And I definitely didn’t complain that he stayed in his little shit mood as he made his way to a kitchen my mom would have described as rustic.

Ivan had a whiteboard on his fridge with his lunch and dinner plans written on each. So, considering it was Saturday, he’d pulled out a package of chicken breasts and the meal on the fridge said CHICKEN, JASMINE RICE, BEETS, I figured that’s what we were doing. I’d always expected him to have a chef or something, but I was coming to see that I didn’t know him at all.

So I found the jasmine rice in a cupboard after searching through his crap—and eyeing a glass container he had on the counter filled with Hershey Kisses—and then found the right sized pot after he’d continued ignoring me as I looked for it. And we got to cooking. I let him make the beets because I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Plus, I wasn’t that great of a cook to begin with, mostly because I could have lived off baked meat seasoned with just salt and pepper, whatever grain I could make in a rice cooker, and steamed or baked vegetables for the rest of my life if it was up to me.

Just as I was measuring out a cup and a half of rice onto each plate—because Ivan had measurements on his whiteboard of how much of everything he wanted on his plate—his cell rang. He brushed by me to grab it off the counter and instantly answered, “Hello.”

I finished measuring as I heard him keep talking, “Yes, she’s here… Better but she’s still sick…” Obviously I was the “she.” I think. The question was, who the hell was he talking to? “Tomorrow?... It depends on what we’ll have… That’ll work… Okay. Sounds good. We’ll see you tomorrow then… I love you too. Bye.”

I told myself it wasn’t any of my business who he talked to.

But if he left his phone lying around and I could figure out the password, I’d look at it.

Ivan didn’t say anything to me about where we were going or what we were going to do, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to ask, so I kept my mouth shut and stood back as Ivan finished putting the food on the plates and then later as we ate.

I had just finished swallowing the last bite of the lime chicken he had stir-fried in coconut oil when Ivan shoved his plate away and finally turned to me, looking just as pissed off as he had two hours ago. Even his stupid shoulders were rigid and tight.

I gave him a lazy look, expecting the worst.

So, because I was expecting him to give me hell, I wasn’t anticipating what actually came out of his mouth.

“I want you to cancel your accounts again.”

“What?”

He repeated himself. “I want you to cancel your accounts again. Having a few followers isn’t worth you getting things like that in the mail.”

What the hell was happening? “Ivan,” I started to say, confused. “I don’t know if they’re still coming in the mail or not, but the private messages and comments are no—”

“We can delete the team one too. Lee will understand,” he said, each word coming out angrier and angrier.

Well, I wasn’t the kind of person to throw other people under the bus, but… “She knows about them. Or, she has an idea about them. We talked about it months ago.”

Those bright blue eyes could have had lasers in them from how uncomfortable his gaze was making me feel. “What?”

“When I first agreed to be your partner, we talked about it. I didn’t tell her much, I just kind of gave her an idea why I’d cancelled my accounts.”

“Wait a second….”

I ignored him. “She told me to tell her if things started coming up again, but I didn’t. I just stopped reading my mail to begin with.”

He blinked. “You told her. But you didn’t tell me.” Why the hell were his words coming out all stiff and robotic?

“Yeah.” Because I had. “I didn’t think you needed to know.”

Yeah, he was getting all pissed off again. “You thought I didn’t need to know?”

“Yeah. I didn’t. We weren’t exactly talking then. It seemed pointless. Why would you care?” I asked him with a shrug, not about to feel bad for doing what I’d done.

“Why would I care?” he murmured to himself, still trying to kill me with his eyes alone.

“Now, I get it. We’re friends. We’re partners. But chill. It’s fine. I’ve never gotten aggressive messages or threats. It’s always just… the pictures and those videos. I might not even be getting them anymore.”

At some point while I’d been talking, he began to tip his head back to eye the ceiling. He wasn’t looking at me as he said, still sounding like he was made of metal on metal, “Is that why you didn’t want to do the TSN shoot?”

I didn’t want to tell him, but I did. “Yes. That was the other part of it. I wasn’t lying when I told you I didn’t want you to make fun of me either.”

His groan was basically a rumble as he continued to look at the beams across his high ceiling. He sighed. He sighed and he shook his head.

It was my turn to sigh. “Cut it out. It’s all right. I knew what I was doing.”

That had his chin dropping. “Yeah, being a stubborn ass, and it’s not fucking all right.”

I scoffed.

He stared at me.

Okay, maybe he had a point. “Look, I don’t want anyone worrying. Everyone has enough stress in their lives, nobody needs me to add more to it. I can’t… I won’t stop living my life and wearing whatever I want to wear or don’t want to wear because of other people being assholes. I hate that I let it bother me as much as I do and did, to begin with.”

He kept on staring.

“If I need help, I’ll ask.”

The laugh that came out of him was a sharp one. A fake one. One that said he knew I was full of multi-layered shit. “You could need a kidney replacement and not ask anyone you know for one, Jasmine.” He shook his head, a frown crossing his mouth. “You think I don’t know you?”

Well. Shit.

“You are so stubborn. So fucking stubborn it drives me insane. You know how many times I’ve wanted to choke you?” he asked, shaking his head in clear exasperation.

I blinked. “Probably half as many times as I’ve wanted to choke you out too.”

He didn’t take my joke. “What we have, it’s more important than a marriage.”

I rolled my eyes and let the m-word go.

“It is, and you know it is. I need you healthy, and I need you focused.”

Something uneasy burned through my belly. “I get it, Ivan. Without me, you can’t compete. Trust me, I get it. I know it. I’m not planning on screwing you over. I didn’t mean to get sick and screw up starting our choreography. You know I’m sorry.”

The look he gave me….

“You’re my friend, Jasmine. Not just my fucking partner. Don’t give me that bullshit.”

I reeled back at his tone and watched his face get furious.

“I want you to be safe because you matter to me. You think I bring my partners to my house? You think I let them into my life? You think I spend time with their families? I don’t, and I never have. I learned my lesson when I was a teenager and my partner tried to blackmail my family by saying they paid for us to win our junior events. That’s why I do contracts now, to keep it professional. I don’t ever want to be as unhappy as I was after my first partner did those things to my family and me. But you….”

Well… I hadn’t known, had I?

And if I suddenly wanted to open two cans of whoop-ass on his bitch of a juniors partner, I would think about it later.

“You. Matter. To. Me. You. I couldn’t forgive myself if something happened to you because of me,” he kept going, his voice rising. “I’ve known you since you were a little kid, helping my sister off the ice when she fell. You didn’t treat her different because of her last name like everyone else did. You didn’t ask her about me. You and Karina just picked each other. I know the things you did for her, she told me. She told all of us about Jasmine Santos who isn’t scared of anybody. About Jasmine who doesn’t like unicorns because she likes Pegasus, because they can fly.

“I wanted you to be my partner for years, dumbass. When Karina had told me you were thinking about switching to pairs, I had thought you would say something to me, even in passing as a joke. I thought you would say you were going to kick my ass, and I had planned on talking to you over it. But you never did. The next thing I knew, you had a partner. Some dipshit that wasn’t half as good as you.”

Was I on imaginary drugs again?

“Do you remember that? Do you remember that I didn’t talk to you for six months after that?” he asked me, his entire focus on me.

And I nodded because I did. I remembered how he’d come back at me with a vengeance out of the blue, talking so much shit over those next two years, I wasn’t sure how my ears didn’t bleed and how I managed not to key his car.

“You’ve been in my life for thirteen years. How could you not think I don’t care about you? We fuck around with each other because we both like it. Because there’s nobody else we can fuck around with that can handle it.”

I mean… he was right. He drove me crazy, he always had, but he was the only one I could talk to on that level. He had annoyed the shit out of me for years.

But…

But…

My mouth gaped open, and I was silent.

I—

He—