” The growl comes soft against your lips, the word a vow that feels as fragile and monumental as the moment itself.
His fingers, slick with your arousal, return to your clit, rubbing faster, tighter circles over it. The coil in your belly winds to a breaking point, thrashing against his hold as your thighs clamp together. You are babbling nonsensical pleas and curses against his mouth, eyes rolling back when you tip closer to the edge. He watches you cum, his eyes dark and awed as he drinks in your expression, flushed all over and mouth hung open, barely able to hold yourself up.
“That’s it, roll your eyes for me.” His voice goes rough, barely registering in your haze. “Yeah, let go. Cum for me, beautiful. Show me you want me... That I make you feel good…”
The command combined with the unyielding pressure of his touch and the feel of him so hard against your hip, it is too much. Your orgasm rips through you in a silent scream of pleasure, your body seizing in his strong arms as your walls flutter wildly around nothing. You shatter against his hand, dripping down your spasming thighs as he continues to rub circles over your clit. Waves of intense pulsing pleasure radiate out from your core, leaving you limp and trembling in his arms.
He holds you through it, his arms strong, his lips pressed to your sweaty temple and breathing hard. When the last tremor subsides, you are both ragged, breathing in harsh syncopated gasps. You stare at each other, dazed and wrecked, just as you had in the car hours prior. The world outside the window—the city, the tour, the past or future—none of it exists. There is only the charged space between your bodies and the shocking intimacy of what has just happened.
Maybe you’ll regret this tomorrow, maybe you won’t. Your mind is too fuzy right now, a haze falling over you, one that you can’t escape. You’re half-naked and flushed and soaked in his arms, and he isn’t faring much better, clearly just as dazed as you. Clearly needing you as you need him right now, even if it’s just physical.
His forehead drops to yours.
“Your dress,” His voice goes hoarse. “It’s in my way.”
Still breathless, you manage a shaky challenge. “And what way is that?”
He pulls back just enough to look into your eyes, his gaze deadly serious. “My way to show you how I feel.”
A fresh, dangerous thrill shoots through you. “We’re gonna... f-fuck, we’re going to regret this tomorrow.”
His expression hardens, a flicker of the old pain surfacing over his features.
“I have lots of regrets.” His thumb strokes your cheekbone with a tenderness that belies his words. “But this’ll never be one of them.”
“You... Rafayel, you can’t say things like that to me. Not tonight...” You are trying to rebuild a wall, knowing it is futile.
“Why not?”
"Because then I’ll let you take off my dress... Give you a chance, one that I don’t know if I can afford to give..."
He shifts, his hardening length pressing more insistently against your hip, making your breath catch and your eyes widen slightly. Traitorous to your logic, your body craves him, craves more of what just transpired.
“You gave me a chance in the car. You let me kiss you breathless... Made you pull me closer...” His eyes search yours, serious and hypnotizing. “Do you regret doing it?”
You hold his gaze, the truth finally spilling out of you, completely undeniable. “...No. I don’t regret it.”
A slow, beautiful smile touches his lips. It makes your throat tighten.
“Then I’ll make sure you don’t regret anything that happens between us from now on.” His hand slides from your cheek to your throat, his thumb tipping your chin up. “You know I want you badly... Just say the words.”
The last thread of resistance snaps. You want it too. The fear, the hurt, the confusion, all still there, but drowned out by a roar of pure, desperate want. For him. For this. For the connection you both had been starving for.
“Take it off.” The whisper barely escapes your kiss-bruised lips. “My dress. I’m hot...”
A triumphant laugh escapes him, low in the charged air between you. He leans in, his lips brushing yours as he speaks.
“Been planning on it all night, cutie...”
With swift, surprisingly gentle movements, he helps you step out of the pooled silk at your feet. The beautiful twilight blue dress is a ruined puddle on the hotel carpet, which he disregards and kicks aside without a second glance.
“Sorry for ruining the dress.” He doesn’t sound sorry at all. He languidly unbuttons his own shirt, tossing it away. His torso is pale and beautifully defined, a map of lean muscle you ache to trace with your lips. “Safe to say it didn’t stand a chance, hm?”
“It’s your dress.” You murmur it, your eyes drinking him in.
“It did its job.” He steps back into your space, his hands sliding possessively up your bare sides. “Made you look... so fucking beautiful. And now it’s a mess on the floor and I’m not even thinking about it.” He leans down, his mouth hovering over yours. “‘Cause I’d rather think about what a mess you’ll be in my arms as we make love... pulling pretty sounds out of you while my hands map the skin I’ve obsessed about every single day since we reunited...”
His words are a litany against your skin as he kisses his way down your neck, over your collarbones, finally taking a peaked nipple into his hot mouth. You cry out, your hands flying to his hair as he laves and sucks, sending jolts of pure need straight to your already-sensitive pussy that begs silently to be filled.
He guides you backward until your legs hit the edge of the bed, and you tumble onto the soft duvet, moving your body backwards as he follows you down, covering your body with his. The weight of him on top of you, the feel of his bare skin against yours, is overwhelming. You can feel the hard and insistent press of his clothed erection against your thigh, having you bite your lower lip. Your mind has scratched any logic and reasoning, demanding only to surrender to your feelings, which right now are screaming at you to get him inside you as soon as possible.
He braces himself on his elbows, looking down at you and searching for any sign of discomfort or wanting to back out, his hair falling into his eyes. The playfulness is gone, replaced by a stark hunger, eyes half-lidded and cheeks flushed to the tip of his ears.
“I need to be inside you.” The words come raw and unvarnished. “I need to feel you. Wanna feel all of you. Tell me you need it too, please tell me you do.”
You reach between your bodies with a trembling hand, your fingers fumbling with the button of his trousers. Your answer is in the desperate urgency of your touch as you struggle to free him. He helps you, shoving the fabric down his hips, freeing himself for you. You wrap your hand around him without looking down, his length hot and rock-hard in your palm, his mushroomy tip leaking over your fingers as you stroke him slowly. He hisses, his hips pushing forward into your grip.
“…Need you, Raf…” Your plea comes pride-stripped, replaced by raw need. “Please, don’t wanna wait anymore... I’m saying yes, please…”
He doesn’t need to be asked twice. He settles between your thighs, his tip nudging against your soaked entrance and you wrap your arms around his neck, face burying in his neck as you pant. He pauses and grabs your face to pull it out of his neck, his eyes holding yours, a final and silent question.
You answer by wrapping your legs around his hips and pulling him down into a searing kiss.
He drives into you in a slow, inexorable thrust, filling you completely, stretching you around his cock in a way that is both a shock and the most right thing you have ever felt. The shared gasp is muffled by your joined mouths, mouth hunging open against his as you try to adjust to the fullness inside you.
For a few moments, he doesn’t move at all, buried to the hilt inside you, his body trembling with the effort of holding still. You can feel every inch of him, a perfect devastating fit inside your cunt. The past and the future vanish. There is only this fusion, this raw wordless claiming. Having him in your arms while he stays inside you, a perfect fit, the last puzzle piece going over the remaining empty spot.
It feels so right. It scaresz you.
“Finally, I’m right where I should be...” He breathes it against your lips, the words soaked in a decade of longing.
Then he begins to move. And it is nothing like the frantic, fevered groping by the window. This is deep, relentless, devastatingly intimate. Each thrust is a revelation of passion, a conversation your bodies are having that your minds can’t yet process. He watches your face so intently, learning what makes you gasp in pleasure, what makes you clutch at his back, what makes you whisper his name in an attempt to ground yourself from floating away.
You are lost in it, in the feel of him moving inside your welcoming walls, in the scrape of his skin against yours, in the building pressure that is already coiling tight again, a lot faster this time. The world narrows to the slap of your skin, the ragged harmony of your breathing, and the intense locked gaze you can’t break, hypnotized by his unreadable gaze. There’s lust in the pools of his eyes, a mirror to your own, yet there are more complicated things hidden under it, surfacing with every thrust inside you, and you try to run from them, pretending you don’t see them.
“Oh fuck, you’re just so tight.” He grunts it, his rhythm faltering for a second as he fights for control. “You’re perfect, but so damn tight—shit, m’not gonna last long. F-fuck... I can’t... I need...”
“I-I know.” You gasp, arching your back to meet his thrusts, get him deeper. “Me too... O-oh, fuck, don’t... don’t stop.”
He shifts angle, hitting a deeper spot that makes you see stars, eyes going so wide before they roll back into your head from how good it feels. It has you grip tighter around his cock, a broken cry tears from your throat when you feel him twitch inside you, groaning into your neck before he bites on it. His control snaps when he feels how tightly you hold onto him. His thrusts become harder, faster, piston-like, driving you both toward the edge. You can feel his own climax growing, the tension in his corded muscles, the way his breath saws in his chest and sweat pools at his temples.
“Keep looking at me.” His voice goes guttural. “I wanna see you when you cum around me... shit, s’tight...”
You force your eyes open, drowning in the storm of emotion in his. The pleasure is a tidal wave, rising up, unstoppable. It crests with a violence that steals the air from your lungs. Your body clamps around him, milking him as you shudder through an orgasm that feels endless, wordless sobs of release shaking your entire body.
Feeling you convulse around him is his final trigger. With a raw, gut-deep groan that is half your name, he buries himself deep into your spasming walls and follows you over, his own release pumping into you in hot, pulsing waves of thick cum.
He collapses onto you, his weight a welcome anchor as you both spiral back down to earth, gasping and slick with sweat. The only sounds are the muffled cars outside and the frantic beating of your hearts, slowly beginning to find a shared, calmer rhythm.
He doesn’t pull away as you thought he might. He nuzzles into the crook of your neck, his lips pressing a damp tender kiss there. His softening cock is still nestled inside you, a final intimate connection between you. One that neither of you can brush away.
In the heavy, sated silence of your shared passion, the world begins to seep back in. And with it, the complicated and terrifying reality of what you have just done. But for now, wrapped in his arms, with the scent of sex and him clinging to you, you let the silence hold you. The talking, the reckoning, the fear of tomorrow—all of it can wait for the dawn.
Tonight, there is only this fragile, blissful peace in the ruin you had made together.
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Synopsis: Rafayel finally relives the day everything shattered between you—your fall, the hospital hallway, and the one-way flight he never managed to tell you about—revealing a decade-old misunderstanding that’s been poisoning both of you from opposite sides of the world.
Content warnings: Angst, hurt/comfort (slight), unresolved feelings, forced proximity, emotional repression, trauma triggers, mentions of a career-ending injury, performance pressure/burnout, self-destructive behavior, poor communication, sexual tension, medical setting, miscommunication, guilt/self-blame, anxiety, slight physical intimacy
Word count: 5.5k
I will post 2-3 chapters a week~ stay tuned :3 alsooo the tags will change with each chapter. next chapter will change the rating to E.
The memory, when it ambushes him now, is not the blur of shock and panic it is for you. It is a crystalline, brutal sequence, every detail rendered sharp by years of looking back.
It is the silence before the crack.
The day of your accident, the arena feels different. You haven’t looked at him once during your separate warm-ups. You, who usually tracks his movements with a mixture of frustration and naked admiration, are in a tunnel of your own focus. A grim, relentless focus he recognizes but doesn’t understand the depth of.
He doesn’t know about the secret pre-dawn sessions you have been logging for weeks. He doesn’t see you wince and shake out your right foot when you think no one is paying attention, trying to disperse the persistent hot ache that has taken root in your ankle, a souvenir from over-rotating a triple flip two weeks earlier. You have iced it, taped it, lied to yourself that it is just stiffness.
He only sees the set of your jaw, the fire in your eyes that seems aimed at an invisible finish line. He thinks it is just the pressure of the qualifiers. He doesn’t know the finish line is him.
He has something to tell you. Something that has been sitting in his throat like a heavy stone for days. His bags, he knows, are already half-packed in the sleek apartment his new management keeps. A one-way ticket to Zurich is locked in a drawer. He is to leave the day after the qualifiers. The opportunity of a lifetime, they keep saying. A clean break. A fresh start.
It feels like a sentence.
In the quiet moments, a different fantasy plays in his head. It is childish, born of watching older pairs glide as one during a recent exhibition. He pictures it. The two of you, not as rivals on the same ice, but as partners on it. Your fierce determination channeled into synchrony, his intuitive grace grounding your power.
A week ago, in a rare flicker of nerve he didn’t know he had, he almost mumbled something about it. Your double axel entry is strong. It would pair well with a lift. But you just scowled, thinking he was critiquing your solo technique, and skated away. The moment, and his courage, shattered with you.
So on this final day, as he lounges on the bleachers pretending to rest, he is wrestling with the words. I’m leaving. But maybe, after... we could try something different?
It sounds stupid even in his head. The future is a vast, intimidating blank canvas, and you are the only constant, the only real thing in it. The thought of carving out a future without you in it, even at a distance, feels like stepping onto ice he knows will not hold him.
Then you take the ice for your last run-through. He watches you set up for the combination, not the one you have been assigned, but a harder, riskier one. The one he has been practicing. A cold trickle of dread runs down his spine. You are pushing too hard. He sits up, the words of warning sticking in his suddenly dry mouth.
The first jump is shaky. He sees the landing foot wobble, the ankle buckling inward for a millisecond before you fight to stabilize it. His own muscles tense in sympathetic panic.
Stop, he thinks, screaming it internally. Abort the second jump. Just glide out.
But you don’t. You are the underdog. You fight. You launch into the second rotation.
The sound is not a crack to him. It is the sound of the world splitting in two.
One moment you are airborne, a portrait of furious ambition. The next, you are a crumpled, gasping heap on the ice, and the wrongness of the angle of your leg is the most horrifying thing he has ever seen.
His body moves before his mind. The ice beneath his blades feels like glass he is breaking with every stride. When he reaches you, the sight of your white, pain-contorted face sears itself into his permanent memory.
“Hey, hey. Look at me.” His voice is someone else’s, low and urgent and terrified. His hands hover, wanting to fix, to undo, but terrified of causing more damage. The coaches’ yelling sounds miles away.
In your eyes, swimming with pain and shock, he sees the finish line you have been chasing has just vanished. And he knows, with a sickening certainty, that he is part of the reason you were running toward it so blindly.
The ambulance comes. The adults take over. He is pushed to the periphery, a ghost in his own life.
He visits the hospital the next morning, before his flight. They won’t let him into your room.
“Family only.” The nurse’s voice is gentle. “She’s sedated, dear.”
He stands in the sterile hallway, the bouquet of irises—blue, like the rink’s early-morning light—feeling absurd in his hands. He leaves them with the nurse. He gets into the black car. He looks back once, at the hospital growing smaller, and the part of him that is just a boy, the boy who dreamed of pair skates and shared sighs, stays behind on that cold hospital floor.
He thinks you know he is leaving. Everyone at the rink seems to know. He thinks your intense focus, your reckless push, was your way of saying goodbye to the rivalry, or maybe of proving something to him before he went. He never imagines it is because you don’t know, because he failed to tell you, and you are trying to close a gap you think is purely about skill, not geography and time.
The misunderstanding is a full circle. You believe he saw your broken body and simply left for greater things, abandoning the wreckage. He believes that, through his silence and his unspoken future, he indirectly caused the wreckage, and has no right to stay and offer comfort he doesn’t deserve.
The music doesn’t just stop for him that day. The entire composition of his life shifts into a minor key. Every gold medal feels like a counterweight to a debt he can never repay. Every flawless performance is a silent message sent across oceans.
See? I’m using what I have. I’m not wasting it. I’m sorry.
And the dream of pair skates, he locks it away. It becomes the most forbidden of thoughts, a treasure too beautiful and too painful to ever take out and look at. Until he sees you again in a stale arena, a ghost from a life he lost, and the lock starts to rust.
—
The silence in your room after the kiss is a physical presence haunting your space. You press the back of your hand to your lips, as if you can still feel the searing imprint of his, the desperate aching pressure that has shaken you to your core.
Your mind is a cacophony of contradictions. The sharp memory of his abandonment against the soft, vulnerable confession of his loneliness. The image of him as an untouchable star against the feel of his sweat-damp skin under your palms. The child you knew against the man who has just unraveled you with a single touch.
Down the hall, in the dim light of his suite, Rafayel is equally still. The ghost of your mouth on his is a brand. The throbbing in his ankle is a distant pulse compared to the ache in his chest, an ache that has just cracked open in the second your lips touched his own.
He looks at the empty space where you had knelt to tend his wound, where you had listened to him. He had told you about his life in Switzerland. He had given you a piece of the loneliness he had carried like a secret trophy. And you had given him a truth of your own, the heaviness of the world after the ice.
It was the most honest exchange you had had since you were children sharing a hot chocolate.
And then he had ruined it. Or maybe he had completed it. The want, a constant humming frequency since your reappearance in the White Dove Arena, had simply overwhelmed the fragile new connection. He had reached for you, and you had met him halfway, and for one blazing moment the fault line didn’t feel like a rift. It felt like a circuit, finally closed.
Now, the aftermath is a cold void. The memory of your wide, shocked eyes as you pulled away haunts him. Mistake, you called it. The word echoes so loud in his own ears.
Was it a mistake because you felt nothing? Or because you felt too much, and it terrified you?
He thinks of the boy in the hospital hallway, holding irises. He had run then, from the pain, from the guilt, from the overwhelming feeling of being responsible for a fracture he didn’t know how to fix. A part of him—the trained, self-preserving part—screams to run again. To let the Liaison do her job, to let the superstar perform his, to let the painful, complicated girl from his past fade back into memory.
But the other part, the part that remembers pair skates and sighs, is so desperately tired of running.
The morning after the kiss dawns with a brutal clarity over you. Your ankle gives a sympathetic twinge as you stand, a ghostly echo of the fresh injury down the hall. The memory of his mouth on yours feels like a dream, a feverish hallucination born of stress. But the sharp feeling of panic in the back of your throat is real.
The next week is an exercise in silent, mutual suffering for both of you.
Rafayel’s twisted-ankle-from-a-curb story is accepted with grumbling suspicion by Thomas. The competition in Shanghai is scratched. The official statement cites a minor training injury requiring precautionary rest. The truth remains a secret held between the two of you, a third entity in every room.
You perform your duties. You arrange for a physiotherapist. You coordinate the postponement of events. Your interactions are models of efficiency and readjustments. You bring him updated schedules with your eyes fixed on the document, never on his face. He takes them with a quiet thank you.
The space between you hums with everything that has been said, and everything that has been done.
You can’t help but see his frustration. It isn’t the explosive kind from before, but a much quieter, simmering thing. He is a creature of motion forced into stillness, pacing his suite like a bird with a clipped wing. The guilt you feel is new and unwelcome.
You hate that you care about his restlessness. You hate the part of you that replays the moment his blade caught, the surge of terror and protectiveness that has nothing to do with logistics or being professional and everything to do with the fragile truth that you care for him.
His ankle heals, as modern medicine and elite athletic physiology ensure it will. But a month without competition for a man like Rafayel is a lifetime. The tour rolls on, his exhibitions now simpler, modified in order to accommodate his new state.
The fire in his performances banks to a quieter, more intense glow. You can see the calculation in his eyes, not of steps but of risk, of pain thresholds, of how much of his former self he can conjure without the foundation of flawless technique.
One evening, in a cold and small city, you find yourself drawn to the empty arena long after the team has left for dinner. You tell yourself you have left your tablet, and that’s the reason your feet take you there.
You know it is a lie.
He is there, alone, not on the pristine main ice but on a smaller older practice rink at the back of the complex. The lights are low. He is in simple practice clothes, no music.
He is not skating, just standing there, shaking in the center of the rink and shifting his weight gingerly from foot to foot, testing the push-off from his healed ankle. A slight wince tightens his features before he smooths it away. He looks like any athlete tentatively returning to a betrayed limb.
The vulnerability of the image in front of you steals your breath.
You stand in the shadows of the entrance, your own heart thudding dully. You remember your own first time back on the ice after the cast came off. The fear had been a living thing, a cold serpent coiling around your spine. The ice had not felt like freedom. It had felt like a predator waiting to remind you of its power.
You had lasted ten minutes before the phantom pains and the dizzying fear sent you stumbling off, never to return.
He begins to move. Not jumps, not spins, because those are much frightening moves and he doesn’t seem ready, at least not tonight. Just edges. Slow careful deep outside edges, holding the curve until his ankle trembles with the strain. He is rebuilding the language, letter by painful letter.
“You’ll overwork it.” Your voice echoes in the vast quiet space, surprising both of you.
He doesn’t startle. He completes the edge and comes to a stop facing you. “Miss Liaison. Doing late-night rounds?”
“Someone has to ensure you don’t undo a month of healing in one night of stubbornness.”
A faint, tired smile touches his lips. “My stubbornness is well-documented.”
You watch from the shadows, arms crossed against the chill seeping through your blazer. “Documented and disregarded, apparently.”
He looks down at his skates, then back at you. “What does it feel like for you now? Looking at it.”
The faint, tired smile on his lips hangs in the air, an acknowledgment of the unchangeable. In the quiet that follows, you feel the careful probing beneath the surface of his question. The ice isn’t just a physical space that separates you nowadays. It is the ground he is trying to clear between you, and you are not ready for that.
So you deflect.
“It feels cold.” You keep your voice deliberately flat, turning your gaze from him to scan the empty bleachers as if checking for something. “Like any other surface that needs maintenance.”
You feel his eyes on you, a patient pressing weight. “That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s the only answer I have.” You push off the boards, intending to walk back toward the equipment room, to put more space between you. “You should stop. Pushing it now will just set you back.”
“You’re an expert on stopping, aren’t you.”
The words, softly delivered, freeze you in your tracks. They aren’t cruel, but they are a direct tap on the fault line. You don’t turn around.
“It’s called self-preservation. You should try it sometime.”
You hear the slow deliberate scrape of his blades as he glides closer to the boards behind you.
“What are you preserving, exactly? The perfect record of never trying again?”
A hot coil of anger and hurt tightens in your chest. He is picking at the lock, and you can’t let him in.
“I’m preserving my sanity. My ability to do my job, which, right now, is to tell you to get off the ice before you turn a healed sprain into a chronic problem. Thomas will have my head.”
“Thomas isn’t here.” His voice is closer now, just over your shoulder. “It’s just you. And me. And a lot of quiet. You used to hate the quiet. You’d hum your program music just to fill it.”
The memory is a tiny precise invasion. You used to do that back then. A nervous habit he had teased you for. The fact that he remembers, that he wields it now, feels like a violation.
“People change.” The words come out clipped as you finally turn to face him. He is leaning on the boards, his expression unreadable. “I’m not that girl anymore. She’s the one who stayed on the ice, remember? You said so yourself.”
"I said a lot of things." His eyes search your face. “I’m trying to say something different now. Tell me what you’re really afraid of.” His tone isn’t accusatory, but prodding nonetheless, “Is it the ice? Or is it that if you get back on it, you’ll have to stop being angry at me. That you might actually have to feel something else.”
He is too close to the truth. The panic is no longer about ligaments or hard landings. It is about the terrifying prospect of dismantling the story you have lived by for ten years, the story where he is the villain who left and you are the victim who bravely moved on.
If that story cracks, what left is there? Just two wounded people on unstable ground.
“I’m not having this conversation.” Your voice goes low and final. “My job is handling your logistics, not your psychoanalysis. Get off the ice, Rafayel. That’s not a request from your liaison. It’s an order from the person who had to clean up the blood last time you were reckless.”
You see the flicker in his eyes, not anger but a pained understanding that you are using the gash, the intimacy of your care, as a weapon to keep him out. It works. The soft curiosity in his gaze shutters, replaced by a more familiar guarded neutrality.
He gives a single slow nod, pushing himself upright from the boards. “Understood.”
He skates away from you, not toward the exit but back to the center, resuming his slow testing edges. He is obeying the letter of your order. He is stopping the conversation. But defiantly staying on the ice. It is a silent rebuke. You can control the dialogue, but you can’t control him.
You stand there for a moment longer, the cold of the arena seeping past your jacket, past your skin, right into the old calcified hurt. You are grateful that you succeeded in dodging him and the conversation, but some part of you wished it didn’t hurt as much as it did.
The heavy door of the arena shuts behind you with a final thud that echoes in the empty corridor. But the silence you sought is a lie. The muffled rhythmic scrape of his blades continues in your head, a phantom track following you back to the sanctuary of your hotel room.
The next day, the routine is armor you’re very grateful for. You deliver the updated physio-therapy schedule with a clipboard as a shield. He accepts it with a neutral thank you, his eyes flicking over you, reading the retreat you have staged behind your eyes once again. The air is thick with what hasn’t been said.
He doesn’t try to probe again. Instead, he practices a different kind of pressure, the pressure of presence. During a sponsor lunch, he requests that you sit at his table, not with the other staff.
“The Liaison should be on hand for logistical questions.” His tone leaves no room for argument.
You spend two hours feeling the weight of his occasional sideways glance while discussing freight timelines with a bored executive.
In the evenings, he takes his carefully measured walks along the hotel’s perimeter path, always as you are returning from some errand or another, forcing a clipped, professional nod of acknowledgement. It feels deliberate. A quiet relentless reminder that he is there, a constant in your peripheral vision, just as he had been a constant in the backdrop of your youth.
Your dreams become treacherous. Not of falling, but of standing at the edge of the rink, your old skates laced tight, while he watches from the center. In the dream you take a step forward, but the ice always remains just an inch beyond your toe pick, an unbridgeable gap. You wake with your heart pounding, not from fear of the ice but from the frustration of the reach.
Your dreams is where you can’t help but reach for him, yet you’re unable to grab onto him. To close the distance. It’s less frigheting in your dream than in reality, yet it still has your head throbbing and the walls of protectiveness you built close in on you.
A week later, in a new city, you find yourself at the rink again after hours. You tell yourself you are auditing the overnight ice maintenance. The crew is efficient, their work a familiar lulling symphony of Zamboni growls and the hiss of the resurfacer.
He is there too, of course. Not skating this time. Sitting high in the empty stands, a dark silhouette against the rows of plastic seats. Watching the machine paint its perfect glacial layers.
You pretend not to see him, focusing on your tablet, checking off imaginary boxes. The crew finishes and leaves, the lights dimming to night mode. Still, he doesn’t move from his seat, and neither do you.
The silence becomes a taut wire. You can either break it or be broken by it. You walk to the bottom of the stands, not looking up at him.
“The tour ends in Jakarta.” You aim your voice at the empty concession stand across the way. “Two more exhibitions. Then my contract is fulfilled.”
From above, you hear a soft humorless sound, almost a sigh. “Efficient as ever. Already counting down the days ‘till your sentence is over.”
“It isn’t a sentence. It’s a job, which I’ve fulfilled.” You finally glance up. He is resting his forearms on his knees, looking down at you, his face half in shadow. “And jobs end.”
“And then what?” His voice is low, echoing almost raspily in the empty arena. “You go back to your desk and forget all about the past months? You ferry more dreams in boxes? You lock the ghost back in its closet?”
“That was the agreement.” You cross your arms, a feeble defense against the chill and his probing. “You got your liaison. I did my job. We’re even now.”
“We will never be even.” The words drop like stones into the quiet between you.
He stands and makes his way down, the metal steps clinking softly under his weight. He stops on the last row, still elevated, putting you at eye level.
“See, that’s what you still don’t understand. This wasn’t a transaction for me.”
You look away, focusing on the EXIT sign’s steady glow. “Then what was it?”
“A chance.” He takes a slow breath. “One I didn’t get ten years ago. And now it’s almost gone, and you’re... you’re already halfway out the door, still looking at me like I’m the one who turned the lock.”
The accuracy of it stings. You are pulling away, preemptively distancing yourself from the crater his departure will leave this time. The old playbook is the only one you have.
“What do you want me to say, Rafayel?” The frustration leaks into your whisper. “That it’s been a delight? You were right. Your presence... it didn’t just remind me of the accident. It reopened the abandonment that came after. Every time you walk into a room, I remember what it felt like to watch you leave the last one.”
You see him flinch as if you have physically struck him. Good, you think faintly. Let him feel it.
“I’m not even mad anymore.” The fatigue is bone-deep in your voice. “I think I’m just... tired. I spent so long wanting to be as good as you. To prove I belonged on the same ice. And then you were gone, and the proving just... lost its point. Why fight to be seen by someone who isn’t there to look?” You shrug, the gesture hollow. “So I stopped. It was easier.”
The pain on his face is raw, undisguised. He descends the final step, closing the distance so you have to tip your head back to meet his eyes.
“Is that what you really think? That I didn’t see you?” His voice is thick, filled with emotions you can’t decipher. “You were the only real thing in that superficial world that only cares about perfection. Your fight, your grit. It was more compelling than any perfect jump I ever landed. I saw you.”
He reaches out, his fingers gently brushing a stray strand of hair from your cheek. The intimacy of the gesture is a shock to your already overwhelmed mind. You close your eyes, your breath catching.
“Don’t.”
“Why?” His thumb traces the arch of your cheekbone, a touch so tender it threatens to break your walls completely. “Because it’s true? Or because you’re afraid to believe it?”
“Because it doesn’t change anything!” The whisper comes out fierce, your eyes still shut tight, building a wall of darkness against his intensity. “It doesn’t change that you left. It doesn’t change the silence that was between us, and still is.”
“Look at me.” His hand stills, cupping your jaw. “Please.”
You force your eyes open. They are brimming with unshed tears, blurring his earnest pained expression. The sight of your distress seems to fracture something in him. The determination softens into something close to grief.
“I can’t change the past.” His own eyes are suspiciously bright. “But I am here now. And I… I see you. Not the ghost of who you were. You. The woman who is so afraid of being left in the silence again that she’s trying to leave first.”
A single tear escapes, tracing a hot path down your cheek. He catches it with his thumb. Then, wordlessly, he pulls you into his arms.
It isn’t a romantic embrace. It is an anchor. A shelter. His arms wrap around you, one hand cradling the back of your head, tucking you against his chest. You stand stiffly for a heartbeat, every instinct screaming to push away, to flee the terrifying vulnerability that latches onto the moment uninvited. But the solid beat of his heart under your ear, the familiar safe scent of him mixed with cold arena air, is a siren’s call your weary soul cannot resist.
A shuddering breath wracks your body, and you melt into him. Your hands, trapped between you, slowly unfurl to clutch at the fabric of his sweater. You don’t sob, but the silent tears come, soaking into the soft wool. He just holds you tighter, his chin resting on the top of your head, his own breathing deep and steady.
You stand like that for what feels like an eternity and no time at all, in the dim cold vastness of the empty arena. The unbroken ice witnesses no spectacular jumps, no tragic falls. Only this. Two different versions of two people, shattered and remade in different ways, holding onto each other in the quiet. Not as a solution, but as a temporary, desperately needed ceasefire.
For this moment, there is no past, no looming future in another city. Just the shared imperfect warmth against the chill, and the silent mutual agreement to simply stop fighting the pull of the fault line and let it hold you both.
—
The news comes an hour before his final exhibition in Jakarta. A flustered stage manager finds you.
“He’s... in a mood. Won’t talk to anyone but you. Something about the lighting cue being chromatically offensive…?” The man looks pained, and very confused. “Can you...?”
You nod, a strange calm settling over you. You feel a dull persistent pull, like a tide you are too tired to fight.
You find him in the stark white dressing room, pacing a short tight path. He has already changed into his costume, a sleek black ensemble with subtle silver threads that catch the light like fractured ice. He looks every inch the superstar, except for the tension coiled in his shoulders and the restlessness in his steps as he paces the room.
“The lighting director is threatening to quit.” You close the door behind you.
“Good. His taste is an affront to art and basic optics.” He doesn’t stop his pacing.
“The cue is the same one you approved in Tokyo. And Osaka. And Shanghai.” You remind him.
“Was offensive there, too. I was being polite.” The sarcasm is a brittle shell. You can see it cracking at the edges, revealing the unease beneath.
You lean against the vanity, watching him. “You’re never polite, Rafayel. What’s really wrong?”
He stops pacing, finally looking at you. His blue-pink eyes hold a stormy, frustrated glint, but beneath that, you catch a flicker of raw unvarnished vulnerability. It is the same look he had as a boy before a big competition, the one he had always tried to hide behind bravado.
He shrugs, a defensive tight movement. “Nothing. The world is just full of incompetence tonight.”
“And you’re full of something else.” Your voice goes soft. You push off from the vanity and walk toward him, not stopping until you are directly in his path. He holds his ground, his gaze wary. You don’t speak. You just slowly kneel down on the plush carpet.
“What are you doing?” His voice has lost its edge, replaced by surprise.
“Checking the source of the problem.” Your voice goes practical. Your hands go to his left ankle, the one he had injured. You begin to gently probe the area over the fine black fabric of his costume, feeling for heat or swelling. Your touch is clinical at first, then, almost unconsciously, it softens into something closer to a caress, your thumb smoothing over the line of the bandage.
He goes perfectly still above you. You can feel the tension draining from his leg under your hands, replaced by a different kind of stillness. The sarcasm, the defensive posturing, all of it seems to leak out of him, leaving behind just the man who is just nervous before a performance.
“It’s fine.” His voice goes low and quiet now. “It’s not the ankle.”
“I know.” Your hands still. You are kneeling at his feet, and the intimacy of the position should feel subservient, strange. Instead it feels grounding. You are both here, in this fragile quiet space.
The Rafayel in front of you is a mystery, a man shaped by fame and loneliness, by a past you shared but didn’t fully understand. Yet the prospect of unraveling that mystery, of learning him again, doesn’t fill you with the old fear anymore. It feels... inevitable.
His hand comes down, his fingers gently tilting your chin up so you have to meet his eyes. The touch sends a familiar electric jolt through you, a direct line to the memory of his kiss in the hotel room, desperate and consuming. It also reminds you of the tenderness, the solidity of his embrace in the stands. Your heart thuds heavily against your ribs.
Before his thumb can trace the line it had memorized on your cheek, before the space between your gaze and his lips can vanish completely, you pull back. You stand up, breaking the contact.
“Your hair is perfect. The costume is perfect. The ice is at minus five point five.” Your voice goes a little unsteady as you busy yourself with straightening a non-existent wrinkle on his sleeve. “The ‘offensive’ lighting cue has been adjusted to a less assaultive shade of blue. There’s nothing left to fix out here.”
He watches you, his eyes dark with understanding and a hint of frustration. “We need to talk.”
“Later.” Your voice is firm as you pick up a lint roller from the vanity and make a show of running it over his back, though there is nothing there. “After the show. You need to focus on this. That’s what matters right now.”
He catches your wrist as you move around him, not tightly, but enough to stop you. The touch burns.
“It’s not the only thing that matters.” He turns you to face him, his expression unguarded, serious. “I want you to be there. In the wings. Where I can see you. I... need it.”
The admission, so soft and direct, flusters you. It is a vulnerability he rarely shows, a request, not a command. The air between you grows thick again, charged with all the words unsaid and all the touches withheld. Your eyes flicker to his mouth. His gaze drops to yours. The pull is magnetic, terrifying.
“I’ll be there.” The promise tears itself from you. Then, before the gravitational pull can win, before either of you can close that agonizing tempting gap, you slip your wrist from his light grasp. “Good luck.”
You are out the door before he can respond, leaning against the cool wall of the corridor, your pulse racing. It hurts, the wanting. It is a fresh acute pain layered over the old dull ache. It hurts because it is real, and it is now, and it is for the man he has become, a man who is still partly a stranger, yet feels more like home than anything has felt in a very long time.
You close your eyes, listening to the distant roar of the crowd waiting for him, knowing you will be in the shadows watching, just as he asked. Not as his liaison, not as a ghost from his past, but as something new, fragile, and terrifyingly alive.
if you liked it, you can buy me a coffee here! it would be very appreciated<3: https://ko-fi.com/zaynessbeloved
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Synopsis: Under the surface, the rink and everything you lost there keeps bleeding into every conversation you share, and the more you try to stay professional, the more Rafayel makes it personal, until you realize this contract isn’t just about logistics. It’s about keeping you close.
Content warnings: Angst, hurt/no comfort (for now), unresolved feelings, forced proximity, emotional repression, trauma triggers, mentions of a career-ending injury, phantom pain, performance pressure/burnout, self-destructive behavior, slight blood/injury detail, poor communication, sexual tension, first kiss turned regret, misunderstandings
Word count: 5.8k
I will post 2-3 chapters a week~ stay tuned :3 alsooo the tags will change with each chapter, eventually going into E-rated
You bury yourself in the logistics of the Asia tour from your clean, quiet desk and treat it like any other project: venue schematics, flight manifests, temperature-control requirements for sixteen different rinks. You don’t watch his competitions televised from Europe. You delete news alerts with his name. When the briefing packet arrives, you study the schedule, the personnel lists, the branding guidelines, and politely ignore the single page that details his personal itinerary and preferences.
You tell yourself it is working. The sharp, confusing edges of the hurt are being sanded down by routine. You think of his words sometimes—fault line, sigh, liability—and feel a dull throb, like a bone aching before a storm, but you can breathe through it. You convince yourself the tension in the hotel suite was a toxic byproduct of shared history and high stress, nothing more.
You aren’t in denial. You are in recovery.
By the time the departure day arrives, you feel a semblance of control, armored in your most impersonal black blazer and a tablet full of checklists.
The reunion happens at the private airport terminal. He arrives surrounded by his usual constellation: manager, publicist, fitness trainer. He looks different, or perhaps you are just seeing him clearly for the first time since the gala. He seems thinner, the angles of his face sharper, with a subtle, weary tension bracketing his mouth that no camera will ever catch. His eyes find you immediately, a quick scanning glance that takes in your professional armor and then dismisses it.
“Liaison.” A bare nod. His tone is cool and flat as he speaks.
“Mr. Qi.” Your voice is equally neutral. “The plane is ready. I’ve briefed the captain on the schedule. Your section is prepared per your specifications.”
He says nothing else, brushing past you with his team. The space where he stood feels electrically charged for a moment, and then simply empty.
That becomes the pattern. In Tokyo, your interactions are clipped, transactional. You confirm ice temperatures. He grunts an acknowledgment. You present the daily schedule. He takes the printed sheet without your fingers touching. He performs his aloof celebrity, and you excel as his invisible handler. The monumental things said in the dark of a hotel suite might as well be a script from a play you have both left behind. You are grateful for the distance, you tell yourself. This is manageable.
The struggle is internal, and it is twofold.
First, being near the rinks. Not the gala’s temporary installation, but real, vast, echoing arenas that smell of Zamboni fumes and old ice. The sound of blades carving arcs is a language you were once fluent in. Watching him practice—really practice, not perform—is a special kind of torture. You stand in the shadows of the tunnel with a clipboard in hand, and you observe. He falls. He curses, low and vehement, slamming a gloved hand on the ice before pushing up to try the quad loop again.
You see the frustration, the relentless drive. It is a mirror of your own childhood determination, reflected back at you through the lens of his perfected genius. It reminds you not just of him, but of yourself, of the version of you that lived in a timeline where the ankle didn’t twist, a version who might be on that ice right now, fighting the same battle. The ghost of that possible life haunts every practice session, a silent, screaming echo at your shoulder.
Second, and more confusing, is the persistent, low hum of awareness you have of him as a physical presence. The way his practice shirt clings to the sweat on his spine during a spin. The particular timbre of his laugh, rare and short, when he banters with his choreographer. It is an awareness that feels like a betrayal of your hurt, a vine growing stubbornly through the cracks in your anger. You dismiss it as leftover adrenaline from your confrontations, or mere aesthetic appreciation for an athlete at his peak. It is easier than naming it.
One night in Seoul, after a long day of sponsor commitments, you realize you have left a crucial folder in the arena. The building is locked, quiet, a monument to stillness. The security guard recognizes you and lets you in with a warning that the main lights will shut off soon.
You retrieve the folder from the deserted staff box. The only light comes from the emergency exit signs and the moon through the high arched windows, casting the empty rink in a sheet of ghostly blue-white. And then you see him.
He is alone on the ice, no music, just the rhythmic, whispering scrape of his blades. He isn’t practicing jumps. He is doing basic moves, deep and languid crossovers that carry him in wide, endless circles. The most fundamental thing, the first thing anyone ever learns. In his hands, it looks like a meditation.
A sigh.
You stand frozen in the tunnel, hidden by shadows. You feel your own throat constrict. This is the private self he spoke of, the one that belongs only to him. There is no audience here, no product, no liability. Just a man and his ice.
A yearning so profound it is an ache that blooms in your chest. It isn’t for him, not entirely. It is for that. For the feeling of the ice giving way under your blade, for the cool air rushing past your face, for the singular focus of your body in motion. You miss it with a desperation that is a physical pain. Your right ankle gives a phantom throb, as if you remind you of it.
The fear follows instantly, cold and familiar. The memory of the crack, the helpless spiral to the hard surface, the end of a world. Your world. The fear tells you that even if you laced up a pair of skates right now, you would only remember how to fall.
As if sensing your thoughts across the dark expanse, his movements slow. He comes to a graceful halt at the center of the rink, his head turning slowly until his gaze pinpoints you in the gloom. You haven’t made a sound. He just knows someone’s there, maybe even hopeful it’s you.
You expect a jab, a cool remark about lurking. Instead, he simply looks in your direction for a long moment, his expression unreadable in the low light. Then he pushes off with one foot, gliding not toward the exit but toward the far side of the rink, continuing his silent, looping path, giving you the dignity of the dark and the distance.
But the spell is broken. The nostalgia curdles into a sharper, more personal sorrow. You are not just a former skater watching a current one. You are the echo, and he is the sound, and you are both trapped together in this tour, orbiting the same painful gravity, speaking in bullet points and schedules because the only other language you have between you is one of sighs and fractures, and you are both too afraid, in your own ways, to try and speak it again.
You leave the manifest on the boards and slip out, the ghost of your own what-ifs skating silent, endless circles in your mind.
The tour becomes a meticulous exercise in compartmentalization. There is the Liaison, who can source a specific brand of mineral water in Osaka at three in the morning just because he requested so. There is the Logistics Coordinator, who soothes frantic venue managers and recalibrates faulty temperature controls, just so his specifications to be met. And there is the third one, the one with no name, who watches from the shadows as he transforms each new arena into his temporary kingdom.
The struggle is a silent war fought behind your ribs. Every arena is a cathedral to what you lost. The chill, the scent, the roar; all of it a visceral echo of a life that flatlined years ago. Watching him command the space, even in quiet practice, is a constant low-grade reminder. You know, logically, that the accident was a tragic pivot, not a punishment. You know his abandonment was the work of a something larger than a fifteen-year-old boy.
But the heart is not logical. It only knows the shape of the hole left behind, and his presence is the exact outline of that hole.
Your feelings for him are a knot you refuse to pick at. The hurt is clear. The confusion is a given. The other thing, the sharp unwanted awareness of the slope of his neck as he stretches, the way his voice can go from cold to molten in a single syllable, you file under Professional Hazard. A reaction to stress, nostalgia, his admittedly potent and curated magnetism. Nothing more.
In Kyoto, the tension snaps.
It is after a flawless, punishingly elegant performance. The Japanese press is in a frenzy and he has been whisked away for a late-night media roundtable. You are finalizing the next day’s travel, alone in a small makeshift office backstage, when the door clicks open.
He leans against the frame, still in his costume, the sequins catching the ugly light above. He looks drained, his vibrant performer side replaced by something hollowed-out.
“The car to the hotel is here.” You don’t look up from your screen.
“They want me to go to an after-party. Board chairman’s hosting. Some cultural exchange.” His voice is flat, devoid of its usual performative edge.
“It’s on your schedule. The car can take you there directly.”
“I don’t wanna go.”
“You’ll have to take that up with your manager.” You click send on an email with more force than necessary.
He pushes off the doorframe and enters the room, closing the door behind him. The space, never large, shrinks to the size of a confessional.
“I’m taking it up with you.”
You finally look at him. “I’m not your social secretary, Rafayel. I’m your logistics liaison. I arrange transport, not your social calendar.”
“You arrange my environment. The party is part of my environment. I’m telling you it’s detrimental.” He takes another step. The costume, a deep blue inspired by stormy seas, seems to swallow the dim light. “I need you to get me out of it.”
The absurdity of it, the sheer privileged demand, cracks the careful shell of your composure.
“What do you want me to do, Rafayel? Forge a doctor’s note? Stage a fire alarm? You’re a grown man. A superstar. Say no.” you scoff at him.
“It’s not that simple.” A flash of genuine frustration in his eyes.
“It never is with you, is it.” You stand, needing to meet him from a position of less vulnerability. “Everything is a layered drama. A sigh, not a step. A fault line. Well, my job is steps. Concrete, actionable steps. Detrimental to your environment isn’t a workable brief. I don’t want to go isn’t my problem to solve.”
He stares at you, his chest rising and falling with a slow, measured breath.
“You really have built a very high, very cold wall, haven’t you.”
“It isn’t a wall. It’s a job description. One you drafted.”
“And you hate me for it.” It isn’t a question. It is a statement he seems to be turning over, examining for its truth.
“I don’t hate you.” The denial comes out too quick. “I’m indifferent to you. Professionally.”
A slow, humorless smile touches his lips. “Liar.” The word is almost soft. Almost kind. “You watch every practice. You know the exact second I’m going to fall on a jump before I do. You stand in the dark and miss the ice so badly it hurts me to look at you.”
The air leaves the room. He had seen you that night in Seoul. He had understood.
“Stay in your lane.” Your whisper is shaky with humiliation and anger.
“My lane is a sheet of ice.” He fires it back, taking the final step that brings him directly in front of you. The scent of his sweat, cold air, and something uniquely him is overwhelming. “And you’re always just outside of it, in the shadows, with that look on your face. The same one you had when you were ten and couldn’t land your axel. That furious, determined, heartbreaking look. You don’t look at me with indifference. You look at me like I’m the finish line you’ll never cross again, and you can’t decide whether to scream or cry.”
Tears, hot and furious, prick at your eyes. You refuse to let them fall.
“Stop it.”
“Why? Because it’s true?” His hand comes up, not to touch you but to gesture at the space between you, the space that is vibrating with everything unsaid. “This tension you keep trying to ignore... You think it’s all professional frustration. Lingering hurt. Look at me and tell me that’s all it is.”
You can’t. You look at his mouth instead, at the sharp curve of it, and your own lips part on a shaky breath. The tension is a live wire, finally named in the space between you, inseparable from the hurt, woven through it like a poison thread, making the whole tapestry of your feelings for him agonizing and irresistible.
“See.” He murmurs the word, and it lands like a caress. “You can’t do that.”
The door handle jiggles. A voice calls from the other side. “Rafayel? The chairman’s car’s waiting.”
He doesn’t move, his eyes holding yours, waiting for an answer you cannot give.
“Go to your party.” Your voice comes out a broken thing.
The disappointment in his eyes is a more effective punishment than any anger could be. He nods once, sharp and final. The performer’s mask slides back into place, smooth and impervious.
“Of course. Thank you, Liaison.”
He turns and leaves, leaving you alone with the wreckage of his perception. He has seen through every one of your defenses, named every forbidden feeling. And worst of all, he has seen the fear, the deep, childlike fear that keeps you forever in the shadows, forever watching, forever yearning for the ice you are too terrified to ever step onto again. The tour is no longer just a professional obligation. It is a front-row seat to your own exile, and he is the unforgiving mirror forcing you to watch.
The aftermath of Kyoto is a deep freeze. You perform your duties with machine-like precision, speaking only when necessary, your eyes never holding his for more than a second. The party he was forced to attend ended with a minor scandal, reports of him being coolly dismissive of a major sponsor. His manager Thomas is livid, and the tension ripples through the entire team.
You tell yourself his words in that small room were just another manipulation, a prodigy’s attempt to unbalance an opponent. You fortify your walls, brick by emotional brick.
The tour moves to a smaller city for a rare two-day break in the schedule. The arena is older, a local landmark with drafty corridors and the faint perpetual smell of damp concrete and old popcorn. It feels more like the rink of your childhood than the sterile megaplexes you have been moving through, which makes the haunting more acute.
On the second afternoon, a crisis erupts. The local crew, while installing special lighting for a filmed segment, has accidentally severed a primary coolant line for a small secondary practice rink tucked away in the building’s bowels. It isn’t the main arena, but it is where Rafayel had planned an essential, private session with his choreographer to rework part of his free program. The main ice is unavailable, booked for a local competition.
Panicked engineers tell you it will take twelve hours to repair and re-freeze. You are in the bustling corridor, listening to the foreman’s rapid apology, when Rafayel and his choreographer approach.
“What’s the issue?” Thomas’s voice is tight.
“Practice rink is down. Coolant line breach.” You keep your eyes on your tablet. “Unusable for at least twelve hours. The main arena is occupied. The only available ice is at a public rink across town, but it’s open session until nine.”
“An open session. With children and amateurs." Thomas says it more than asks. "Impossible. The security risk, the media exposure—”
“Cancel the session.” Rafayel’s voice is quiet. He is looking past everyone, at the closed doors to the damaged rink.
“We can’t.” His choreographer, a woman named Elara, insists. “The changes for the finale are not working. We must drill them today. The public rink is a circus, but it is ice nonetheless.”
A silent, furious standoff begins between manager and artist. You can feel Rafayel’s frustration building, a storm contained behind his ribs.
“Is it locked?” Rafayel asks suddenly, pointing to the practice rink doors.
“The ice is melting, Rafayel.” You finally look at him. “It’s slush and water over a concrete base. It isn’t safe for anything.”
“I asked if it was locked.”
The foreman shakes his head. “No, sir, but I wouldn’t...”
Rafayel pushes past all of you and shoves the heavy door open. A wave of marginally cooler, damp air drifts out. You follow, the others at your heels.
The sight is dismal. The small oblong sheet of ice is indeed melting, a large dark puddle of water spreading at the far end near the breach, but two-thirds of the surface remains, a milky uneven plane covered in a layer of water that shimmers under the work lights. It is the ghost of a rink.
Rafayel walks to the edge, his boots leaving prints on the wet concrete. He stares at the deteriorating surface, expression unreadable. Then, to your horror, he sits on the boards and starts unlacing his boots.
“What are you doing?” Thomas’s voice borders on panic.
“Ice is still there.” Rafayel pulls off a boot. “Thin. Soft. But it’s there.”
“You’ll break an ankle, for fuck’s sake!” The words rip out of you before you can stop them.
He looks up, and there is a challenge in his eyes. “Then it’ll match yours.”
Before anyone can stop him, he has laced on a pair of skates from his bag, not his competition blades but an older pair.
He steps onto the ice.
It isn’t a glide. It is a surrender. His blade sinks into the soft watery surface immediately, sending up a small spray. He pushes forward, his stroke sluggish, the sound a wet sucking scrape instead of a clean hiss. He looks ordinary. Earthbound. The prodigy brought low by physics.
“This is insane,” Thomas mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose.
But you can’t look away. Rafayel moves with intense, focused caution, testing the give of the ice with each step. He doesn’t attempt a jump, not even a spin. He starts tracing slow large figures, basic school figures, the kind no one practices anymore. A shallow edge, a wobbly change of foot, a teardrop shape left behind in the melting surface. The most fundamental, humble skating imaginable.
And it is the most vulnerable you have ever seen him. The superstar is gone. The petulant artist is gone. Here is just a man, on bad ice, trying to remember the feeling of a blade biting into something solid. Trying to find the sigh in the chaos.
The fear in your chest, the one that lives where your own skating dreams died, twists into something else. It isn’t just fear for him. It is a deep, resonant recognition. This is what it means to love something enough to risk looking foolish, to risk breaking, just to be near it.
Elara, seeing his intent, calls out a sequence of steps; not for the finale, but simple connecting footwork. Rafayel begins to trace them, his movements growing more confident as he learns the language of the dying ice. He won’t fall. He is too connected to it, reading its weaknesses like a poem.
Thomas, after several more minutes of furious whispered argument with Elara, finally throws his hands up.
“Fine. Break your neck. See if I care.”
He shoots you a look that clearly says this is now your problem, before storming out, Elara following with a worried glance back. The heavy door swings shut, leaving you alone in the cavernous, dripping cold with him.
Annoyance spikes through you, sharp and clean. It is easier than fear, easier than that unsettling recognition.
“This is the most reckless, self-indulgent thing I’ve ever seen.” Your voice echoes.
He doesn’t stop his slow, careful tracing of a figure eight. “Noted, Liaison.”
"You’re going to get hurt."
“I’m always hurt.” He says it so matter-of-factly it steals your breath. "Question is whether it’s a useful hurt or a pointless one. This—” He gestures to the decaying ice. “This is useful. It remembers me.”
You hug yourself against the chill, watching as he pushes a little harder, testing the limit of the ice’s strength. He moves into a series of quicker crossovers, building shallow momentum. For a moment he looks like his old self, fluid and powerful, a force of nature meeting a crumbling element.
Then it happens.
The blade of his outside skate catches a fissure in the softening ice, a hidden weakness. Instead of a clean release, it snags. His momentum twists him sideways. There is no dramatic crack, just a sickening wet wrench and a sharp bitten-off grunt as he goes down, his leg folding beneath him. He slides into the growing center puddle with a splash.
You are moving before the sound fades, your own fear forgotten, your shoes skidding on the wet concrete. “Rafayel!”
He is already pushing himself up onto his elbows, his face a mask of pained concentration. But your eyes are locked on his left ankle. The white leather of the skate is already stained a shocking, spreading crimson where it meets his practice pants. A deep gash, likely from his own blade during the twist.
“Don’t move it.” Your voice trembles with an authority born of horrific familiarity. You kneel in the icy water, not caring as it soaks through your trousers. Your hands, professional and steady, go to the skate’s laces. “Let me see.”
“It’s fine.” He grits it out, trying to pull his leg back.
“It is not fine. Look at the blood!” The sight of it, so red against the white, sends a wave of nausea through you. It is a different injury, but the panic is the same: the same helpless dread, the same sight of a skater’s dreams leaking onto the ice. Only this time, it is him.
He blinks up at you, pain glazing his eyes, but something else as well, a startling clarity. “See?” It comes through gritted teeth, a faint pained smirk touching his lips. “Now we match.”
You ignore him, focusing on the injury in front of you, trying not to panic. He finally stops resisting, watching you as you carefully, gently, loosen the laces around the wounded area. Your fingers are steady, but your heart is a wild thing in your throat.
“We need to get you to a hospital. Now.”
“No.” The refusal is instant, absolute.
“Are you insane?! You could need stitches, it could be fractured—”
“I have a competition in four days. Shanghai. I’m getting on that plane and I’m skating.” His eyes are flint, glaring at you through the pain.
The worry curdles into something hotter, darker. “You’ll destroy your ankle. For some... some meaningless exhibition?”
“It is not meaningless!” The roar bounces off the empty walls. He tries to stand, his face going white, and sways. You surge up, catching him under the arm, taking his weight. His body is rigid with pain and fury, leaning into you. “It is the only thing that means anything. You, of all people, should understand that. Or did you forget that, too, when you quit?”
The words are meant to wound, and they do. But beneath the hurt, a realization detonates in your mind, clear and terrifying. This isn’t just about art or competition. This is a man trying to outskate a ghost: the ghost of the boy who left, the ghost of your abandoned potential, the ghost of a shared dream that ended in a crack. He is trying to skate so perfectly, so relentlessly, that he can escape the past. And he will break himself in the process.
The fight leaves you, replaced by a cold, determined exhaustion. “Fine. No hospital. But you are not skating on this. And you are getting off this ice right now.”
It is a struggle. He is taller, heavier, but you are fueled by a furious feeling and adrelanile. Half-dragging, half-supporting him, you get him off the melting surface and onto the rubber matting. You don’t call for help. This, somehow, feels like it has to stay between you.
The journey to his hotel suite is a silent, tense ordeal. In his room, you deposit him on the edge of the plush bed.
“I’ll get the first aid kit from my room. Don’t move.”
When you return, he has managed to get the skate off. The wound is deep, still oozing blood, and the ankle is already swelling, an ugly purple bloom against his skin. The sight makes your own ankle ache in sympathy.
You work in silence, kneeling before him. You clean the cut with antiseptic wipes, your touch efficient. He doesn’t flinch, but you see the muscles in his jaw jump.
“You’re being stupid.” You don’t look up as you apply a sterile pad.
“I know.”
“You could end your career.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why?” You look up then, your hands stilling. The frustration and hurt are plain on your face. “Why push it until you break? Just to prove you can?”
He is quiet for a long moment, watching you tend to him. The anger has bled out of him, leaving only a profound weariness.
“Because the only thing worse than breaking is stopping. And I don’t know how to stop.” His voice softens. “You... You learned how. I never did.”
The confession hangs in the air. You begin to wrap the bandage around his ankle, your movements slower, more deliberate. The intimacy of the act is unbearable. Your fingers brush against his skin, feeling the heat of the inflammation. He is in your care, vulnerable, and it strips away every last pretense of professional distance.
“You’re a mess,” you whisper, more to yourself than to him.
A pained, almost-smile touches his lips. “You’ve mentioned.”
You finish the bandage and sit back on your heels, looking at your work, at him. The mighty Rafayel, brought low, trusting you to patch him up. The tension is still there, but it has changed. It isn’t a wall between you anymore. It is the very air in the room, charged with shared history, with pain, with a terrifying and undeniable closeness.
You are frustrated. You are hurt. You are desperately worried. And as you look at his pale, stubborn face, you realize the most terrifying thing of all. You are not indifferent to him. You care. Deeply.
And that changes everything.
The silence in your own room that night is absolute and suffocating. Every nerve feels scraped raw from the adrenaline of his fall, from the intimacy of bandaging his wound, from the weight of his confession. You have just begun the futile attempt to quiet your mind when your phone lights up on the nightstand, vibrating with an unknown number.
You know.
“Yes.” Your voice comes out flat.
There’s a pause before his voice echoes on the other end, strained and tighter than before. “It hurts...”
You close your eyes. “Take the anti-inflammatories in the kit I left.”
“I did.” Another pause, filled with shallow breath. “It’s not helping.”
There is a hesitance there, a boyish reluctance to admit weakness so at odds with the arrogant superstar. It is that crack in his armor that has you swinging your legs out of bed and leaving your room.
When you enter his room, the scene is dimly lit by a single bedside lamp. He is propped up against the headboard, shirtless, the sheets tangled around his waist. A fine sheen of sweat coats his chest and forehead, catching the low light. The bandage on his ankle is starkly white against his skin.
“You’re sweating.” You cross to him immediately. You press the back of your hand to his forehead, then his cheek. His skin is warm, but not alarmingly so. It is the heat of pain, of a body fighting inflammation. The touch is meant to be clinical, but the sensation of his skin under your hand sends a jolt through you.
“No fever.” You murmur it more to yourself than to him, pulling your hand away too quickly.
“Just the brilliant feeling of my own dumb decisions.” He attempts a smirk. It turns into a wince halfway through.
You busy yourself with the kit, avoiding looking at the expanse of his bare shoulders, the defined lines of his torso. You shake out a stronger painkiller and hand it to him with a glass of water. Your fingers brush.
“You need to keep it elevated properly.” You rearrange the pillows with brisk efficiency, then, against your better judgment, gently lift his injured leg to rest on them. Your hands are careful around the bandage.
“Thomas can’t know,” he says, watching your movements.
The spark of annoyance flares back. “Don’t be childish. He’ll know the moment you try to walk to the team meeting tomorrow. Or do you plan to perform your next miracle and skate on a slashed ankle?”
‘I’ll manage.”
“You’ll collapse.’ You finally look at him. “And then it’ll be a bigger story, a bigger scandal, and you’ll be forced into a hospital anyway. What is the point of this stubbornness? To prove how much pain you can endure? I already know that, Rafayel. I’ve always known.”
The fight bleeds out of him again, leaving exhaustion in its wake. He looks away, toward the dark window. “The point is one more day where it’s just an injury and not a problem for them to solve. One more day where I’m not a defective product.”
The starkness of the phrase—defective product—leaves a hollow ache in your chest. You sit on the edge of an armchair, a few feet from the bed, the fight gone out of you too. The quiet of the room settles, different now, charged with a fragile stillness.
“What was it like?” he asks after a long moment, his voice quiet. ‘After. When you... stopped.”
The question surprises you. He is probing, gently, into the ruins of your past.
“Lonely.” The truth slips out before you can craft a deflection. “Then loud. College, internships, learning to be a person who wasn’t defined by a rink schedule. It was like learning to walk on land after living at sea. Everything felt too slow. Too heavy.”
He nods slowly, as if imagining it. “I went to a sports academy in Switzerland. All glass-rinks and schedules and efficiency. They called it high-performance nurturing.” A short, humorless sound at the back of his throat. “It was a factory.”
He picks at the hem of the sheet.
“I had a technical coach, a fitness coach, a nutritionist, a media trainer, a psychologist. Not one of them ever asked if I liked the music for my programs.”
The sadness you feel is a quiet, surprised thing. You had pictured his life as a gilded ascent, not a sterile, monitored climb.
“Did you? Like the music?”
“Sometimes. Didn’t matter, though. The music was chosen for marketability.” He looks back at you, blue-pink eyes reflecting the lamplight. “The only program music I ever chose for myself was the one I skated the day you watched. At the White Dove. The oceanic piece.”
Your breath catches in your throat, suddenly dry. That piece had been all longing and turbulent beauty. You had thought it was a masterpiece crafted for him. To know he chose it himself… it changes its color in your memory.
“Why that one?” you whisper.
He holds your gaze, and the space between the chair and the bed seems to evaporate.
“Because it sounded like something I’d lost. Something deep, and stormy, and... present. Something I need in my life.”
The air grows thick. You are both speaking in codes now, about voids and choices and shared, silent understandings. You want to retreat, to pull the hurt around you like a shield against this disarming vulnerability. He is making it impossible.
“You shouldn’t have left without a word.” The old wound pulses behind your sternum. “A note. A call. Anything...”
“I know.” There is no defense in his voice, just a heavy acceptance. “I was a coward. I thought if I didn’t say goodbye, it wasn’t real. That I could just... pause you. Pause us. Come back to it later.”
“You can’t pause people.’
“Realizing that now.” His voice is so soft it is almost inaudible. “Realizing a lot of things now. With you here.”
Your heart is pounding. You are acutely aware of everything about him. The rhythm of his breathing. The shadow of his lashes on his cheeks. The way he is looking at you, not with the artist’s assessment or the star’s detachment, but with a raw open focus that feels like a physical touch on your skin. The room is too quiet. Too small. The years of distance are collapsing in on themselves, and you are at the epicenter.
You don’t know who moves first.
Maybe you lean forward to stand, to break the spell. Maybe he reaches out. But suddenly the space is gone. His hand is cradling the back of your head, his fingers tangling in your hair, and your mouth is on his.
It isn’t gentle. It is desperate, a landslide of everything unsaid: the hurt, the anger, the dizzying attraction, the childhood admiration, the profound aching loneliness for a self and a life only the other had ever known. It tastes like salty tears and painkillers and the faint taste of his sweat. It is consuming.
And then it is over. You break apart, gasping, staring at each other from inches away. His eyes are wide, his lips parted, mirroring your own shock.
The silence rushes back in, roaring in your ears.
You stumble to your feet, your chair scraping loudly against the floor. Your head is a chaotic mess of sensation and betrayal, of your own carefully nurtured resentment, of the professional lines you swore to hold.
“This is a mistake.” The words come out frail and meaningless.
He says nothing, just watches you, his expression unreadable again, but his chest rising and falling rapidly.
You turn and flee, leaving the door ajar behind you, the ghost of his touch on your lips and the terrifying, echoing truth in the silent room.
A mistake it might be, but it has changed the fault line between you irrevocably. It has made it a living, breathing thing. And you are now standing right on top of it.
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Synopsis: You sit high in the White Dove Ice Arena, swallowed by a crowd that came for a legend—while you came for the boy you used to share a rink with. Rafayel skates a flawless program that looks like fire against white ice, and it should feel like closure… except it doesn’t. Not when every clean landing reminds you of the day your own dream ended.
Content warnings: Angst, hurt/no comfort (for now), reunion, confrontation, mentions of a career-ending injury, mentions of physical pain/recovery, misunderstandings, grief-adjacent vibes (loss of a dream/identity), flashbacks/memory triggers of being left behind, abandonment issues, unresolved feelings
Word count: 6.3k
Author's note: I've long since wanted to write some Rafayel angst with pain and misunderstandings and also been obsessed with the idea of him being an Ice skater:3 he just fits the part sooo well, especially if we pair it with pain and suffering<3 pls forgive me raf mains, I love my fishie<3
I will post 2-3 chapters a week~ stay tuned :3 alsooo the tags will change with each chapter, eventually going into E-rated
The cold of the White Dove Ice Arena is different now.
It isn’t the crisp, promising chill of morning practice from your childhood, the one that used to smell of ammonia and rubber matting and your own coffee going slowly cold against the boards. This cold is recycled, pumped through the vents for an audience that paid for the right to be awed. You sit high in the stands, dissolved into a sea of thousands, a former skater nobody is looking at.
Every one of them is here for the same reason.
To witness the legend that is Rafayel.
On the ice, he is a vision of fire and grace. The program is set to something oceanic, all swelling strings and crashing crescendos, and he moves through it with that preternatural fluidity that makes the difficult seem like nothing at all. The quadruple lutz arrives clean, the soaring axel cleaner still, each blade meeting the ice with a soft sigh you can almost feel from here. The crowd answers in a long roll of sound that breaks against the rink walls.
He finishes on a final spin, one arm extended toward the ceiling, chest moving fast under the costume. From this far up you can still catch the charismatic smile he turns on for the cameras as he bows, and you catch it dropping, too, the moment he skates toward the kiss and cry. What’s left is something neutral, almost apathetic.
He isn’t the boy from your shared rink anymore. He is Rafayel now, the international name, the artist on ice, and you are the one he left in his wake.
Later, with a backstage pass you didn’t ask for hanging from your lanyard, you find yourself wandering the underbelly of the arena. From an open door near the end of a long, fluorescent corridor, his voice drifts out. He is on the phone with someone who sounds like a manager, in the middle of a light, dismissive argument about boring sponsor events, about why he should have to attend yet another one this month. You stop just short of the doorway, your heart a trapped bird in your ribs.
“If you’re going to lurk in the hallway, you might as well come in.” His voice carries the same teasing lilt it always did, only drier around the edges. “Unless you’re a particularly lost fan. Security’s gotten lax.”
You push the door open.
He is half-turned away, rummaging through a duffel bag, his purple hair damp at the ends from sweat and no longer on the phone. When he finally glances over and registers who is standing in the doorway, the change is small and instant. The careless, performative charm slips off him in the space of a breath. His blue-pink eyes widen, just for a fraction, before something more guarded settles into the lines of his face.
It’s a look you remember. The one he used to wear when he was pretending something didn’t matter to him. When he was hiding.
“Oh.” The single syllable lands flat in the cold air. “It’s you.”
Your mind goes back without your permission. You are ten, gripping the boards of a colder, smaller rink, watching the coaches fawn over the new boy. Rafayel, they keep whispering. A natural. A once-in-a-generation talent. He is eleven, already moving with an effortless ease you have to strain for, his jumps already higher than yours, his spins faster.
He skates past you, smirking, his voice taking on that singsong cadence he saves for needling you. “Your toe pick is dragging.” Or, in the same lilt, “You’re thinking too hard again. Your face is all scrunched up.”
It was infuriating at first. He made it look like play. For you, every skill was a battle carved out of the ice by will alone.
Back in the dressing room, the silence stretches taut between you, thinned out by all the years. He turns back to his bag and pulls out a simple white shirt, the movement deliberately casual.
“You watched my performance.”
“It’s hard to miss you. You’re everywhere these days.” Your voice comes out steadier than you feel.
He shrugs, a graceful lift of one shoulder. “People like pretty things that move fast. It’s not complicated.” His gaze sharpens then, lands on you and stays. “I heard you stopped skating. After... everything.”
The words, so blunt, land somewhere old and unhealed. The injury isn’t just in your ankle anymore, hasn’t been for a long time. The memory comes for you before you can stop it.
You are fifteen. It is the day before the Junior National Qualifiers, and the rink is empty except for the two of you, both taking final practice sessions. You are attempting a risky triple axel combination, pouring everything you have into it. Rafayel is lounging on the bleachers, supposed to be resting, watching you with interest.
You take off into the first jump, land it shakily, and push through for the second. The landing foot betrays you with a sickening twist and a crack that echoes through the hollow arena, and then you are crumpled on the ice with the pain rushing up your leg in waves.
His skates cut across the ice in an instant. The smugness is gone from his face, replaced by a pale, wide-eyed panic you have never seen on him before.
“Hey. Hey, look at me. Don’t move your leg.” His voice is low, urgent, his hands hovering uselessly above you. The coaches are running. He stays there, a fixed point in your whirling pain. “You’re going to be okay.” He says it more to himself than to you.
The next day he leaves for an international training camp in Europe. You get a cast and a medical retirement letter. Your last image of him is a distant figure being ushered into a car by men in suits, not looking back.
“I did stop.” You say it in the present, the old ache twisting inside you. “My ankle wouldn’t hold enough for me to continue.” You look to the side, biting the inside of your cheek. “Not everyone gets a fairy tale ending.”
Something flickers over his features that could be irritation, could be guilt; you can’t tell which.
“Fairy tales are boring.” His tone returns to that deliberately light, childish petulance. He pulls his shirt on. “And most of them have terrible endings when you read the original text. So.” There’s a pause before he continues. “Are you here to reminisce about the good old days, or to ask why I never called.”
The question hangs in the air, charged with years of unsaid things. The boy who used to hide his concern behind teasing has grown into a man who hides his complications behind a facade of careless artistry. The tension between you is something living, forged in shared childhood dreams and fractured by a single twist on the ice.
“I didn’t come here for an answer.” Your voice is steadier than you expect. “Or for pity.”
It is mostly true. You came to see the myth everyone is entranced by, not the boy you used to spend your days with on the rink.
“I was curious about the spectacle tonight. And you were right. People do like pretty things that move fast.”
A muscle twitches in his jaw. The childish petulance solidifies into something colder, more polished. He leans back against the vanity and folds his arms across his chest, the gesture casual, the effect of a barricade meant to put more space between you.
“So you paid for a ticket and a backstage pass, just for curiosity’s sake.”
He makes it sound like the most foolish thing he has ever heard. You can’t quite name what it is about this version of him standing in front of you after all these years, but your chest lurches painfully.
“It was complimentary.” The defensiveness rises before you can catch it. “From the event sponsor. My company handles their logistics.”
“Ah.” He nods slowly, as if you have just confirmed something for him. “So you’re not in skating at all now. You ferry other people’s dreams around in boxes. How practical.”
The words come soft and slicing. It is not hard to guess he is aiming for somewhere tender, but the why of it is a mystery to you.
The old wound, the one that lives deeper than bone, throbs inside your chest. He is expertly avoiding the heart of it, picking instead at the edges of your present.
You mirror his posture, folding your own arms across your chest, a feeble defense against the cold of the room and the cold of him.
“It’s a living. Not all of us can make a living from being pretty on ice.”
A short, humorless laugh escapes him. “You think that’s all this is?” He pushes off the vanity in one fluid step toward you. The space between you crackles with a sudden, dangerous charge. “You, of all people, should know better. Or did you hit your head on the ice too many times?”
It is a month before your injury. Late-night practice. He is supposed to be gone, but he is still there, leaning on the boards as you drill your step sequence, your blades etching a furious, complicated pattern into the ice. You are so focused you do not notice him watching until you finish, chest heaving from the strain.
“You’re doing it wrong.” His voice comes uncharacteristically quiet.
“I’m doing it exactly as choreographed.” You are panting, irritated.
He shakes his head, a rare, serious look in his heterochromatic eyes. “No. You’re performing the steps. That’s all. You’re not telling the story.”
He skates out, then. Not to show off. To demonstrate a single, simple crossover.
“It’s not a step.” His voice goes low, almost private. “It’s a sigh. See?”
For one fleeting moment, it is not a prodigy talking down to an underdog. It is one artist whispering a secret to another.
The memory makes the present Rafayel feel like a crude imitation of himself.
“I know exactly what it takes.” Your voice is low, defensive. “I also know what it costs. You just left before the bill came due.”
All pretense of lightness vanishes from his face. For a second he looks startlingly young, like the boy who saw you fall and your dreams shatter with you. Then his expression shutters closed.
“You think I didn’t pay?” His voice goes dangerously soft. “You think getting on that plane was free?”
This is the confrontation you had not braced for. This quieter, needle-fine prodding. Both of you are expertly avoiding the real issue, the weeping sore at the center of all of this: the fall, the abandonment, the silence of the years that followed. Instead, you circle it like wolves, jabbing at each other’s choices, using the present to punish the past.
“I have no idea what you paid, Rafayel.” You finally speak his name. It feels foreign on your tongue. “You never said. You just disappeared. The prodigy got his golden ticket while the underdog got a metal plate in her ankle and a pamphlet on career transition. It’s not a complicated story.”
He turns away from you and runs a hand through his damp hair. His reflection in the lighted mirror looks tired, the superstar glamour stripped away in the harsh light of the dressing room.
“You wanted a fairy tale.” He repeats it, his back still to you. “A dramatic, heartfelt goodbye. A promise to write. Life isn’t a program set to music. Sometimes the music just... stops.”
“My music stopped the moment I fell.” The words escape before you can lock them away.
He goes very still. The only sound is the hum of the lights. When he finally speaks, he does not turn around.
“So did mine.”
The confession hangs there, incomprehensible. How could the music have stopped for him? He is the one who never fell. He is the one currently bathing in the roar of adoring crowds.
Before you can demand an explanation, before you can claw past the avoidance and force a real answer out of him, he moves. He picks up his skate bag, the movement decisive.
“I have a sponsor dinner. The kind where I have to be pretty and say boring things.”
He walks to the door, pauses with his hand on the frame, and does not look back.
“The Rafayel you knew at that rink.” His voice goes flat and final. “The one who knew your step sequence was a sigh and not a step. He didn’t get on that plane. He stayed on the ice with you.”
And then he is gone, leaving you alone in the cold room with nothing but the echo of his blades and the ghost of a boy he claims was also left behind.
The confrontation has not ended in a clash, the way you expected. It has ended in a vanishing act. The old wound inside you has not just reopened. It has been freshly salted, aching with a new and confusing kind of loneliness.
The news comes less than twenty-four hours later. A calendar invite from your director, marked high-priority. Project Starlight Gala: Liaison Assignment.
You sit in a sleek, glass-walled conference room while the morning sun glares off the polished table. Around you, the marketing and events teams buzz with frenetic energy. The sponsor is a luxury watch brand known for backing sports artists, and they had been thrilled with the visibility of the arena event. Now they want a larger spectacle. A black-tie gala at the city’s modern art museum, culminating in a private, press-only exhibition skate by their star ambassador.
“It’s a multi-layered operational challenge.” Your director clicks through her presentation. “Museum venue logistics, celebrity handling, press coordination, and the technicalities of installing a temporary ice rink for the exhibition segment. We need a single point of contact. Someone who can interface with the client, the venue...” She pauses, clicks to a full-screen, breathtaking image of Rafayel mid-jump. “...and the talent.”
A junior manager pipes up. “We need someone unflappable. Someone who understands rink logistics and can manage high-profile personalities.”
A beat of silence settles over the room. You keep your eyes on your notebook, tracing the edge of a page, trying your hardest to look calm and professional despite the conversation in the dressing room still ringing in your ears.
Then the client representative speaks. She is sharp-eyed, in a tailored suit. “There’s another factor. At the post-event debrief, Mr. Qi was asked about his comfort level with the expanded campaign. He was... particular, so to say.” She glances down at her tablet. “He said, and I quote: ’If you need someone who doesn’t gawk and actually knows which end of a skate is sharp, use the one from your logistics team. The one who was backstage at my latest show.’” She looks up from her tablet, and your stomach turns when you make eye contact with her. “He then confirmed your first name.”
A cold understanding trickles down your spine. This is not a request for a helping hand or for professional assistance; it is a requisition.
“He requested you by name?” Your director’s tone is a mix of surprise and dawning opportunism. “Well. That’s excellent then. It shows a level of trust. Given your familiarity with the sport itself, and your proven competency, you’re the obvious choice.” Her words land on you like a slap. “You’ll be the dedicated liaison for Project Starlight. All communication with Mr. Qi’s team and the man himself will go through you.”
The walls of the room close in on you. This isn’t curiosity or a chance encounter anymore. It is a contract, a job description, a box drawn around you both with a very expensive pen.
You know, deep down, that he hasn’t done this to be kind, or out of any nostalgia. He has done it with calm, cold precision, clearly wanting to prove something. If you are going to bleed, his actions seem to declare, you are going to do it in a controlled environment. On his terms. Under rink lights and NDAs.
The next forty-eight hours are a blur of site visits, production calls, and fabric swatches. Your first official interaction with his campaign is a three-way call with his manager, Thomas.
“Rafayel has approved the museum’s east pavilion for the ice installation.” Thomas’s voice is clipped and efficient as he fills you in on the essentials. “But he has stipulations about the temperature. It must be precisely minus five point five degrees Celsius, not the standard minus four. And the ice must be white, not clear, for the lighting design. You will coordinate this with the technicians. He will not perform on inferior ice.”
“I’ll ensure the specifications sheet is updated.” Your professional voice is a steady mask you try your hardest to hold.
“Good. He also wants the final run-through to be closed. No sponsors, no publicist. Only essential operational staff. And you.”
The line hums quietly. “Understood.”
“He’s picky and opinionated about his space,” Thomas adds, a note of warning sneaking into his tone. “See that it’s respected.”
The gala night arrives in a whirlwind of tense coordination. You stand in the museum’s vast east pavilion, now transformed: a pristine rectangle of white ice gleams under haunting, aquatic blue lighting, and the surrounding space is filled with murmuring guests in glittering attire, champagne flutes in hand. You are in a tailored black suit, a comms earpiece whispering updates into your ear, the very picture of professionalism.
From the shadowed entrance, he emerges. Not in skating gear, but in a deep aubergine tuxedo that makes his hair look like spilled ink and wine. The crowd parts for him, a whispered current of awe following his path. He is the spectacle, effortlessly playing his part: accepting a compliment with a faint smile, posing for a photo with a sponsor.
The rest of the gala passes in a blur of controlled chaos under your guise. You are conducting an orchestra you didn’t choose, your comms earpiece a constant, tinny stream of demands. Catering is behind schedule at Table Six. The lead photographer needs access to the south balcony. The temperature on the ice has risen by point three degrees.
Through it all, your awareness of him is a second, more persistent thing. You feel his gaze like a physical touch across the crowded room as he gives a bland interview, from the shadows near the ice while you confer with a technician. Each time you look up, your eyes snag on his, already watching. The intensity is not the warm, teasing observation of childhood; it is cooler now, more analytical, as if he is studying a reaction in a petri dish, his petri dish.
You make a point of looking through him, your face a polite mask of focus, before turning sharply back to your tablet. The confusion and hurt from the dressing room have congealed into something simpler, something easier to carry: annoyance. He engineered this entire situation without giving a thought to how you would feel about it. The least he could do is not stare.
Yet your body betrays you in tiny, traitorous ways. A flush of heat crawls up the back of your neck when you feel him approach from behind, before you have even heard his low voice giving a directive to his manager. Your breath hitches when, navigating through a press of guests, the side of his hand brushes against yours.
You jerk your hand away as if burned, muttering a terse “Excuse me,” without meeting his eyes. You catch the faintest, most maddening curve of a smile on his lips before you turn away.
He isn’t the boy you knew, you repeat to yourself like a mantra, checking the ice for the third time. That boy stayed on the ice. This man is a stranger who orders custom ice and uses people as pawns in a corporate game.
But the memory of the boy who saw a sigh in a step sequence is the ghost haunting every interaction now, making the stranger’s proximity all the more disorienting.
Then comes his exhibition skate. As he glides through the haunting blue light on the ice, you force yourself to watch the technical aspects you are supposed to be in charge of, not him. The quality of the edge trails on the white ice. The synchronization of the lighting cues with his movements. When he glides to a stop right in front of you, his breath clouding the cold air between your faces, you do not flinch. You give a single, small, professional nod, as if approving a stage effect.
His eyes narrow, almost imperceptibly. Then he pushes off.
The final obligation of the night is a small, post-gala reception in a velvet-roped section of the museum’s lounge. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and the cloying scent of expensive perfume. You are there to ensure the sponsor’s executives are happy, a role that feels like being a docent in a gallery of your own ruin.
He holds court in the center of a plush sofa, one arm draped along the back, a glass of something clear and untouched in his other hand. He is the picture of indolent charm, listening to a silver-haired man boast about his golf handicap.
You are by the bar, reviewing the load-out timeline with a staff member, when you feel his presence at your shoulder.
"My manager tells me you corrected the Zamboni driver on the water pH levels." His voice goes low, low enough that only you can hear it over the jazz piano. “Still a perfectionist, I see.”
You refuse to turn. “It’s my job to ensure the specifications you demanded are met, Mr. Qi.”
The formal title feels like a weapon in your mouth. Out of the corner of your eye, you see his fingers tighten slightly around his glass.
“My specifications are the only reason you’re here.”
And whose fault is that, you want to snap. Instead, you finally turn to face him. The proximity is a shock. You can see the faint, tired smudges under his eyes, the absolute blandness of his expression that is hiding a world of unspoken things. The scent of him wraps around you.
The tension between you is not a spark. It is a slow, deep ache, a gravitational pull you have to consciously resist. It is infuriating.
“I’m aware.” Your voice goes flat. “Is there an issue with the specifications?”
He holds your gaze for a long, silent moment, searching for something, the girl from the rink perhaps, buried under the professional veneer.
“The ice was acceptable.” His tone is dismissive, but his eyes do not leave yours. “For a temporary installation.”
“Glad it met your exacting standards.” You want to step back, but the bar counter is pressing into your spine. “If that’s all, I need to confirm the secure transport for the timepieces.”
You move to leave. His voice stops you, low and absolute.
“A car is taking me back to the Weston Hotel. Be in it.”
It is not a question. It is a command, delivered in that same calm, cold tone. The entitlement of it, the sheer audacity of the demand, twists your stomach.
“My responsibilities are here until the breakdown is complete.” Every word comes out chilled.
"Your most important responsibility is to me for the duration of this campaign." He finally takes a sip of his drink, eyes watching you over the rim. “And I’m leaving. We have the preliminary meeting for the Asia tour segment at 8am. My hotel. You’ll need the briefing materials." He sets the glass down on the bar, a silent punctuation. "The contract is very clear about access and availability, Miss Liaison. Be in the car in ten minutes."
He turns and melts back into the crowd of admirers, leaving you standing there, your cheeks hot with a mix of fury and a shameful, unwanted thrill at the command. He is boxing you in, using the contract, his fame, the entire apparatus around him as walls. You are trapped in the professional context he designed, and with every passing moment the line between your professional duty and his personal excavation of the past grows thinner, more dangerous, charged with a tension you can no longer ignore.
For ten suspended seconds you consider defiance. Let him fire you. Let him explain to the sponsor why their chosen liaison walked away.
But the part of you that is still the underdog, that has fought for every scrap of respect on and off the ice, locks your knees. You will not give him the satisfaction of seeing you break the contract. You finish your debrief with the site manager, your voice miraculously steady, and walk toward the museum’s private exit with the measured steps of a prisoner going to her cell.
The car is a sleek black sedan, idling in the shadows. The driver holds the door open. Inside, Rafayel is a silhouette against the fogged window, the city lights painting streaks of gold and white across his profile. You slide in, putting as much space between you as the luxurious interior allows.
The door thuds shut, sealing you in a silent, tense capsule. The partition is up. The engine purrs as the car pulls into the late-night traffic.
You stare rigidly ahead. “The briefing materials could have been emailed.”
“They could have.” His voice is a quiet rumble in the dark. He doesn’t look at you. “But I prefer to discuss them in person.”
“It’s after midnight.”
“My schedule is not dictated by the sun.” He finally turns his head. The intermittent streetlights flash across his face, revealing that same unreadable expression. “You’re upset.”
It is not a question. It is a clinical observation. The simplicity of it detonates the professionalism you have been clinging to all night.
“Upset?” You hiss the word, turning to face him fully. “You hijack my job, parade me around like a... a trauma consultant for your spectacle, order me into cars like I’m part of your entourage. You don’t get to diagnose my feelings, Rafayel!”
“Then what are they?” His gaze focuses on yours, utterly. “Annoyance. Hurt.” He leans forward, just an inch, the space suddenly charged and claustrophobic. “Or is it just inconvenient, being this close to the ice again. To me.”
His proximity is a live wire. The oceanic scent of him is overwhelming. Your heart hammers against your ribs, a frantic rhythm that is part fear and part something else, magnetic and terrifying. The tension between you is no longer a subtle ache; it is a sharp, dizzying spike. You want to shove him away and clutch the front of his stupid, perfect tuxedo all at once.
“What do you want from me?” The question spills out, stripped bare of pretense. “A performance review? Congratulations? An apology for not being able to keep up with the prodigy?”
Something raw flashes across his face, gone so fast you might have imagined it.
“I want to know what you see when you look at me now.” His voice drops lower. “The legend. The stranger.” A pause, the word hanging. “Or the boy who failed you.”
The air leaves your lungs. Failed you. He has never named it. Never come close. You were so prepared for more barbs, more cold analysis, that this sudden, stark vulnerability disarms you completely.
You are thirteen, huddled on a metal bench after a brutal fall during a practice run-through. It isn’t a bad injury, just a bruised hip and a shattered pride. Everyone else has left for lunch. Silent tears of frustration track cold lines down your cheeks. A shadow falls over you.
Rafayel stands there, holding two paper cups of hot chocolate from the vending machine. He doesn’t say you’ll get it next time or that jump is too hard for you. He just sits down beside you, hands you a cup, and stares at the empty rink.
“The ice is jealous.” His voice is utterly serious. “It doesn’t like it when we fly. So it grabs our feet.”
It is the first time he has not teased you for falling. The first time he has shared a piece of his private, poetic world with you. You drink the terrible, watery chocolate in a silence that feels like understanding.
The memory is a sucker punch. The man in this car holds none of that boy’s tentative gentleness. And yet, you find yourself swayed still.
“I don’t know who I see,” you whisper, the fight draining out of you, replaced by a profound exhaustion. “The boy I knew wouldn’t have used a contract to force a conversation.”
He leans back, his face disappearing into shadow again. “The boy you knew was too much of a coward to have it.” The words are barely audible. The car slides to a smooth halt under the glittering portico of the Weston Hotel. “My suite. Ten minutes. The tour brief is... extensive.”
He doesn’t wait for you to agree. He exits the car, leaving you wrapped in the lingering warmth of his presence and the echo of his confession. He has called himself a coward. He has named the failure.
The driver looks at you patiently in the rearview mirror. You could tell him to take you home. You could quit in the morning. But the part of you that has to see the hard thing through, the part that is now electrically aware of the man Rafayel has become, nods.
“Ten minutes.” Your voice is not quite your own.
You are no longer trapped only by the contract. You are trapped by a need to know who he is now, what he means, why, after all this time, the wound he reopened feels less like an old injury and more like a nerve waking up after a long sleep.
The ten minutes feel like a lifetime. You sit in the idling car, watching the glittering hotel entrance swallow him whole. Your hands tremble slightly in your lap. To go up is to step into his gilded cage, to continue this agonizing excavation. To leave is to let him win, to confirm you are still the one who runs from the hard things.
You go up.
The suite is what you expected. Sprawling, minimalist, coldly elegant. Floor-to-ceiling windows showcase the city’s skyline like a conquered kingdom. He has discarded his tuxedo jacket and tie. He stands by the window, a glass of water in hand, the expanse of the room feeling vast and suffocatingly small at once.
“Shut the door.” He doesn’t turn. “The draft is annoying.”
You do, the solid click of the latch sounding unnaturally loud in the silence. You stay by the door, an unwilling visitor refusing to commit to entering fully.
“The brief.”
He sets his glass down on a chrome table with a sharp tap. “Forget the brief.”
“You demanded I come here for—”
“I demanded you come here because I’m tired of you looking at me like a stranger.”
He turns, and the controlled facade is fractured. Anger, raw and impatient, lights his eyes.
“You stand there in your perfect suit, with your perfect professionalism, and you look right through me. It’s infuriating.”
The laugh that escapes you is brittle, sharp.
“What do you want me to see, Rafayel? The boy who shared hot chocolate? He’s gone. You made sure I knew that in the dressing room. You told me he stayed on the ice. So who am I looking at? Your press-ready version? The one who uses people as logistical chess pieces?”
He crosses the room in a few quick strides and stops just inside your personal space. The anger simmers, mixed with something more desperate.
“You think you’re the only one who got left behind?” His voice is low. “You think you’re the only one who paid? I was shipped to a different continent. Every move I made, every breath, every relationship was a line item on someone’s balance sheet. The ice was the only thing that was mine, and even that turned into a product." His voice cracks, just once. “And the one person who understood what it meant... I had to leave her there, broken, because my handlers said sentiment was a liability. So don’t lecture me about cost.”
The word her hangs between you, a grenade whose pin had been pulled years ago. The hurt comes in a wave so intense it steals your breath. It isn’t just the abandonment; it is the brutal reminder of it.
“So I was a liability,” you whisper, the words like ash in your mouth.
“No!” He drags a hand through his hair, frustrated. “You were the only real thing. And in that world, real things get broken. So they removed you. They removed me from you. And I was fifteen, and terrified, and I let them.” It sounds, somehow, like a confession of war crimes. “My music didn’t just stop when you fell. It inverted. Every note after that was an echo of that crack.”
The confession is too huge, too terrible. It paints his fame as a gilded prison, his artistry as a ghost. It is asking for a compassion you are too raw to give.
“And that makes it okay?” Your own anger rises to meet his, a shield against the pity threatening to soften you. “You become this... this king of ice, and you think admitting it’s lonely up there is some kind of absolution? You requested me by name to what, Rafayel? To get a front-row seat to your suffering? To force me to feel sorry for you so I’d stop being angry that you left me alone in a hospital?”
“I want you to be angry!” The roar startles in the quiet room. He closes the last of the distance, his hands coming up to grip your arms, not to hurt, but to shake you into seeing him. “Be furious! Hate me! Scream at me! Anything is better than this... this polite, corpse-like tolerance. You used to burn, even when you were falling. Now you’re just... empty.”
You are not empty. You are a nova of feeling, and his hands on you are the catalyst. The anger, the years of hurt, the confounding, unwanted attraction; it all fuses into a white-hot current. You can feel the heat of his palms through your sleeves, the tension in his fingers.
“Let go of me.”
“No.”
The challenge is electric. You shove against his chest. He doesn’t budge. He is solid, immovable. The push brings your bodies flush. You can feel the rapid beat of his heart against your palms, see the storm in his blue-pink eyes up close.
“You don’t get to decide how I grieve.” Your voice trembles with the effort of holding back a scream, or maybe a sob. “You don’t get to poke at the wound you made and complain that the scar isn’t pretty enough for you.”
“It’s not a scar.” His gaze drops to your lips for a heartbeat before snapping back up. “It’s a fault line. And it’s in me, too. We’re standing on it right now. And you’re so busy pretending you don’t feel the quake that you’re going to let us both collapse.”
The truth of it is undeniable. The tension is no longer just emotional or of the past. It is in the scant inches between your mouths, in the shared, too-quick breaths fogging the small space between you, in the way your body is betraying you by not pulling away, by leaning into the heat of him.
You hate him and you ache for him, both at once, both as true as each other.
“What do you want?” The question comes broken.
His answer is not in words. His gaze holds yours, captive. One hand releases your arm and comes up. His thumb brushes, so softly it is agony, over the furious line of your eyebrow, then down to trace the tense corner of your mouth. A painter’s touch, studying texture.
“I want the sigh back,” he whispers, and his voice is ragged. “Not the step. The sigh.”
And there it is, the core of all of this. He is not just asking for the past. He is asking for the lost language between you, the secret understanding that existed only on that old, imperfect ice. He is asking for the part of you that only the boy he used to be ever knew how to find.
You are frozen, caught between the instinct to surrender to that touch and the terror of what it would mean. To give him that is to admit the wound is still open, that the girl who sighed on the ice is still alive somewhere beneath the logistics manager. It is to make all this pain a beginning, not an end.
Before you can speak, before you can move, his hand falls away. He takes a full step back, the space feeling arctic without his heat. The mask of the weary, controlled superstar slides back into place, but it is fissured now, glimpses of raw need showing through.
“The Asia tour.” His voice is once more a neutral, professional instrument. “It starts in Tokyo in three weeks. You’ll receive the packet tomorrow. There will be sixteen events. I’ll need you there.”
It is not a request; it is a statement of inevitability. He is giving you a timeline, a battlefield, and a choice: continue this agonizing dance across continents, or finally walk away for good.
He turns back to the window, dismissing you. “The car will take you home.”
You leave without a word, your body humming with the aftershocks of the quake. The wound is no longer just open. It is pulsating, aligned with the fault line that runs directly to him.
And you have just agreed, by silence, to follow its treacherous path wherever it leads.
if you liked it, you can buy me a coffee here! it would be very appreciated<3: https://ko-fi.com/zaynessbeloved
.ᐟ✧ translations or reposts of my work on tumblr, ao3, or other sites ARE NOT permitted. please do not ask. do not reuse my blogpost headers, dividers, or layouts. these are original designs of my own. thank you!
There’s something addictive about having Rafayel’s pleasure in the palm of your hand, granting or denying him release at the flick of your thumb over his leaking cock.
You always get him trembling tremendously when you play with him, sweating all over his expensive sateen sheets, but oh he only cares about one thing, really. He really, really needs to cum so badly, but his gorgeous girl won’t let him.
Could he really blame you, though? When you look at him so sweetly, praise him in that honeyed voice that drips sweet-nothings into his ear the same way he’s dripping pre-cum all over your hand and his swollen, aching balls.
You’re just as addicted to control as he is, and you’re just so sexy hovering over his body like his, flicking your wrist just so... it makes him go crazy, go desperate to fall over the edge, chasing his orgasm like a child chasing butterflies on a summer’s sunny field.
Except there’s nothing innocent in his mind at the moment, only sex and the ghost feeling of being inside you clouding his mind. His cock is angry and red, twitching uncontrollably every time your thumb moves down his slit. Moans spill from his mouth unguarded, head thrown back enough to tempt you to latch your lips onto his skin.
One kiss, one soft sucking motion over his pulse and he's just gone... fucking into your hand, eyes rolling back and shutting closed, ropes of cum shooting all over his abs and through your fingers as you stroke him gently until he’s shuddering from oversensitivity.
You only chuckle against his neck, swinging your leg over his hips, instantly making him twitch as you drag your wet folds up his cock, smearing every drop of his cum between them. He moans, dazed as he looks up at you.
You only grin down at him, rubbing your clit over his tip as you purr.
if you're wondering what plagues lex's mind for the past few days is metalhead!zayne 🎸
sweet, brilliant, top-of-class & soon-to-be-doctor zayne who no one would have thought has such distinct taste in music, who spends his free time (albeit short in between all his studies) in an underground pub, playing bass guitar 🎸 with his band
who dresses so differently, like he's another person entirely, and you almost can't believe it's really him when you have the opportunity to witness this version of him & his secret little hobby. all leather and chains, mostly black-fitted outfits that has your mouth watering at the sight
who knows what's hidden under his black tee? since he is a career-oriented guy, he has to be careful with permanent changes to his body. so of course, when you get lucky enough to get rid of a piece or two of clothing, you get the shock of your lifetime as you take in his lean body, covered in intricate tattoos
tattoos inked strategically to be easily hidden. tattoos who make him so damn sexy, you have to control yourself from dropping to your knees and lick them and all over his body
who knows? maybe he has more secrets to be discovered. if the nipple piercings are anything to go by...
Fucking with Xavier in the dark of your apartment, going rounds upon rounds of making each other cum, sweat and slick connecting your bodies... your lips to his as he chases your mouth to kiss you... your pussy to his cock as he pounds into you relentlessly, a ring of whiteness forming around his shaft, a mix of your own cum and his.
And the one thing that makes your vision swim as he hits another deep spot inside you is how sweetly he talks into your ear, giving you the chance to choose where to spill yet another impending release.
“O-On me, baby...” you moan, scratching down his back.
He groans into your neck, snapping his hips even faster. You're on the tip of an orgasm yourself, and all you need to cum is feel his teeth catch the juncture of your neck in a bite that is sure to bruise.
Your eyes cross as pain and pleasure shoots through you like lightening, body dragging up and down the mattress as Xavier continues to fuck into your spasming cunt while you milk him greedily.
He waits until the last second to pull out, splashing ropes of his translucent, slowing cum over your pussy and lower belly, rubbing the tip of his cock over your sensitive clit and smearing his cum between your folds.
You love to be covered like this, love the feeling of stickiness, the way his load covers your skin like shooting stars. Because, as you learned early in your sexual relationship, not only does Xavier glow from happiness or excitement, but his cock glows too... and with it, his cum as well.
The first time it happened, it had you so excited and horny that you begged for him to face-fuck you and stroke himself as he came all over your face. Then the next time it was your tits, then your ass cheeks and back, and in the end, there was no inch he hasn't covered.
He smears it over your entrance, having you moan as he dips inside briefly, shooting just a little bit in there too. Meanwhile his fingers gathered some from your belly and smear it around your nipple and then over your lips.
The smirk on his face is one of pure lust and possessiveness, but above that, one of pride when you easily part your lips, tongue peeking out, eager for a taste.
You just give him a dazed smile, tongue circling his two fingers clean, body glowing in the darkness of the bedroom where his cum dries slowly on your skin...
...and then his cock slips inside your warmth again, because there is one more place needed to be marked tonight.
Hello! This is my first time doing any asks, so I'm kinda nervous. I wanted to ask if a little Zayne fluff with a forgetful and often overwhelmed MC is alright (she tries hard not to buy it still gets kinda difficult sometimes)
To be specific, she tends to forget little things like her handkerchief or her id-card, things like that, except for when she makes like exhaustive checklists to ensure that she remembers everything. And sometimes when in a hurry, she sometimes misses to check everything and things happen 😂 And that in turn leads to her feeling overwhelmed and the cycle continues.
Hope I'm doing this ask thingy alright. Have a great day!
hiii cutie~ don't be nervous, this is such a cute idea! wrote this on my lunch break today and exited the app before saving so it got erased and had to rewrite everything 🥲 anywayyy hope you like it! god i love zayne sm
You’re shifting in your seat too much for it to pass as casual, your mind already miles away, and you don’t even notice how hard you’re biting your lip.
But Zayne does.
As he always notices every small thing about you, because it all is important to him, no matter how insignificant you think it is. He always takes note of you, your mood, your thoughts you are reticent to share with him but he knows you’re having.
Like the ones spiraling in your pretty little head right now.
Did you unplug the curling iron you’ve used until the last minute because the front pieces of your hair kept falling weirdly?
Did you turn off all the lights? If you didn’t, you thought of the endless scenarios of danger waiting to happen if some weirdo noticed that.
Not even your lifesaver of a checklist you keep on your phone helps every single time. Sure, it does a great deal in helping keep you calm and keep track of things that need to be done, and would not have you freak out in public (as you did an embarrassing amount of times already).
Zayne took note of it all. Carefully, he takes your hand in his, squeezing lightly. That prompts you to look at him, questioning. The lower lip hunched between your teeth was starting to hurt, but that is the least of your worries.
It is Zayne’s worry, though.
He intertwines your fingers while his other hand comes up gently to pull your lip from in between your teeth.
“Everything’s alright.” he reassures you in his gentle tone, no sign of being annoyed at your distress.
You are on your way to the restaurant he booked weeks ahead for your monthly dine-out date, already running a bit late because of your fussing around the apartment. That is another reason why your mood is so sour.
Zayne is so patient with you. So gentle, so kind. Never the one to make you feel like you are in the wrong for feeling this way. He knows you can’t help it, and he knows just how to help you through it.
Always reaching for you whenever he feels you slipping away into your own head, your own prison where everything goes wrong and everything’s your fault. He pulls you in his embrace, tethers you to him with soothing caresses and gentle kisses.
He doesn’t talk much in these moments. He knows it’ll only make it worse for you, overwhelm you even more so, and that’s the least thing he wants. He knows his presence makes up for it, knows it’s enough when you cling to him and just melt into his body.
He knows you’re struggling, and is also aware of how much you try to sweep it under the rug, try to play it off sometimes. He guesses it’s a defense mechanism you privately developed around people who would get annoyed at you for always overthinking simple things, going back and forth, pacing anxiously.
He swore it to himself he would never make you feel like that. Yet it still hurts him to see you try to make it less than it is, pass it off like it doesn’t make you bite your lip until it bleeds or nails until they’re a mess or tap your feet in an attempt to self-regulate.
So he takes care of things for you.
“I unplugged it,” he tells you, thumb smoothing once over your knuckles. “And the lights. You walked past me to the door twice, so I checked behind you both times.”
You noticed that, too. Somewhere between your anxiety attacks and his tender, soothing hugs, you noticed how he quietly took things into his own hands. You found yourself reaching for your list to go over it for the nth time in a day, and suddenly, there was Zayne there with you, checking things off the list.
Rushing to the Association early in the morning? He would be there with a good morning text and a simple reminder to not forget your Hunter ID at home, because he knew how often that happened and how it messed with your head whenever it would.
Going out with Simone and Tara? Zayne would call you, tell you to dress comfortably, not forget your jacket and keys. Vitamins? He would help set up reminders on your phone and text you just five minutes after they go off to remind you once again, because he knew you would get distracted and forget.
Many such little things, and they mattered to you. So they mattered to him, too.
Zayne is a capable man, so he only took care of small things at first. He didn’t want to make you feel like he thought you incapable of handling things on your own. Never one to push you with anything, he only made it a habit when he was sure you would appreciate it and not feel burdened by it.
You noticed all of it. It made your chest constrict in a tender, aching way. He did it out of love, you knew that. You didn’t need to hear it, his actions were the loudest confessions of love there could be. He loved you so much that he wanted to ease things for you, without waiting for anything in return.
That was the kind of man Zayne was.
Your eyes sting, throat constricting around the words you want to tell him. You love him, so much that it hurts sometimes. You know he knows that, how much you cherish him and everything he does for you.
Words fail you, as they always do. So you act instead.
You bring your joined hands up, kissing the back of his hand softly. He looks at you in quiet surprise, but before he can say something else, you reach over the console and gently bring his face closer.
You plant a sweet, soft kiss to his lips. Smiling as you pull away slightly, thumb tracing the side of his neck.
“We’re already late,” he murmurs against your cheek, recovering far too quickly for someone whose ears are still that red. “Don’t start what you can’t finish.”
MDNI 🔞 rafayel fucks your tits — based on this request!
⋆. — content warnings: canon-compliant, foreplay, tits job, multiple orgasms & overstimulation (he puts himself through both), he cums all over her tits, makes her lick his cum off his fingers, nipple play, he's a freak thats all guys
“Mmm, look at this, cutie,” Rafayel murmurs against your neck, his voice a low rumble that sends shivers through your whole body. His hands, usually so agile with a paintbrush, are now tracing a fiery path across your skin. “Perfect, aren’t they? Such a lovely canvas.”
He leans back slightly, his eyes, usually filled with playful mischief, now hold a deep, possessive glaze. “I just love them,” he confesses, his fingers gently kneading your breasts before moving lower. “These are gonna be my favorite piece to paint tonight.”
You gasp, breath catching in your throat as his touch intensifies. “Rafayel…”
He chuckles, a husky sound that makes your core clench. “What, ma petite artiste? Already flustered, just from this? We’re just getting started.” He leans in, his lips brushing against your ear in a soft exhale. “Don’t tell me you forgot how much I love leaving my mark on my lover.”
His kisses move slowly, trailing a path from your collarbone to the swell of your chest. Each touch feels like a burning brand, claiming you as his own.
“Is this what you wanna paint?” you manage to ask, voice a little breathless.
“Absolutely,” he agrees, his teeth lightly nipping at the skin. “A masterpiece. And only I get to admire it, fully completed.” His gaze travels over you, lingering. “Empty canvas, huh? Not for long.”
He captures your lips in a deep, hungry kiss that wipes away any further protests. His hands are everywhere, demanding and tender all at once, molding your body against his. When he finally pulls back, a faint line of saliva connects your mouths, and his eyes are dark like the depths of the ocean, full of desire.
“See?” he whispers, thumb tracing the curve of your breast. “Already adding color. My favorite shade of pink.” He leans down again, his tongue circling one nipple, feeling it perk further into his mouth. “They’re so responsive. Makes me wanna paint you all over, everywhere.”
You arch into his touch, a soft moan escaping your lips. “A-ah, y-you’re insatiable,” You accuse, though the word is laced with longing more than complaint.
“Yeah I am, only for you,” he counters, his voice rough with emotion. “Especially when you look like this for me. You’ve given me quite a surprise, cutie, showing up all ready for more…” He pauses, his smirk returning as his eyes travel down your body in time with his hand. “How should I repay you?” His fingers dip below your navel, teasing. “Maybe by making sure every inch of you remembers me?”
A shiver runs through you, part pleasure, part anticipation. He loves to tease, to build the tension until you are practically begging. “Don’t hold back,” you challenge, your own voice bolder than you expected. Part of you is just as desperate to feel claimed as his own desire to claim you.
He grins, a flash of white teeth greeting you just as his fingers dip slowly to part your folds. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Tonight, my art will be perfected. Every curve, every dip… all covered in my paint.” He licks his lips, eyes gleaming with want. “You’re really greedy, aren’t you? Not only do you wanna make me surrender, but you also wanna be marked by me.”
His words, usually light and playful, are now heavy with meaning. He is obsessed with leaving his presence on you, a physical manifestation of your heated passion. Your blood sings in response to his intensity. “And what if I am?”
“Then I gladly cooperate,” he concedes, his eyes never leaving yours. “Won’t miss a single spot, cutie. We’ll paint such a masterpiece on your body, together.”
With that, he leans in and his lips met yours once more, marking the beginning of his latest, most intimate masterpiece.
He nudges you back, a gentle pressure that’s still unequivocally a command, his eyes locked on yours after he breaks the kiss. “C’mon, princess,” he whispers, a low growl that makes your whole body shiver. “Wanna give me what I want, don’tcha?”
You can feel the anticipation thrumming under your skin, a counterpoint to the wild beat of your heart. His slender hands are framing your face, tilting you just so. “Eyes on me,” he insists, his voice a low thrum against your chest. “You don’t have permission to look away when I’m about to… well, when I’m about to claim you.”
He traces the line of your jaw, then lets his fingers drift lower, featherlight, over the curve of your collarbone, teasing the sensitive skin there. You gasp, a small, involuntary sound, and his smirk widens. “Such a good girl,” he praises, but there’s a possessiveness to his tone that melts you. “Always so ready for me, aren’t you? You just can’t help yourself.”
You challenge him with a look, a silent dare, and he laughs—a rich, throaty sound that sends shivers right down to your cunt. He leans in, his lips brushing your ear.
“I love watching you,” he confides, his breath warm against your skin. “Love how your skin colors for me… how you track my every move. It’s like you’re just waiting for my approval, waiting for my touch.” He pulls back to see your reaction, knowing his words got you squirming. “Am I right, cutie? You just live for this, for my attention.”
Your breath grows harsher as he moves closer, his body molding against yours, leaving no space between you. He lets out a soft groan, the sound vibrating into your chest. “Trouble, you are,” he accuses, though his eyes are full of adoration. “Always making me want more, want to feel you wrapped around me, clinging just for me.”
His hips move in a teasing movement that has your mind racing, imagining all the ways he wants to take you. His hands cup the curve of your neck, his thumbs rubbing soft circles behind your ears. “Such a perfect fit,” he whispers, his gaze falling to your lips. “Just like you’re made for me, and I’m made to drive you wild. Have you begging.”
You lean into his touch, your body begging for pressure or friction—anything. For the full weight of his adoration. His smirk flashes again, triumphant and deeply possessive. His fingers weave into your hair, pulling your head back gently, exposing your throat. He dips down, tasting just below your earlobe as you let out another breathy moan.
“Good,” he murmurs, satisfied. “That’s what I like to hear. Your little sounds… they tell me everything I need to know, don’t they?”
He pulls back, his eyes dancing mischievously. “Don’t worry, cutie. I’m not gonna let you off easy. I’m gonna make sure you’re painted in my attention, covered in my devotion. Every single part of you… until you’re breathless, crying out for more. That’s my art, after all. And you,” his gaze sweeps over you, intense and consuming, “you’re my favorite thing to paint.”
He urges you back, settling between your legs, his gaze locked on the swell of your breasts. “Miss Bodyguard is being awfully generous today,” he murmurs, a smirk playing on his lips as he takes his cock in hand, stroking it lazily. “I love it when you offer yourself up to me like this...”
You eagerly comply, arching your back to push your breasts together, creating a perfect, soft valley for him. “Go on then,” you whisper, your voice breathless and daring. “Show me what you got.”
He shifts his hips, aligning himself with the valley between your breasts, his dark eyes roaming over the exposed flesh with a hunger that makes your skin tingle. “Let’s spread them, baby,” he breathes, his voice dropping an octave, thick with lust. “You look so eager for me to fuck them. Bet you’re horny as hell right now.”
He grips the soft mounds, fingers sinking in deep, and squeezes them together, molding them around his throbbing length. “Squeeze ‘em for me, cutie. Yeah, wrap ‘em around me—fuck…” He hisses, the friction of skin against skin sending jolts of electricity through his spine. The sight of his cock disappearing between your soft flesh has him panting, his face flushing a deep, adorable pink. “So hot... so tight...”
You comply, soft moans spilling out of you to join his own as you keep your breasts together, squeezing them harder every now and then, having him curse under his breath.
He begins to glide through your cleavage, the head of his cock teasing your nipples with every pass. His hands are busy too, one pinching and rolling your sensitive peaks while the other holds your breasts in place, forcing you to take him deeper.
“Do you know how beautiful you look like this?” he groans, watching his shaft slide in and out of the soft, warm flesh. “Splayed open just for me... hugging my cock with your soft flesh… Wanna bite them, baby—shit, wanna leave bite marks all over…”
“B-baby...” you gasp, arching your back to meet his thrusts, your own desire spiraling out of control. You squeeze your breasts tighter around him, desperate to feel him closer, to feel that barrier break. You’re sweating all over, but it’s not what you desperately want to be covered in. Your mind supplies only the feeling of how your boyfriend’s cum will feel on your flesh, when he finally paints you in his release.
“Yeah, you like that, huh?” He chuckles darkly, his hips snapping forward with increasing speed, having your breasts bounce. “Cute tits, begging for a touch. I can feel ‘em trembling... so needy.” He leans down, capturing a earlobe in his mouth, sucking hard as he pistons his hips between your breasts. “Gonna cum, hah, have my paint drip between your perfect breasts... wanna fuck you so full, cutie—shit, ‘m cumming...”
He buries himself deep into your breasts, pulsing hot ropes of seed across your chest. It splatters over your skin, dripping down into the cleavage he’s holding open. He keeps thrusting through his orgasm, smearing his release over your skin, mixing it with your own natural oils. “Fuck—shit, cutie— you squeezed them on purpose, didn’t ya? You wanted me to make a mess.”
Even as he softens, he pulls back slightly to admire his work, his chest heaving as he catches his breath. A bead of cum glistens on your nipple, and he instinctively reaches out, swiping it up and pushing it into your skin. “Your skin’s all shiny now... so beautiful...” he breathes, his eyes wide and dilated.
He swipes the thick texture off your left breast, bringing it up to your parted lips.
“Clean it off,” he commands softly, his thumb tracing the slick mess. “That’s my flavor now, isn't it?”
You obey, licking the salt from your fingers, your eyes rolling back in pleasure. The sight of you doing exactly what he wants pushes him over the edge again instantly. “You’re g-greedy, haahh,” he growls, leaning forward to capture your mouth, tasting the lingering salt himself as your tongues collide. “Wanting more even when you’re full.”
He keeps thrusting his hips even as he hisses from overstimulation, his skin flushed and glistening with sweat. The mixture of fluids makes obscene, wet sounds as he fucks your tits in languid thrusts. His hand is a blur, pinching and tugging at your nipples, driving you wild. He cums again, harder than the first orgasms and spurting even more of his fluids, whole body shuddering as he paints another layer over your skin. You moan, squeezing your breasts around him, milking him for everything he has.
“Open up,” he commands, pulling away from your chest just enough to grip his shaft. He strokes himself furiously over your face, aiming right at your mouth. “Swallow it all... haah, taste your paint, cutie. Since you love it so much…fuck—”
You eagerly open your mouth, sticking out your tongue as he releases in fast sprungs of white, sticky fluids, coating your lips and tongue in his thick seed. He slides his fingers through the mess, pressing it into your mouth where it’s dripping in the corner of your parted mouth, making you suck them clean.
He grabs your waist, holding you steady as he begins to fuck your chest again, the cum from his previous releases acting as a slick lubricant. “Gonna do it again... gonna cover you in my devotion.”
He’s desperate now, that much you can tell through your own haze, his strokes rougher and frantic. “There we go... paint you good, cutie. Gonna cum a-again, hah... gonna mark you for real this time...” He thrusts hard and fast, his hips slapping against your skin. “Cumming—fuck! Gonna cover your nipples... my paint... all over them...”
He cums for the last time, his body shaking with the intensity of it, spurting his last remnants of release he has in his body, covering your tits completely. He keeps grinding against you, spreading the mess everywhere, painting your skin like a canvas. Finally, he collapses against you, chest to chest, his hand lazily stroking your nipples, smearing the thick, white fluid over the sensitive bud.
“You’re such a mess,” he murmurs against your collarbone, his voice husky and satisfied. “All covered in my cum... dripping down your stomach.” He pulls back just enough to look you in the eyes, his own darkened with satisfaction.
“But look at you... still so fucking horny. You really just can’t get enough of me, can you?”
because i'm feeling generous 😼 (and very excited to finally bring back fem!rafayel), i will post two chapters tonight of Say It's Me You Want, my College!AU ft. roommates rafmc series.
as i've been rewriting/editing it, i decided to write an extra chapter to the story (since this was originally posted a year ago for pride month)
i'm so freaking excited to post it!! 🫠
p.s. yes, one of the scenes contains rafayel teaching us body shots. ;)
p.s. 2: if you wanna be tagged, just comment on this post~
because i'm feeling generous 😼 (and very excited to finally bring back fem!rafayel), i will post two chapters tonight of Say It's Me You Want, my College!AU ft. roommates rafmc series.
as i've been rewriting/editing it, i decided to write an extra chapter to the story (since this was originally posted a year ago for pride month)
i'm so freaking excited to post it!! 🫠
p.s. yes, one of the scenes contains rafayel teaching us body shots. ;)
p.s. 2: if you wanna be tagged, just comment on this post~
