Chapter 6

The cold follows you out.

It always does — clings to your hair and your jacket and the inside of your lungs for a few minutes after you leave the rink, like it doesn’t quite want to let you go. You don’t mind. You’ve always liked that about skating. The way it stays with you even after you’ve left it behind.

The door swings shut behind you both and the afternoon light hits immediately, pale and golden, the kind of late day sun that makes everything look a little softer than it actually is. The small car park outside the rink is quiet. A bird somewhere. The distant sound of a road.

You’re adjusting the strap of your skate bag on your shoulder when Alysa slows beside you.

You take another step before you realise she’s not quite keeping pace anymore, and you glance back.

She’s looking at your bag.

Not your face. Your bag — specifically, the small cluster of pins you have fastened near the top strap, the ones that have lived there so long you’ve stopped seeing them. Your eyes follow hers automatically, scanning for something wrong, something out of place, a strap coming loose maybe or—

There.

The rainbow flag pin.

Small and round, enamel and silver-edged, and in this particular slant of afternoon light it is catching the sun and throwing the tiniest scatter of colour across the fabric beside it. You’ve had it so long it’s just part of the bag now. Part of you. You’d stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing things that have always simply been there.

You look back up at her.

She isn’t saying anything.

She’s just — smiling. Soft and private, like something has settled quietly into place somewhere inside her, like a small piece of information has been received and tucked away carefully. Her eyes lift from the pin to your face and when they find yours the smile doesn’t go anywhere, it just changes slightly at the edges, becomes something a little warmer, a little more like a question that isn’t quite ready to be asked out loud yet.

You don’t say anything either.

You just smile back, and there’s something fluttery and warm happening in your chest that you are absolutely not examining right now because you are outside a rink in the afternoon sunlight and you would like to remain a functioning person for at least a few more minutes.

You both start walking again, easy and unhurried, bags on shoulders, blades wrapped and tucked away.

“Same time next week?” Alysa asks, after a moment.

You glance at her.

She’s looking ahead, but there’s still the ghost of that smile on her face, and her hands are tucked into the front pocket of her hoodie — something dark, something with a small logo you don’t recognise — and she is so effortlessly, unthinkingly cool that it is frankly a little unfair.

“My schedule hasn’t changed in two years,” you say. “So probably.”

She makes a small sound that is almost a laugh. “Mine either.”

A beat.

“Funny that it took us this long,” she says, lightly. Easily. Like she’s just observing it.

“Yeah,” you agree, just as lightly.

Funny.

You reach the point where the car park splits — her direction and yours, the way paths do at the end of things. You both slow without discussing it, drifting to a natural stop on the asphalt the way you’d drifted to a stop in the centre of the ice earlier, and the symmetry of it is not lost on you.

She turns to face you.

“It was really nice, [y/n],” she says. Your name in her mouth still sounds new and lovely. “Today. Talking.”

“It was,” you agree, and you mean it completely.

She rocks back on her heels once, just slightly, that little silver piercing catching the light the same way your pin had, and gives you one last smile — warm and bright and entirely Alysa — before she turns and heads toward her side of the car park.

You watch her go for exactly as long as you can justify.

Then you turn and walk to your own car, and you are smiling at the ground the whole way there, and the afternoon light is golden and the cold is still in your lungs and everything feels, quietly and without explanation, a little bit like the beginning of something.