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The Olympic Village in Cortina d'Ampezzo should have been colder. Jakob remembers reading somewhere that temperatures here have risen over six degrees since the 1956 games, but tonight, standing outside the athletes' dormitory, the February air still bites hard enough to make his breath visible. Or maybe that's just the anxiety tightening his chest as he waits for Matteo to slip out through the side door.
Inside those walls, everyone knows everyone's business. Cameras everywhere. Reporters hunting for stories. Coaches tracking their athletes' every move. And somewhere in the maze of hallways and shared spaces, teammates who might not understand, or worse, who might understand perfectly and decide it's a problem worth sharing with the world.
This is what fear tastes like at the Olympics: metallic and sharp, like you've been training too hard at altitude.
The Weight of Watching Eyes
Olympic Villages are peculiar ecosystems. They're designed to celebrate international unity and athletic excellence, but they're also pressure cookers where every gesture gets analyzed, every friendship gets scrutinized, and every relationship becomes potential headline material. For LGBTQ+ athletes, especially those from countries where being openly gay can cost you sponsorships, team positions, or worse, these villages become stages where you perform straightness alongside your sport.
Jakob had qualified for the downhill and super-G. Matteo was here for the slalom. They'd met three years ago at a World Cup event in Austria, struck up a friendship over terrible cafeteria coffee, and gradually, carefully, let that friendship transform into something neither of them had words for at first. Something that made Jakob's heart rate spike faster than any starting gate.
But here, in the global spotlight, they were just fellow skiers. Casual acquaintances. Maybe training partners, if anyone asked.
The exhaustion of it was almost worse than the training schedule. Every smile measured. Every glance calculated. Every moment together requiring an excuse, a cover story, a third person to make it look platonic. Jakob had downloaded one of those MM romance books from Read with Pride last month, something about enemies to lovers, two guys who got to be openly furious and openly affectionate with each other, and he'd nearly thrown his phone across the room from jealousy.
Snow That Doesn't Fall Naturally Anymore
The mountain above them was almost entirely covered in artificial snow. Three million cubic yards of it, manufactured and blown across slopes that should have been naturally white but weren't anymore. Climate change was making winter sports increasingly artificial, increasingly precarious. Jakob found the metaphor uncomfortably apt: even the environment around them required elaborate constructions to look like what people expected.
He and Matteo had gotten good at constructing what people expected too.
"You're thinking too loud." Matteo's voice came from behind him, warm and amused. "I can hear your brain spinning from here."
Jakob turned. Matteo was bundled in a team jacket, hood up, looking like every other athlete who couldn't sleep and needed air. Except when Jakob looked at him, everything else, the village, the mountains, the pressure, narrowed to just this: the curve of Matteo's smile, the way his eyes caught the security lights, the fact that for just a few stolen minutes, they could be real.
"How's your knee?" Jakob asked, because they always started with the safe questions. The ones that made sense if anyone overheard.
"Better. Physio helped." Matteo moved closer, but not too close. Never too close in the open. "Your run tomorrow, you ready?"
"As ready as I'll ever be."
They started walking, following the perimeter path that athletes used for cooldown jogs and midnight anxiety spirals. The Olympics had a way of making everyone a little unhinged. No one questioned why you were outside at odd hours. Everyone was processing pressure in their own way.
"I keep thinking," Matteo said quietly, "about that gay romance novel you recommended. The one with the spies?"
Jakob blinked. "The adventure romance one? With the mission in Prague?"
"Yes. And I keep thinking, they had to hide too. Their whole relationship was secret, coded messages, dead drops, pretending they barely knew each other." Matteo's breath clouded in the cold. "But at least they chose that life. They knew what they were signing up for."
"And we didn't?"
"Did we?" Matteo stopped walking. "I chose skiing. I chose competition. I didn't choose to have to hide who I love to keep doing it."
The word love hung between them like something fragile and dangerous. They didn't use it often. It made things too real, too complicated, too impossible to walk away from if they needed to.
The Warmth Worth the Risk
Jakob reached out and brushed his fingers against Matteo's glove, the smallest touch, barely contact, the kind that could be accidental if anyone saw. But they both knew it wasn't.
"After the games," Jakob said. "After medals or no medals, after we leave this place, "
"What? We'll be free?" Matteo's laugh was bitter. "There's another World Cup season. Another sponsorship negotiation. Another national team camp where I have to smile and nod while teammates make jokes about 'finding the right girl.'"
"I was going to say we could be freeer." Jakob held his ground. "Look, I'm not naive. I know coming out publicly as a professional athlete is complicated. I know there are risks. But I also know that there are LGBTQ+ authors writing gay romance books about people like us who get happy endings. There are communities: Read with Pride and places like it: full of people who want these stories, who believe we deserve them."
Matteo was quiet for a long moment. Around them, the Olympic Village hummed with its strange nocturnal energy: athletes who couldn't sleep, coaches reviewing footage, physiotherapists treating midnight injuries, reporters hoping someone would give them a story.
"What if I want that?" Matteo finally said. "A happy ending. Not just in a gay fiction novel, but in real life. With you."
Jakob's chest tightened: not with fear this time, but with something that felt dangerously like hope. "Then maybe we start planning for it. Not today. Not while we're under this microscope. But soon. We decide what we're willing to risk for what we want to gain."
The Thing About Cold Places
They walked back toward the dormitories in silence, their shoulders occasionally brushing: the kind of contact that could be coincidental or could be the whole point, depending on who was interpreting it. Jakob had learned that ambiguity could be a kind of protection, even if it was exhausting.
At the door, Matteo paused. "Your run tomorrow: ski like you're free. Even if it's just pretend."
"You too," Jakob said. "In a few days."
What he wanted to say was: I love you. I'm tired of pretending. After this is over, let's figure out how to build something real. What he wanted to do was kiss Matteo right there under the security lights, let every camera catch it, let every headline scream it, let the world know that this: this: was worth more than any medal.
But he didn't. Not yet.
Because the thing about cold places is that you have to be strategic about where you find warmth. You have to protect it, shelter it, keep it safe until you're somewhere it can actually grow.
Beyond the Games
The conversation about LGBTQ+ visibility in sports is slowly changing. There are more openly gay athletes than ever before, more queer fiction that tells our stories, more platforms like Read with Pride dedicated to celebrating love in all its forms. But for athletes like Jakob and Matteo, caught between their passion for their sport and their desire to live authentically, the path forward isn't always clear.
What is clear is that these stories matter. Whether they're lived experiences or MM romance books that help us imagine what's possible, they remind us that love: even secret, complicated, Olympic Village love: deserves space to exist.
Jakob qualified fourth in his downhill run the next morning. Matteo sent him a text that just said: "Proud of you." No hearts, no emoji, nothing that could be screenshotted and interpreted as more than friendly support.
But Jakob knew what it meant. The same way he knew that the warmth growing between them was worth protecting, worth planning for, worth whatever risks they'd eventually take to bring it into the light.
Because some things are worth melting for: even in the coldest places on earth.
Looking for gay romance novels that celebrate love against the odds? Explore our collection of LGBTQ+ ebooks featuring everything from contemporary MM romance to gay adventure stories at readwithpride.com. Because every love story deserves to be told with pride.
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