The Major Prix. Worlds. Nationals. They were three of the most prestigious competitions in the figure skating world, and only he could screw up that much in a competition and still win something. That should have reassured me that I’d be making a good choice if I accepted his offer, but all it did was make me resentful toward myself for fucking up so much that I had nothing.

“Karina didn’t tell you anything about it?” My mom turned her attention to me.

I made sure I still had chicken in my mouth while I shook my head and said with a mouthful, “She’s still in Mexico.” They knew she was in school.

“E-mail her and find out,” she urged.

I frowned. “You e-mail her and ask.”

Mom snorted like bring it on. “I will.”

“I always forget Karina is his sister,” James noted, leaning across the table. “Is he just as good looking up close, in person?”

I snickered. “No.”

Jojo snorted out, “Uh-huh,” but the tone put me on edge and had me glancing in his direction to find him leaning into James’s shoulder. He pretended like he was trying to whisper, but the idiot looked right at me as he added, “Jasmine used to always flirt with him. You should have seen it.”

I gagged on the chicken I hadn’t swallowed yet before coughing out, “The hell did you just say?”

His “ha!” made me get my middle finger ready. “Don’t even pretend. You used to always come home talking about him,” the five-foot-seven-inch man who had always been a perfect balance between a supportive older brother and an annoying pain in the ass with boundary issues claimed. “You had a thing for him. We all knew.” He looked at James and raised his eyebrows. “We knew.”

Was he fucking with me? He was fucking with me, wasn’t he? Me flirting with Ivan? Ivan?

“No,” I told him calmly, only because if I said it too aggressively they would cry bullshit. I knew how they worked. “I did not flirt with him.” And just so James knew, I emphasized it. “Ever.”

Mom made a noise that basically said, “Well.”

I swung my gaze toward her and shook my head. “No. No, I didn’t. He’s all right looking”—I only said that because, if I said he wasn’t my type, they would assume I was trying to hide something, and I wasn’t. “—but it was never like that. Not even a little bit. He’s kind of a jerk. His sister and I are friends. That’s it.”

“He wasn’t a jerk,” my mom interjected. “He’s always very polite. He’s very good with his fans. He seems like a very nice boy.” She slid me a look. “And you did like him.”

A nice boy? What the hell were they on?

Yeah, everyone did love him, and they all thought the world of him. Handsome, talented Ivan Lukov, who had won the world over as a cute, winking, cocky teenager. He knew how to play the game. I would give him that. But I had never liked him. Not ever. “Nope, no I didn’t,” I argued, shaking my head in disbelief they would be trying to claim that kind of crap. Were they for real? “You’re imagining shit. We say a sentence to each other once a month, and it’s always sarcastic and a little mean.”

“Some people might consider that foreplay—” my brother started to say before I cut him off.

I made a horrible noise again, still shaking my head. “Hell no—”

Jonathan burst out laughing. “Why’s your face turning red then, Jas?” he asked, slapping his palm over the top of my head and giving it a shake before I could jerk it out of the way.

“Shut your mouth,” I said to Jojo, thinking of a dozen different comebacks and knowing I couldn’t use any of them because they would all come out way too defensive and make me look guilty. Or, worse, I’d tell them about the offer I’d been given that morning. “I didn’t like him though. I don’t know why you two would ever even think that.”

Mom snickered. “It’s okay to admit you used to have a crush on him. There are plenty of girls around the world who have. I might have even had a little crush on him back in the day—”

Forgetting we were on opposite teams, Jojo and I both gagged.

Mom groaned. “Oh, stop. I didn’t even mean it like that!”

Of course the woman who was married to a man not even ten years older than me would have to clarify that comment. Mom wasn’t just a cougar, she was The Cougar. All other cougars hailed to her.

“I’m going to pretend you just didn’t say that so I can sleep tonight, Ma,” Jojo muttered with a borderline sick look on his face before he physically shook it off. Then he elbowed me. “You did used to talk about him a lot, Jas.”

I blinked. “I was like seventeen, and it was only because he’d been an asshole.“

Mom opened her mouth, but I kept going.

“No, no. He was. I swear he was. Y’all never heard him, but it happened, he just made sure not to ever get caught. Karina knows.”

“What did he do to you?” James asked, the only one who seemed to still be on my side. At least because he wasn’t denying my claim and sounded interested to actually hear the facts.

I was going to give them too, because the last thing I wanted was for Mom and Jonathan to keep assuming that crazy shit. Especially with what might happen. Maybe. Possibly.

So, I told them.

Shit hit the fan the day Ivan Lukov wore the ugliest costume I’d ever seen in my life up to that point.

I had been sixteen back then, and Ivan had just turned twenty. I remembered that because it had always amazed me that he wasn’t even four years older than me but already so much further ahead in his career. He had already won multiple championships as a junior with his longtime partner before going into the senior level at seventeen. At twenty, people had already been shitting themselves all over him for years. Little did I know, nothing would change over the next decade.

By that point, his sister and I had already been friends for a few years. I’d already spent the night at her house more than a handful of times. She had already spent the night at my house more than a handful of times. Ivan had just been that family member I saw on her birthdays and randomly at her house when he’d drop by to visit. He’d never really said anything to me directly up until then, apart from shooting me reluctant expressions that existed because his parents expected him to have good manners.

So, on that day years ago, when he’d skated out on the ice as I was stretching on the floor, I hadn’t been able to hide my horror, and I didn’t even bother trying. What he had been wearing resembled something the Chiquita Banana lady would have worn. Frills, yellow, red, green… there’d even been a flower somewhere in there, and these awful yellow pants that made his legs look like genuine bananas in his boy-man body back then.

That costume was the worst. The absolute worst. I’d worn some leotards my sister had made me that had been… experimental, but I hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings so I’d put them on anyway.

But what I wore had nothing on what the hell he’d been wearing that day.

Ivan had then started skating with his partner, some girl that he’d skated with for years before then but hadn’t lasted much longer after that. Bethany something. Whatever she had been wearing hadn’t been anywhere near as bad as his costume though. I’d seen their program in bits and pieces when I wasn’t busy; I’d heard the music that would go along with it too, obviously. But I hadn’t seen the costumes until then. It was like watching someone break dance to Mozart. It didn’t make sense. And in my mind, the train wreck he’d been wearing had taken away from the piece he and his partner were performing, which wasn’t exactly a mambo.

I’d blame that for being the reason I opened my big mouth that day. I thought he’d be doing a disservice to his routine. So, I thought I was doing him a solid by saying something.

I know for sure I hadn’t thought about what I was doing before I went up to him as he’d been getting off the ice following the end of his practice, clipping his skate guards on to the blade below his black boots. And in that moment, I told the boy-man who had said zero to me before that, “You should really change your costume.”

He hadn’t even blinked as he’d turned his head to look at me and asked, in the one and only polite sentence that he had ever and would ever direct at me, “Excuse me?”

Maybe I could blame my mom or even my siblings for not stressing enough that I needed to shut up and keep my opinions to myself. Because of all the things I could have said to soften my words, I didn’t pick any of them. “It’s ugly,” was exactly what had come out of my mouth.

Not “It takes away from your lines and the height in your jumps.” Not “It’s a little too bright.”

I didn’t say any of those things to make my comment less asshole-ish.

Then to let him know that it wasn’t just horrific, I’d added, “It’s butt ugly.”

And everything changed after that.

The twenty-year-old had blinked at me like it was his first time seeing me, which it wasn’t, and then reared back. He spit out in a low, low voice from that boy-man body, “It’s not my costume you should be worried about.”