Chapter 5

Practice does what practice always does — swallows you whole.

Sandra runs you through your program twice, then pulls it apart at the seams and makes you put it back together again piece by piece, the way she always does when competition is close. Footwork sequence. Step sequence. The combination spin in the second half that she keeps telling you can be tighter, cleaner, give me one more.

You give her one more.

You give her several more.

By the time she calls you in, your lungs are burning pleasantly and your hair is escaping whatever you did with it this morning and you feel that specific kind of tired that only skating gives you — wrung out and full at the same time.

You step through the barrier gate and reach for your water bottle and it’s only then, in the quiet of coming back to yourself, that you realise.

You glanced over too.

Not often. Not obviously. But somewhere between your second run-through and the footwork section you’d let your eyes drift — just once, just for a moment — to the far end of the rink where Alysa was mid-combination, dark hair catching the light, and you’d looked away again before it could become anything more than a glance.

You’d told yourself it was just natural curiosity.

You’re still telling yourself that.

What you don’t know — what you have no way of knowing — is that across the rink, scattered between corrections and Massimo’s gentle repositioning of her free arm and Phillip’s very detailed opinions about her entry edge, Alysa had done the same thing.

Just a glance. Just a second.

The moment your combination spin had opened up in the middle of the ice, clean and centred and quietly stunning, her eyes had found you without permission. She’d watched the whole thing — the entry, the rotations, the way you held the exit like you had all the time in the world — and something in her chest had done a small, specific thing that she didn’t examine too closely because Phillip was already saying her name in that tone that meant focus.

She focused.

But she looked over again later, just once more, when you were doing your step sequence and you clearly didn’t know anyone was watching, and that was somehow the best version of it.

The sessions end within minutes of each other.

You’re back on the rubber mat, lowering yourself onto the bench, when you hear it — the familiar sound of the gate at the far end, footsteps, and then the bench shifting in that way it had this morning that you already, embarrassingly, recognise.

“Good session?” Alysa drops down beside you, slightly breathless, cheeks faintly pink from the cold. Up close like this she has that post-skate glow that makes her look like she belongs in the rink the way some people belong in certain light.

“I think so,” you say, reaching for your laces. “Sandra didn’t look disappointed, which is basically a standing ovation from her.”

Alysa laughs — bright and unguarded — and the sound bounces softly off the low ceiling of the small rink.

“Okay I have to say something,” she says, and the shift in her tone makes you look up.

She’s already looking at you, expression open and earnest in that way of hers that you’re starting to suspect is just how she is — no performance, no preamble, just whatever she’s thinking walking straight out into the open air.

“Your combination spin.” She shakes her head slightly, like she’s still thinking about it. “The one in the second half of your program. It was so — I don’t know, it was just so pretty. Like the whole thing was just quiet and perfect and I couldn’t stop watching it.”

You stare at her.

She was watching you.

She watched your spin.

Say something. You have a mouth. It has words in it. Use them.

“I’ve been working on it for weeks,” you say, which is not the most interesting response in the world but it is a response and you are proud of it.

“It shows,” she says, simply and sincerely. “Genuinely. You’re a really beautiful skater.”

The word beautiful lands somewhere in your ribcage and just stays there.

You look down at your laces. Your fingers are doing something with them — loosening, you think, that’s probably loosening — and you are extremely grateful to have something to do with your hands right now.

“Thank you,” you say softly. “That actually means a lot.”

“I mean it.” She’s working on her own laces now, and there’s a comfortable ease to it, the two of you side by side again, unwinding from practice together like it’s something you do. “Your jump was really nice too, by the way. The one toward the end — was that a lutz?”

“Flip,” you say. “People always mix them up.”

“Okay in my defence—”

“There’s no defence for that one.”

She gasps, dramatically, and points at you. “You’re mean.”

You are smiling so hard at your skates right now.

“I’m really not,” you say.

“Mm.” She pulls her boot off and sets it aside, and when you glance over she’s already looking at you with this expression that’s soft and amused and something else you don’t have a word for yet. “No,” she agrees, quieter. “You’re really not.”

The rink is settling into its after-practice hush around you, and neither of you is in any particular hurry.