Playing with Fire | Yuzuru Hanyu

27. Acceptance

Yuzuru was wrong to think that he had escaped the interrogation session.

When she turned and asked the dreaded question, Yuzuru knew he had to think fast.

"And where exactly does Aria fall into place in the story?"

Denying the relation was useless, his mother would know so he just said the closest thing to the truth that he could without admitting the actual reason.

"I thought I needed to move on after Julia and went to this bar a few times. It's kind of high-end, hence the suit."

"You met Aria there?"

It wasn't a lie, he did meet her at a bar...

"Yeah. We met there and have been in contact sometimes."

He really thought the conversation would come to an end there but his mother was too smart.

"I would think that someone who works at a supermarket wouldn't be able to afford those fancy bars."

His head immediately rang in alarm, why did she have to think of everything?

"That's the thing, Mom, if you don't drink, they aren't expensive. Most people are just there for the experience."

Truthfully, he was kind of proud of how quickly he came up with that and how she seemed to accept that.

"As long as you don't get hurt, it's fine by me."

"She's just a friend."

"Whatever you say, honey."

🔥

Yuzuru wasn't dumb, no matter how much he seemed to be sometimes.

His mother saw right through his BS and the only reason why she didn't call him on it was probably pity.

At the end of the day, he could barely call Aria a friend, even if he felt like he knew a lot about her.

Then again, now, more than ever, Yuzuru knew that if he ever wanted to try and have a chance of a friendship with her, he could always go to her.

Given that he now knew where she worked, it was only a matter of trying. Now the real question was if he wanted to.

Yuzuru knew well what the answer was but he still wanted to pretend to think about it and maybe even change it. Why would he even try to fight for something that looked doomed from the very start?

When his life was as busy as it was on those days, working on new programs and preparing for the new season, it was too easy to just let it all go and not even think about it.

In a way, he was making sure he forgot just as his initial plans dictated, getting busy to forget and just pretending nothing happened.

He was enjoying the new programs and despite his crazy bad injury, the progress on his Quad Loop was going by steadily. Yuzuru wanted to include it in both of his programs, even if his coaches seemed to be against it.

Through the course of summer, he practiced endlessly with the goal of going back to winning as soon as the competitions started again.

There was no denying that he was far from his top shape for a while after the season started. It didn't stop him from being the first skater to land the Quad Loop in competition but it just seemed impossible to be fully clean.

The lingering pain he felt sometimes in his foot was just a little reminder of what had been at risk just a few months prior.

His skating was always the biggest and most important priority. His private life and everything else would have time to be settled once he was done with the sport. Yuzuru just wanted to enjoy the time when he was still young and able to skate in his prime.

Even if he did try to forget and ignore the pending trouble in his mind, throughout the season, small things always made him remember the woman that he tried so badly to forget.

On those bad days when nothing seemed to go well, a beautiful image of her showed up in his mind.

It got to a point that even the mention of a Negroni by one of the skaters at the banquet made him remember her when they first met and everything about that first night. For Yuzuru, it was very weird that he remembered in vivid detail everything she wore on that evening and how she looked. Even weirder was the fact that every time he did, the opposite image of her in her grocery store uniform showed up in his brain.

How could she be so damned beautiful wearing a uniform? How could she enchant him in no makeup and hair tied in a claw clip?

The sheer fact that he managed to think of her in such random and unprovoked events just showed how bad he had it. Whatever she had done to him seemed like sorcery that he couldn't escape and the worst was that he didn't want to.

It was when he was back from Marseille after winning the GP finals for the 4th time in a row that something made him want to jump back into her warmth.

Once again, Julia ended up being the cause.

The woman seemed to have a talent for pushing him into doing things he didn't want to and when she asked him out to "Talk" he just figured that she finally wanted to apologize for the way things ended up between them.

When the conversation turned out to be about her willingness to help him be better in bed, Yuzuru ended up laughing in her face. It had been more than half a year and Julia was interested in helping now?

Somehow, now far more confident in himself, Yuzuru didn't even believe he needed that much guidance to improve but even if he did, the only teacher he could ever want was right across the street from his Condo, possibly working at that moment in the nearest grocery store.

He almost completely blacked out of the conversation as soon as his head settled on Aria. Julia's voice was a distant whine that he didn't listen to and he could almost see the other woman right in front of his eyes, wearing nothing but his clothes.

"Yuzuru? Are you even listening to me?" the woman eventually asked.

Yuzuru knew what he had to do. He had finally accepted that there was no reason to hide or try to avoid it and he had to act as soon as he could. Yuzuru wanted the woman back in his life.

"Huh... Sorry, but I need to go somewhere."