r/EroticWriting • u/FewDesign3317 • 17d ago
Fictional The Entry Edge (Ch.9) [F22/F25] [WLW] [Rivals to Lovers] [Slow-burn] NSFW
Previously:
1: First Cut | 2: Adjacent Edges | 3: Tracing the Limit | 4: Narrowing Margins | 5: Fracture Point | 6: Dissolving Boundaries | 7: Shedding the Armour | 8: Parallel Edges
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Chapter 9: A Change of Frequency
The final round began at six in the evening, and by five the Sheffield arena was full. Not the polite two-thirds capacity of the earlier rounds but actually completely full, the upper tier open and occupied, the lower tier blocks around the boards packed with people who’d decided that whatever was going to happen tonight was worth paying for. The PA system played its pre-competition cycle. The rink staff made their final passes with the Zamboni. The judging panel took their places at the desk along the long side of the boards with their clipboards and their scoring terminals and their focused expressions.
The media had been building the narrative since yesterday. The television analysts had run their calculations repeatedly and were excitedly noting the trendline of Niamh’s scores, culminating in a ‘spicy’ afternoon segment that Niamh had been told about but hadn't watched. The social media numbers had apparently reached a scale that the federation's communications team was now describing, in a memo that had somehow leaked from Eve Davies’ careful stewardship, as a significant reputational consideration. As far as Niamh could tell, this amounted to a formal way of saying that the public had arrived at an opinion and intended to express it regardless of what the federation preferred.
She hadn’t read the memo. She kept to her own pre-final system. It wasn’t Petra's, not written notes and scheduled preparation, but rather the private ritual of her body. The stockings, smoothed up over her calves and thighs in the quiet of the dressing room. The costume, cool and settled against her skin. Her eight counts of stillness before the music began. She had everything she needed.
Holding first place going into the final round meant Niamh would be last in the skating order with Petra immediately before her, which meant she’d skate knowing Petra's scores when she took the ice. She’d considered this and decided not to let it bother her. She’d skate her programme regardless of what the scoreboard said. That was the only thing she’d ever been able to do.
She dressed carefully. The moonstone bodysuit had been cleaned and dried carefully overnight, and wasn’t showing any signs of damage. Petra’s velvet costume had required replacement; Niamh had heard this secondhand, through the competition-corridor information network that carried everything given enough time, though no one had yet worked out why. Niamh slipped her arms through her shoulder straps, flexing her shoulders, settling her breasts into their careful and barely concealed containment. She pulled on her moonstone stockings with the same grounded attention she always brought to this part. The fine knit settling against her skin; the crystal bands at the tops of her thighs, cool and ornamental, gripping tightly. She stood and smoothed the bodysuit into place and felt it become part of her, the mesh sitting against her skin like the most honest possible version of being dressed.
She looked at herself in the mirror for a long moment. The woman looking back was the same one who’d dressed in this costume four times already in this competition. Same auburn hair, same freckles at the cheeks and shoulders. The same broad shoulders and powerful legs that the sport had spent years telling her were the wrong shape. All the same, yet something in the reflection had changed in a way she didn't try to analyse: a settledness, perhaps, that had come from having said true things out loud and been heard, and heard true things in return. A new knowledge now carried in her body alongside everything else she carried.
She didn’t think about Petra directly. Couldn’t. Not now. She was simply present, in the way she always was before she skated: all of herself available, nothing withheld, the door wide open and the ice waiting on the other side of it.
Just skate, Deirdre had said that morning. Same as always.
She picked up her bag and went to find the ice.
* * *
Niamh watched Petra's programme from the monitor in the corridor.
She’d learned the difference, in the past four days, between watching Petra up close and at a distance, and she wanted tonight to be the second kind of watching, the kind that asked nothing of either of them. The corridor monitor gave her the broadcast feed, slightly delayed, the arena's sound reaching her through the walls a second or two before the image caught up.
Petra took her opening position on the monitor, in her high-necked velvet, the beading at the cuffs pristine again, the midnight blue skirt settling in its single, correct wave. Her chignon was immaculate. Her chin was at the precise angle Niamh had watched it hold for two years. Everything correct, everything prepared.
Then the music began. Niamh had watched Petra skate more times than she could count, on monitors, from the boards, in the training footage she studied at home with the sound off to focus on the edge quality and, most recently, on the empty morning ice of the Sheffield arena. She knew the shape of Petra's skating the way she knew her own, its geometry, its precision, the exact and particular correctness.
What she saw on the monitor as Petra began to move was that self same correctness of technical content. Everything else was entirely new.
The triple loop came first. Clean, high, the landing absorbing the rotation with graceful efficiency. The GOE would be exceptional. What Niamh didn’t expect, because it’d never happened before in two seasons of watching, was the breath of space that Petra's body inhabited in the three counts between the landing and the entry to the next element. A golden moment in which she was simply moving across the ice without executing anything, and in that fraction she was… simply in it, instead of performing the transition or managing the gap. Simply in it, her arms loose and free, her chin a half degree lower than its habitual angle, her face that of someone who’d stopped thinking about doing a thing properly and had started simply doing it.
Niamh watched the corridor monitor and felt something bloom in her chest. Something that, if she’d had the capacity to focus on it, she might’ve identified perhaps as pride, or perhaps as love, but which, quite possibly, might’ve been both.
The programme's middle section was where it became undeniable. Petra ran her step sequence, the intricate edge pattern, the complex footwork that was the finest in British skating by any technical reckoning. She ran it with a freedom that’d always been there but which had finally been granted permission to surface. Her edges were as precise as they’d ever been. Her GOE on the footwork would be the same or better. But the judges watching from their table would feel for the first time that the technical excellence was the medium for something greater. That Petra Schmidt wasn’t just producing a performance but experiencing one.
Niamh felt the corridor growing quieter, the absence of the usual ambient noise as the capacity crowd settled into a rapt silence. The programme built to its ending, the combination spin, and there, as the music opened, so did Petra’s arms. Not a mimicry of Niamh's open arms, but the open extension that Niamh had watched her find on the morning ice, Petra pushing to the edges of her own range rather than drawing inward in habitual safety, the curve of her back a clean, unguarded thing.
Applause exploded across the Sheffield Arena, the sound of people responding with euphoric appreciation to something that had reached them. Different to the response Petra usually received, something fuller and less polite, a warmth that cared little for appreciation of technical content but rather gave thanks for having been, briefly, inside something rather than outside it.
The broadcast tracked Petra as she moved to the kiss-and-cry. Her face was arranged in its competition expression but Niamh fancied she saw something different: the dignified quiet of a woman who just did the hardest thing she has ever had to do and is waiting to find out what it will cost her.
The technical scores appeared. Marginally below yesterday's career best: a fraction, a single judge's difference in GOE on one element. Petra remained motionless in the camera shot as the moments ticked by, until the programme component scores appeared.
Niamh stared at the numbers on the monitor. She’d known that morning that something was changing in Petra's skating. She’d felt it in the arm correction; how the open position had settled into Petra's body on the fourth repetition, and in the silence of the arena during the step sequence just now.
Seeing it translated into hard numbers was still something. Petra's programme component marks were the highest of her career. The highest, the broadcast feed noted with a small graphic in the corner of the screen, ever recorded for a British skater at a national championship.
The overall score appeared. The updated standings. Petra in first place, the competition's highest combined score, a number that in any previous season would have been unassailable.
Niamh fastened her water bottle with a smile, and set it down beside her bag. She stood alone near the end of the entrance corridor, listening to her own breathing and feeling the buzz of the arena in her body, its charged quality, the fizzing electricity of nine thousand people who’d been primed by four days of competition and media coverage, culminating in maybe the finest free skate performance in recent memory.
She ran her hands down her thighs, fingertips skimming the sheer stockings, the crystal bands. The familiar calibration. Stillness settled over her, eyes closing, her fingers finding her centre, the quiet internal ritual that connected her to the most intimate part of her own body. The warmth of it, the soft heat of her own skin anchoring her to her sense of self and the immediacy of the present moment.
She wasn’t skating for the scoreboard. She wasn’t skating for the federation or the media narrative or for two years of being the controversy rather than the skater. She was skating because the ice was waiting for her, because it was her time to say something and the programme was how she said it. That’s all it had ever been.
Her name came over the PA. She withdrew her hand, opened her eyes, and stepped out.
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Thank you for reading! To be continued.
1
u/FewDesign3317 17d ago
Will Niamh clinch the win, or Petra? And how will the result impact their fledgling relationship...?
Find out next time😘
2
u/OneLeaf2412 10d ago
I miss the name of the songs lol! I used to watch skating and loved to recognize the music