Chapter 12

She’s already there.

That’s the first thing you notice — the bench, your bench, and Alysa already on it with two minutes to spare, which has never happened in all the weeks you’ve been doing this. She’s lacing up with her head down, striped hair falling forward, and she looks up the moment you push through the door like she heard you coming, like she was listening for you.

She smiles.

You smile back before you can do anything about it, which is just how things are now.

You cross to the bench and drop your bag and sit down beside her and reach for your skates and it’s all completely normal, completely routine, the same thing you’ve done every Wednesday for longer than you can count —

Something lands on your bag.

Small. Light. The softest little sound of enamel on fabric.

You look down.

A pin.

Small and round, the same size as the others, and the colours on it are — pink and orange and red and white and—

Your breath does something.

You pick it up slowly and hold it in your palm and look at it properly and it is exactly what you thought it was, exactly what those stripes mean, and your heart is doing something so loud you’re surprised the whole rink can’t hear it.

You look up at her.

Alysa is watching you with an expression that is trying very hard to be casual and not quite getting there — her eyes are too soft for casual, too hopeful, and there’s something in the set of her mouth that is waiting, that is please, that is the same quality as a held breath.

You close your fingers around the pin gently.

And you smile at her — warm and slow and with everything you have — and watch her whole face exhale.

She looks back down at her laces.

But she’s smiling at them so hard she’s basically useless with them for a full thirty seconds and you see every moment of it and say nothing and feel everything.

“Okay,” she says eventually, with great dignity, “how are you so good at lacing those.”

You look down at your skates, already half done. “Practice.”

“I have practice.”

“Skating practice. Lace practice is different.”

She looks at you. “Lace practice.”

“It’s a thing.”

“It’s absolutely not a thing.”

“It is,” you say solemnly. “You should try it sometime. I could teach you.”

She stares at you for a second and then laughs — bright and startled and delighted, the laugh that you have collected every single instance of since the first time you heard it — and points at you. “You’re different.”

“Am I?”

“You’re funnier than you let on.”

“I’ve always been this funny,” you say. “You just couldn’t hear me from across the rink.”

She laughs again and this time you feel it in your chest like something settling into its right place, warm and certain.

“Fair point,” she concedes, turning back to her laces. A pause. “For the record I was listening.”

You glance at her.

She’s not looking at you but her mouth is doing that thing, that small private smile aimed at her own hands.

“From across the rink,” you say. “While we were saying hey.”

“You have a very expressive hey.”

“I—” you laugh, actually laugh, surprised out of it. “What does that mean?”

“It means what it means.” She finishes her laces and sits up and looks at you with her eyes bright and her expression completely serene, like she hasn’t just said something completely unhinged. “Some people’s hey is just a hey. Yours has layers.”

You stare at her.

“You,” you say slowly, “have been thinking about the layers of my hey.”

“Professionally,” she says. “Out of professional curiosity.”

“You keep using that.”

“It keeps applying.”

You shake your head at your skates but you cannot stop smiling and you both know it and neither of you pretends otherwise.

You finish lacing up and you’re reaching for your blade guards when you look down at the pin still sitting in your palm, those careful stripes of pink and red and orange, small and deliberate and so full of everything she hasn’t said out loud yet.

You look at your bag.

The rainbow pin on one side. The little camera in the middle.

You fasten the new one on the other side, completing the little collection, and you smooth your thumb over it once and zip your bag closed.

When you look up Alysa is watching.

“Perfect,” she says quietly. And she means the pin. She means all of it.

“Yeah,” you agree, just as quietly.

And she nudges your shoulder with hers, light and brief, and stands up and offers you her hand to pull you up from the bench, and you take it, and she pulls, and for just a second you’re standing very close before the momentum carries you apart, and she’s already heading for the gate still smiling, and you follow her onto the ice with three pins on your bag and your heart approximately full to the brim.

On the ice Phillip watches them from the boards.

He says nothing.

He takes his phone out and texts Massimo, who is parking the car.

you need to get in here.

Three dots.

why what happened

nothing yet, Phillip types. but soon.

He puts his phone away and smiles at the ice.