From Lukov with Love

by Mariana Zapata

  I would have gaped, but I didn’t want him to know that he could get that reaction out of me.

  Then he kept going. “You’re out of your mind if you think I’m letting you choose the music for any of our programs.”

  Now that had me turning my whole body on that bench seat to give him this “the fuck did you say” look. My knee was pretty much on top of his thigh as I leaned toward him. It wasn’t like I didn’t touch him a hundred or three hundred times a day and had for weeks by that point. I could pick him out in a crowd by smell alone, I bet. “What?”

  That light pink mouth twitched for the second time that day. “You heard me. Nancy, the choreographers, and I will pick it. It’ll be perfect.” Then his mouth twitched again. “Trust me.”

  I had to throw my head back and laugh. “Ha!”

  “It’s okay, Jasmine. I’ve always chosen. It’s probably more important than the choreography. You want to win, don’t you?”

  No shit I wanted to win, and honestly, he did have great taste in music. His arrangements always surprised me. They were good, but I wasn’t going to admit that. “There’s no ‘I’ in team, you know that?”

  The son of a bitch had the nerve to wink. “But there’s an ‘I’ in winning, and if you want to win, you have to listen to me.”

  I scoffed. Then I laughed, even though I didn’t want to. “That doesn’t even make sense, you idiot. And quit doing that thing with your eyes. It’s freaking me out.”

  Those broad shoulders hunched up without the least bit of apology, straining at the seams of his beautiful sweater that I didn’t have to touch to know it had to be soft as hell. “Makes sense to me.”

  “Because you’re a dumbass. You’re not the boss of me. We’re partners. There’s no ‘I’ in partners either.”

  He winked again. “We can argue about costumes and choreography, but I’m choosing the music.”

  Sheeeit.

  I’d take it, but what was I going to do? Say okay? Really, I didn’t care about the music. I’d skate to anything. Now the costumes… “Remember your Chiquita Banana Mambo costume nightmare? I’m sure as hell not letting you choose the costumes without seeing them first. And I already have someone who will make mine.”

  A muscle in his cheek twitched for all of a second before it stopped, and he ignored my comment about our costumes. “Who’s a national champion, world champion and Olympic champion?” he had the nerve to ask.

  I reeled back. And then couldn’t form a single fucking word. Not one other than one that started with an m, ended with an r and sounded like trucker wucker.

  Until this slow smile crept over his mouth.

  Then I could. “You’re such an annoying shit. God, I just want to punch you in the face sometimes. Who’s a champion? Shut the hell up.”

  What did he do? How did he respond? He laughed. Ivan Lukov laughed loud.

  “You probably paid the judges with your Russian mafia money,” I kept going, which earned me another laugh so loud that I almost smiled back at him. When Karina and I were way younger, I had asked her how her parents made so much money that they could live in their giant mansion, and she had said she thought they were in the mafia. They weren’t, but it still made me laugh.

  “You’re such a sore loser,” he got out after a moment. “I thought I was bad, but you’ve got me beat.”

  “Oh please.” I wasn’t the one who got rid of partners every time one of them failed.

  But I didn’t say that.

  “You probably sit in your Tesla and cry every time you wrinkle your sweaters.”

  Ivan barked out another laugh that was pretty much shouted up at the ceiling.

  “What are you laughing at? I’m not trying to be funny,” I said, watching him lose his shit for the first time in the more than ten years we’d known each other. The most I’d ever seen out of him was a smile or two around his family, specifically Karina.

  But that was it.

  I hadn’t even known he knew how to laugh…. Unless he was doing something shitty, like taking people’s souls and stuff.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” a new voice piped up, nearly getting lost into the volume of Ivan being a pain in the ass.

  And just like that, he stopped, the sound of his laugh replaced with silence.

  We both looked toward the door at the same time. Sure enough, there was a woman standing there at the doorway holding a messenger bag in one hand and a purse in the other. “You don’t have to stop on my account,” she said, smiling.

  I didn’t say anything, and neither did Ivan.

  She kept her smile on her face. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she went on, without offering an explanation.

  If she was expecting an “it’s okay” out of me, she wasn’t getting it. I couldn’t stand people that were late. Apparently, Ivan wasn’t a fan either, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw him bob his head. “We’re ready whenever you are to get started. We both have other engagements and can’t stay late.”

  He had something to do too? Since when? He didn’t have a job. I used to think I wouldn’t have one either if I had the opportunity to stay at home, but the truth was, I’d probably go apeshit without things to do. I could barely sit still for ten minutes.

  But… what the hell did Ivan have to do?

  The other woman nodded and began making her way into the break room, clutching a bag in each hand. “I understand, all I need is a minute to get ready,” she said as she dropped her messenger bag on the table in between the bench seat that Ivan and I were sitting on and the chairs on the opposite side. She had to be in her mid-thirties, maybe even a little older. I never trusted guessing people’s ages because neither one of my parents looked like theirs. “Amanda Moore,” she said, thrusting a hand out in my direction first.

  “Jasmine,” I responded, taking her hand and giving it a shake.

  She did the same to Ivan, who said, “Ivan. Pleasure to meet you.”

  Pleasure to meet you? What a suck-up. But I kept my attention forward on the lady, because as much as I wanted to shoot him a side-look, there was no way I’d be able to hide my “you’re full of shit” face.

  She gave us both a tight smile before beginning to go through her bag. She pulled out a laptop, a small black device that had to be a recorder, and a small yellow notebook along with a pen. “One minute,” she said, as she opened her laptop.

  Ivan’s leg touched mine underneath the table, but I didn’t look at him.

  Not too long afterward, after moving things around, the woman gave us a tight smile. “Okay, I’m ready now.”

  The idiot beside me touched his leg against mine once more. That time, I hit my knee against the side of his thigh at the same time I folded my hands and stuck them between my thighs out of view. I wasn’t going to be the one to break. No way. Lee wasn’t going to get the chance to give me shit.

  “I already thanked Ms. Lee for reaching out to Ice News for the interview, but I wanted to thank both of you myself. When the rumors started coming in that you and Mindy weren’t going to skate together, we were wondering who would replace her,” the woman named Amanda started, her gaze shifting to Ivan’s direction as she spoke to him.

  Good. I didn’t know what they thought or knew about Ivan’s situation besides that they wanted to keep the details under wraps. They could figure that out and deal with it. All I wanted was to compete.

  “So,” she continued on, glancing down at her notebook for a moment. “I’m going to record this conversation, if that’s okay with both of you.”

  I nodded at the same time Ivan said, “Yes.”

  The woman beamed. “I have it here that you’ve been training together at the Lukov Ice Complex for the last fourteen years?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” we both answered at the same time. Was he trying to answer for me?

  She bobbed her head. “And, Ivan, you’ve been here since it was built twenty-one years ago?”

  “Yes. Before that I lived and trained in California,” he r
eplied, like he’d answered that question countless times in the past, maybe because he had.

  The reporter switched her attention to me. “You’ve known each other since you started coming here?”

  I could do this.

  “No,” I answered, trying to keep from instantly thinking her questions were dumb. Wasn’t it common knowledge that Ivan had been doing this longer than I had? “He was more advanced than I was. We met about a year or two later.” She didn’t need to know we had “met” at his house instead of the LC.

  The woman gave me a little smile. “But you’re close friends with the family, aren’t you?”

  I blinked. How the hell did people know that? “Yes.”

  “You were in the same classes as—” She paused and glanced at her notebook. “—Karina Lukov, Ivan’s sister. Correct?”

  I nodded. Unlike Ivan, her parents hadn’t put her into figure skating until she was a lot older. She had taken dance classes instead. The only reason they put her into figure skating was because Ivan had won a gold in the junior level and she had wanted to try. You know, since her family already owned an ice rink and all. Why not? I had shaken my head the first time she told me that story.

  “How long did that last?” the Amanda woman asked.

  Luckily, Ivan decided to answer that question. I didn’t want to. I didn’t even want Karina being brought up into our conversation. She didn’t like having attention on her of any sort, and I respected that. “My sister stopped at fourteen. She decided to pursue other things.”

  Did his voice sound weird or was it my imagination? Maybe he didn’t like talking about her either.

  “But you two were best friends?” she asked me.

  I nodded again and didn’t miss the funny look the woman gave me. Maybe she wanted more than one-word answers and nods, but that’s all she was getting, until I had to say more.

  “This partnership is a decade in the making then?”

  I froze. Don’t look at Ivan. Don’t look at Ivan. Don’t—

  His knee knocked mine, and it was only because I was familiar with his voice—mostly his smart-ass voice, but whatever—that I noticed how off it sounded, almost choked, a little gravelly… weird. “You can say that,” he said slowly in that awkward voice.

  I was not going to laugh. I was especially not going to laugh at this idiot. So all I did was nod. Slowly. Very slowly in agreement.

  Amanda Moore’s eyes slid to my direction to see me agreeing, and a little smile came over her mouth. “I’m sure you’ve seen the video of you,” she pointed at me, “telling Ivan some things. There was so much feedback from his fans toward you after that—”

  She was bringing that up, wasn’t she? Great. Now whoever didn’t know about it was going to look it up.

  Shit.

  “—was that simply both of you playing around then?” she kept going.

  I went tense. I was pretty freaking sure that my eyes were almost bugging out of their sockets, and the fact I was pressing my lips together, probably made my face even worse. Shut up. Don’t say anything. Shut the hell up.

  So I nodded. Slowly again. Feeling like I was about to burst from the lying.

  Beside me, the idiot, the complete moron, hit his leg against mine again, and he said in that ragged voice that wasn’t his at all, “Yes. We play around all the time.”

  Damn it. Damn it. I wasn’t going to laugh. I wasn’t going to deny. I couldn’t.

  I had promised Lee that I could do this. That I could pretend we were friends.

  “Jasmine is wonderful,” Ivan basically choked out, somehow not bursting into flames as he said them. “What a sense of humor.”

  I had to fist my hand and dig my nails into my palm to keep from reacting. What a shit liar. Oh my God. And he gave me hell for being bad at lying.

  I cleared my throat and plastered on a smile that felt like melted rubber as I said, “Ivan is great,” I pretty much spit out, going “heh” at the end, as I remembered our conversation not that long ago about having voodoo dolls of each other.

  The leg beneath the table hit my knee, and it took all of my self-control to not say a single word, because obviously he was thinking something similar. Don’t laugh. Don’t choke. Keep it together. Professional. United and all that shit.

  But the lies must have been evident because the reporter almost immediately frowned and glanced at Ivan—who I had no idea what kind of facial expression he had on his face because I might die if I actually looked at him—and then glanced back at me. “Is there something funny?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ivan shake his head. “No. Nothing. We respect and admire each other a lot.”

  Oh my God.

  My shoulders shook for the two seconds it took to get them under control.

  Respect and admire. Of all the things he could have said, he literally went there. That time, it was me that banged my leg against his beneath the table.

  Something, which I was pretty sure was the back of his hand, hit my forearm under it too.

  “So much respect and admiration,” I ground out, barely holding in a choke as I nodded.

  “I’ve always been a big fan of Jasmine,” the idiot continued on.

  “Me too,” I warbled out, trying to smile again and more than likely looking like a serial killer. “Ivan is a very likable guy.”

  She gave us both a funny look for a moment before either deciding to let it go, or believing us. I didn’t care. “What are your favorite strengths of Jasmine’s skating?” the woman asked.

  “Oh, you know….”

  I didn’t even move my knee that time, I just kicked him. Straight-up kicked him in the shin. Not hard, but hard enough.

  “She’s a tremendous athlete,” he finally got out, hitting my forearm again.

  “And you, Jasmine, what drew you to want to partner up with Ivan? Other than the fact he’s the reigning world champion,” she asked.

  “What more is there?” I got out with a shrug, taking the easy route, despite her comment rubbing me the wrong way.

  “I know you haven’t been together very long, but if there was one thing you wanted to say to the other, as a criticism, what would it be?”

  I jumped on that real quick because I didn’t trust Ivan. “Criticize this guy?” I ground out, tapping my heel against his, lightly as a warning and a reminder. “Oh, there’s nothing. Nothing at all. Everything he does is… perfect.”

  I almost gagged at the effort those words took.

  The smile that came over the reporter’s face was just about a beam. “That’s sweet.”

  Ivan’s heel hit mine.

  “And you, Ivan? What about Jasmine?”

  It hit it again.

  “A criticism? Jasmine is… too nice.”

  The woman blinked at the same time I did. “Too nice?” she asked, not even offending me because really? That’s what he was going to go with?

  I glanced at him at the same time he was nodding. “Yes. Too nice.”

  She probably wasn’t even expecting the “huh” that came out of her mouth because it came out so swiftly. I looked over at her and blinked. Then she blinked too… like she couldn’t believe that had slipped out of her mouth.

  Bitch.

  Maybe I wasn’t the warmest, cuddliest person in the world, but I was nice.

  Or as my mom would say, “when I wanted to be.” But that was my mom. She had earned my love and deserved it. She could say whatever she wanted to me.

  “What do you think about your old partner and Mary McDonald announcing they’re competing this season?” she asked out of nowhere.

  Just the mention of my “old partner” and then bitch-ass Mary McDonald afterward ruined everything about the day so far. Just like that. My whole body tensed.

  Then Ivan kicked me. Literally kicked me.

  But it snapped me out of it. It only took me a second to get my thoughts together and say, “I don’t think anything about it.” Maybe I should have said, I wished them
luck or the best or something, but I wasn’t that good of a person.

  “Is it true you haven’t spoken to him since your last season together?”

  I wasn’t going to count the one night I had called him drunk and upset right after he’d ditched me. He hadn’t answered, but I had taken advantage of it. I was pretty sure I had called him a weak little pussy bitch, but… I wasn’t positive. All I knew was that I didn’t regret anything that had come out of my mouth. Whatever it had been, he deserved.

  “No, we haven’t.”

  “Is it true that he sent you a text message to tell you?” she had the nerve to ask about the rumor that had been circling for some reason I didn’t understand. I had never brought it up to anyone other than my family, so I knew it hadn’t come from me.

  Plus, the truth was… he hadn’t told me. Period. I’d found out when he’d announced Mary and him were taking the next season off to train together. That’s how I’d found out. From an article. Two days after we had started our planned one-month break.

  Spineless bitch.

  “Can we talk about Jasmine and me instead? I thought Coach Lee had mentioned that we didn’t want to talk about our partners in the past,” Ivan cut in suddenly, his tone that snooty shit one that I usually hated.

  …until then.

  The woman’s face went pink, and she nodded quickly. “Yes, sure.” But she didn’t apologize for bringing up a topic that they had already told her not to. I hadn’t known they had done that, but I appreciated it. A lot more than I thought. “What are your expectations for the season?” the woman continued with, not missing a beat.

  “We’re going to do well,” Ivan answered, almost immediately. “Better than well.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  The heat and muscle of his thigh fully rested against mine, but I didn’t move. “That means I don’t expect this season to go differently than any other season.”

  The woman’s eyes went wide. “You think so?”

  I was watching him as he did his slow nod. “I know so.”

  “You’re not taking the season off?”

  Little did she know we only had a season together. I didn’t have time to spare.

  “No.”