Chapter 17

It starts with a text.

alysa 🖤 ⛸️ ✨
2:34pm
what are you doing right now

You look at your phone. You look at the book you’ve been attempting to read for the past forty minutes without retaining a single word. You look at your phone again.

you
2:35pm
absolutely nothing

alysa 🖤 ⛸️ ✨
2:35pm
perfect

alysa 🖤 ⛸️ ✨
2:35pm
I’m outside

You put the book down.

She’s leaning against the wall beside your building’s entrance when you come out, hands in the pocket of an oversized jacket you haven’t seen before, dark and slightly worn at the cuffs in a way that means she loves it. Her hair is down. She has the silver ring on again. She looks like herself in the way she always looks like herself — completely, unapologetically, like the concept of being anything other than exactly who she is has simply never occurred to her.

She looks up when she hears the door and smiles and something in your chest does its thing.

“Hi,” she says.

“You’re outside my building,” you say.

“I was in the area.”

You look at the street. The very residential, not particularly near anything street. “Were you.”

“I was in a area,” she amends. “Come on. Walk with me.”

You walk.

No particular direction — just the two of you and the afternoon and wherever the streets decide to take you, her hands in her pockets and yours in yours until at some point, without discussion, her arm finds its way around your shoulders again and stays there and you lean into it and she pulls you in and the world goes on around you completely unbothered.

She talks. You talk. It moves the way it always moves between you — easy, unhurried, following threads that lead somewhere unexpected and staying there a while before finding the next one. She tells you about a song she’s been given for next season’s programme and how she can’t decide if she loves it or if it terrifies her, which she says might be the same thing. You tell her about a skater you watched online last night, something about the quality of their edges, and she listens with her whole face the way she always does and asks questions that show she actually heard you.

You pass a bookshop.

You slow instinctively — you always slow near bookshops, it’s simply what you do — and she slows with you, looking at the window display with mild curiosity.

“Do you want to go in?” she says.

“We don’t have to—”

“I asked if you wanted to,” she says, simply. Not impatient. Just — asking what you actually want.

You go in.

It’s the kind of bookshop that takes itself seriously in the best way — floor to ceiling shelves and a slightly creaky floor and a cat asleep on the counter who opens one eye at you and decides you’re acceptable. Alysa looks around with the expression of someone who is happy anywhere that has a good atmosphere, and you drift immediately toward the section you always drift toward, fingers trailing along spines.

You’re somewhere between poetry and fiction when you feel her beside you.

She’s quiet. Just looking at the shelves with her head tilted slightly, reading titles. And then —

“You mentioned this one,” she says.

You look.

She’s holding a book out toward you. Small, pale cover, the kind of title that sounds like a feeling. Your heart does something very specific.

“When?” you say, though you already half know.

“The café. The first time.” She’s looking at the cover, not at you, her thumb running along the spine in the careful way of someone who respects books. “You said you’d been meaning to read it for ages but you kept forgetting to look for it.” She glances up. “I looked for it.”

The sentence lands so quietly.

I looked for it.

She says it like it’s nothing. Like of course she remembered, like of course she went looking, like paying that quality of attention to the things you say is just something she does without thinking about it — which is exactly why it hits you the way it does, square in the chest, soft and certain and completely flooring.

She noticed.

She remembered.

She looked.

You take the book from her carefully, like it’s something precious, which it is — not for what it is but for what it means, for the fact that weeks ago in a café over tea and an almond croissant you mentioned something small and she held onto it and carried it here.

“Alysa,” you say softly.

“It might be terrible,” she says, which is such a her thing to say that you almost laugh. “No pressure to love it.”

“I already love it,” you say.

You’re not talking about the book.

She looks at you for a moment and something moves through her expression — that open, undone thing, the one that belongs to the version of her that exists underneath the effortless cool — and she looks back at the shelf and clears her throat very slightly and says “good” in a voice that is just a fraction less steady than usual.

You hold the book against your chest and smile at the poetry section and feel so completely, helplessly gone for this girl that you wouldn’t know where to begin explaining it.

The cat is awake when you get to the counter. It accepts being looked at by Alysa with great dignity and allows her to scratch behind its ear for approximately four seconds before deciding that’s enough and looking away. She accepts this outcome completely unbothered.

“Very cool cat,” she tells the person at the counter while they ring you up.

“He knows,” they say.

She nods like this is correct and expected.

You pay for the book. She tries to. You get there first and she points at you with an expression of fond outrage and you put your card away with great serenity.

Outside the afternoon has gone golden in the way it does in the early evening, that particular quality of light that makes ordinary streets look like something worth remembering. You’re walking back in the direction of your building, her arm around your shoulders again, the book in your bag, and everything is easy and warm and full of the specific contentment of a day that asked nothing of you and gave you everything anyway.

She slows as your building comes into view.

You slow with her.

And she takes her arm from around your shoulders and turns to face you slightly, and you look at her, and she is — doing something new. Something you haven’t quite seen before. Her hands find her jacket pockets and she looks at you and then briefly away and then back, and there is something in her expression that is working something out, something that is just slightly less certain than she usually is, and it takes you a moment to place it because you have never seen Alysa uncertain about anything.

She’s nervous.

Actually, genuinely, endearingly nervous.

Your heart grows approximately three sizes.

“So,” she says.

“So,” you say softly.

“I was thinking.” She shifts her weight slightly. Looks at you properly. “I would like to take you somewhere. Properly. Like — dinner, or whatever you want, anywhere you want to go.” A breath. “I would like to plan it and come and get you and take you somewhere that isn’t a car park or a takeout window, not that those weren’t—”

“They were,” you say.

“—they were, yeah, but I want to—” she stops. Tries again. “I want to take you on a date. A real one. If you want.”

The last three words are so careful. So genuinely uncertain. So completely unlike every version of Alysa you’ve seen breeze through every room and every rink and every moment with that effortless warmth — and yet somehow more her than any of it, this small careful asking, this tiny held breath.

You look at her for just a moment.

Just long enough to watch the uncertainty flicker.

Then — “yes,” you say. “Obviously yes.”

The relief that moves through her face is so immediate and so unguarded that you fall a little further without meaning to, which you hadn’t thought was possible, and then she smiles — her whole smile, her real one — and rocks back on her heels once and says “okay good” with the energy of someone who has just put something down that was heavier than they let on.

“Okay good,” you echo, smiling.

She reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, gentle and unhurried, her fingers just barely grazing your cheek, and then her hand drops and she takes a small step back and points at you.

“Wednesday,” she says.

“Wednesday,” you agree.

She turns and heads back down the street, and you watch her go, and she turns back once — just once — and grins at you in the golden evening light.

You stand outside your building holding a book she found for you because she listened and remembered and looked, and you think that you were already gone, you were gone a long time ago, but today finished the job completely and you are so entirely, joyfully fine about it.