Ice Games by Jessica Clare

my smile pinned to my face. “Friendly advice, huh? What about?”
    Serge gave me a thin-lipped smile. “Half the points come from scoring, little one. Half comes from the audience. If you want to win this? You need them both. But I see you don’t care about winning.”
    I digested this warning-slash-advice. He couldn’t influence the audience, of course, so he had to be warning me about the judging panel. So they were crooked? Great. Figure skating had a long history of ‘slanted’ judging panels, so this shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, but I did feel a twinge of doubt.
    I glanced over at my partner as Serge stalked away. Ty was laughing it up with Annamarie and her supermodel buddies, and I noticed Annamarie had a long, too-tan hand on his back, an almost possessive gesture. And he sure wasn’t fighting her off.
    Figured.

    ~~ * ~~

    “No,” Ty said. “Absolutely fucking not.”
    I bit my lip, glancing around nervously at the stage hands rushing around. People were everywhere, even crawling around in the dressing rooms, and so were the cameramen. No place was off limits, and that included last minute costume, ahem, alterations.
    Ty threw down his shirt and looked at me with disgust. “What did I tell her all week?”
    “No sequins,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek and trying not to laugh.
    “And what is this freaking…monstrosity covered with?” He gestured at the garish shirt that was now wadded into a ball.
    I picked it up and studied it. It was a virtual match to my own, which meant it was incredibly hideous. It was a cowboy outfit…sort of. To go with our “Boot Scootin’” theme. Sort of. Except it was neon. I was neon pink and he was chartreuse. And both were covered in yellow fringe going up the arms (which was bad enough) and purple sequins (which was even worse). To make matters worse, I had bright white chaps and he had purple ones. Again, sequined and covered in fringe. His cowboy hat was bright green, and we had fake ‘boots’ that went over our skates and matched our chaps.
    It was pretty much a costuming nightmare. No wonder they hadn’t wanted to show us until the last minute.
    Ty shook his head at me. “I’ll wear the goddamn ugly hat. I’ll wear the fucking fringey-ass pants, since I have to, but I refuse to wear sequins. Absolutely and completely refuse. NO fucking way.”
    I studied his clothing. It really was an odd choice for a guy as masculine as Ty. Maybe for a traditional figure skater with no sense of taste? But not Ty Randall, big, beefy, incredibly sexy MMA fighter. They didn’t even show off his tight ass.
    I shook my head at myself. Where on earth had those thoughts come from?
    “I’m sorry, Zara,” Ty said to me. He took my hands in his and gave me an earnest look. “I tried really fucking hard these last two weeks. I did. I understand how badly you want this. But a man’s got to draw a line somewhere, and this is my line. If they have to scratch us from the competition, I’ll take the scratch and work on another way to fix my PR.”
    “It’s not that bad,” I told him, giving his hands a squeeze.
    “I look like I belong in a gay pride parade.”
    Okay, he kind of did. I studied his costume and then sighed. We could either spend the next hour warming up for the show, or I could try to fix his costume. Looking into Ty’s angry gaze, it was clear what my choice was. I pulled up one of the folding chairs and got out my costume alteration kit. “Let me see what I can do.”
    Forty-five minutes later, Ty no longer looked like a parade float. We’d scrapped the shirt entirely, as well as the hat, and he’d decided to go bare-chested at my suggestion. After all, he had a gorgeous chest. Seemed a shame not to put that to good use. I couldn’t do anything about his sequined boot-covers, so we ditched them. Instead, I focused on de-fringe-ing his pants and removing the strips of sequins that had been badly sewn down the seam of each leg. When I was