Chapter 15

She lets you pick.

Not in a making-a-point way, just — “what are you feeling” with genuine curiosity while she navigates out of the car park one handed, your hand still in hers on the centre console, like letting go is simply not something either of you is considering.

“Something warm,” you say.

“Specific.”

“You asked what I was feeling, not what I wanted.”

She glances at you sideways and the corner of her mouth does the thing. “Okay that’s fair. Noodles?”

“Noodles,” you agree.

She takes a turn you don’t recognise and the radio plays something low and the evening is coming in softly through the windows and you watch the streets go by and feel, quietly and completely, like you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

The place she picks is a small takeout window on a side street — the kind with a handwritten menu board and a queue that moves fast and smells incredible from twenty feet away. You stand beside her in the cold waiting, and at some point without discussion her arm finds its way around your shoulders and stays there, easy and warm, and you let yourself lean into it just slightly and she pulls you in just slightly more and neither of you makes anything of it.

It is the most natural thing in the world.

It is also the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to you on a side street on a Wednesday evening but you are keeping that to yourself.

She drives to a small car park overlooking a patch of green — bare trees and a path and a distant lamppost just coming on in the early dark — and cuts the engine and you eat takeout from the containers in your laps with the seats pushed back and the windows fogging slightly from the warmth of the food and your breath.

She steals a noodle from your container.

You move it further away.

She steals another one.

“You have your own,” you say.

“Yours taste better.”

“They’re the same thing.”

“They’re really not.” She says it with complete conviction and absolutely no supporting evidence and you shake your head at your food and try not to smile and fail entirely.

This is how it goes.

For an hour, maybe more, this is simply how it goes — the two of you talking about nothing in the particular way that means everything, the way that means you have found someone whose company makes ordinary things feel worth describing. She tells you about learning to skate, really learning, the early mornings and the cold and the falling, and the falling, and the falling, and then one day not falling. You tell her about your first competition, how you were so nervous you laced your skates on the wrong feet and didn’t notice until you were at the boards, and she laughs so hard she has to put her food down.

“Wrong feet,” she repeats.

“I was eight.”

“Both of them?”

“Both of them.”

She covers her mouth with her hand and her shoulders are shaking and you point a chopstick at her with great dignity. “I still placed third.”

This makes it worse. She laughs harder. You watch her laugh and think about the first time you heard it, how it bounced off the low ceiling of the rink and you’d thought even then — before the bench, before the café, before all of it — that’s a sound worth being near.

You think that even more now.

The food is gone and the containers are stacked neatly and the windows are properly fogged now, the world outside soft and indistinct, and you are just sitting in the quiet of the car with the radio still going low and everything easy between you.

She’s talking about Massimo — something he said at practice last week that she’s been thinking about, something about skating from the inside instead of the outside, and what that actually means, and whether she’s been doing it right — and her voice has gone thoughtful and genuine and you are listening, really listening, watching her hands move when she talks the way they always do.

And in the middle of a sentence she glances at you.

And whatever she sees makes her stop.

“What?” she says, softly.

“Nothing,” you say. “Keep going.”

She looks at you for a moment longer. “You’re doing the thing.”

“What thing.”

“The thing where you look at me like—” she stops. Something moves through her expression, something warm and a little undone. “Never mind.”

“Like what?” you say quietly.

She shakes her head, but she’s smiling, and she looks at her own hands in her lap and then back up at you, and the lamppost outside is casting just enough light through the fogged window to make everything soft and golden and close.

You lean forward and kiss her.

Gentle. Unhurried. Your hand coming up to find the side of her face the way hers found yours on the ice, careful and sure, and you feel her go very still for just a half second — surprised, sweetly surprised — and then she kisses you back with a warmth that starts soft and stays that way, the kind of kiss that isn’t asking for anything, just saying something.

When you pull back she is looking at you with an expression you have never seen on her before.

Open. Completely open. Every bit of the effortless cool she carries through the world set down somewhere out of reach, and just her underneath it, just Alysa, soft and undone and looking at you like you are something she is still getting used to being allowed to have.

“Hi,” you say softly.

Because it worked so well the first time.

Something breaks open in her face — a laugh and a smile arriving at the same moment, bright and helpless — and she drops her forehead to yours and stays there, and you stay there too, and outside the lamppost glows amber through the fog and the radio plays something you’ll never be able to hear again without thinking of this exact moment.

“Hi,” she says back.

Her hand finds yours on the centre console.

You turn yours over.

She links her fingers through yours and neither of you moves for a long time and the evening settles around the car like it knows you’re not ready to leave yet and has decided to be patient about it.

Eventually she drives you back to the rink car park.

Your car. The end of the evening. The part where Wednesday becomes Thursday and the world asks you to go back to your separate lives until the next time.

She pulls up beside your car and leaves the engine running and you gather your bag from the footwell slowly, not rushing, and she watches you the way she’s been watching you all evening — like she has no interest in pretending she isn’t.

You open the door.

Cold air.

You step out and then turn back and lean on the door frame and look at her, at this girl with the striped hair and the smiley piercing and the three pins she gave you before she ever said what she meant, and you think about hey, about all the hey’s, about six months of a single word that somehow managed to carry everything it needed to carry until they were ready for something more.

“Wednesday,” you say.

She smiles. “Wednesday.”

You close the door gently.

She waits until you’ve unlocked your car and gotten in before she pulls away, and you watch her taillights until they disappear around the corner, and then you sit in the quiet of your own car with your bag in your lap and your hand still warm where hers was and you think —

Wednesday.

It was always going to be a Wednesday.