Chapter 21

The first thing Alysa is aware of is the light.

Pale and soft through curtains that don’t quite meet in the middle, the particular quality of early morning light that hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet — not golden, not grey, just quiet. Just the slow beginning of a Saturday that has nowhere to be.

The second thing she is aware of is you.

Asleep beside her. Facing her. Your hair loose across the pillow in a way that has nothing to do with how it looked last night and everything to do with how it looks right now, which is — she doesn’t have a word for it. Something that belongs only to this room, only to this morning, only to the version of you that exists before the day gets to you.

She stays very still.

Not wanting to move. Not wanting to disturb any of it — the quiet, the light, the fact of waking up here, in your space, in your warm and softly pink and entirely you bedroom, with the lamp still on in the living room because neither of them thought to turn it off last night and somehow that feels like the most intimate detail of all.

She watches you sleep for a moment.

Just a moment. Just long enough to think —

There you are.

There you finally, completely, entirely are.

You surface slowly.

The way you always wake up — in stages, consciousness arriving like tide coming in rather than a wave, and for a few seconds you’re just warm and comfortable and not quite sure why the morning feels different until—

Oh.

Oh.

You open your eyes.

She’s already awake. Lying on her side facing you, head on the pillow, striped hair everywhere, and she’s looking at you with an expression that is so soft and so unguarded and so completely free of the effortless cool she carries through the world that for a moment you just look back at her and let it be the first thing you see on a Saturday morning.

“Hey,” she says. Quiet. Just for this room.

“Hey,” you say back.

A beat.

And then — you’re not sure who starts it, it might be simultaneous, it might be the morning itself — you both smile. Wide and helpless and slightly ridiculous, the kind of smiling that happens when something is so good you don’t quite know what to do with your face about it.

“You’re in my bed,” you say.

“I am,” she agrees, very seriously.

“How did that happen.”

“I’m also unclear,” she says. “Very mysterious.”

You pull the duvet up slightly and she does the same on her side and you lie there facing each other in the soft morning light being absolutely ridiculous and you have never felt more awake in your life.

“Your ceiling has a crack in it,” she says, after a while.

You both look up.

“I know,” you say. “It’s been there since I moved in. I’ve named it.”

She turns her head to look at you. “You named your ceiling crack.”

“Gerald,” you say. “He’s been through a lot.”

She stares at you.

And then she laughs — that laugh, your favourite sound, the one that bounces and fills and asks nothing of the space it lands in — and buries her face in the pillow and you watch her shoulders shake and feel so completely full of something you still don’t have quite the right word for.

“Gerald,” she repeats, into the pillow.

“He’s been very supportive.”

She lifts her face. Her eyes are bright and slightly watery from laughing. “I can’t believe you. I genuinely cannot believe you.”

“You’re the one looking at my ceiling.”

“Because you told me to look at your ceiling!”

“I told you there was a crack—”

“Named Gerald—”

“It felt right—”

She throws her head back into the pillow again and you’re laughing too now, properly, morning laughter that is looser and more helpless than any other kind, and the duvet shifts and the light comes in through the gap in the curtains and Gerald observes everything from above with great dignity.

The giggles settle slowly, the way they do, leaving something warm and easy in their place.

You end up on your backs, both looking up at the ceiling — at Gerald — shoulders touching, the duvet pulled up to your chins, the morning going gently around you.

“What time is it?” she asks.

You reach for your phone on the nightstand. Look at it. Put it back.

“Doesn’t matter,” you say.

She considers this.

“No,” she agrees. “It really doesn’t.”

She finds your hand under the duvet.

Doesn’t say anything about it. Just finds it and holds it and you look at the ceiling and feel her thumb moving slowly back and forth across the back of your hand in that way she has, that particular rhythm, and think about all the times before this — the film, the ice, the car park in the golden light — every time her hand found yours and what it meant and what it was building toward without either of you having a name for it yet.

It has a name now.

Girlfriend.

You said it in the middle of a party with the music playing and the room full of people and it came out like something you’d known for a long time, which maybe you had.

“Can I ask you something?” you say.

“Always,” she says. Your word. Handed back to you again.

“When did you know?” you ask. “That you — ” you pause. “You know.”

She’s quiet for a moment.

“The spin,” she says.

You turn your head to look at her.

She’s looking at the ceiling. “The combination spin. The first Wednesday we actually talked.” She pauses. “I was at the far end of the rink and I looked over and you were mid-spin and I just — ” she stops. Tries again. “I don’t know. Something happened.” A small almost-laugh. “Phillip made me redo the same jump four times because I couldn’t focus.”

You stare at her.

“You never told me that.”

“I’m telling you now.”

You look back at the ceiling.

“The laces,” you say quietly.

She turns her head.

“When you said they suited me.” You keep your eyes on Gerald. “That was when I knew. I’d been — I already thought you were — but that was when it became something I couldn’t explain away.”

She squeezes your hand.

You squeeze back.

You stay in bed for a very long time.

Long past when the pale morning light becomes proper golden morning light, long past when you could reasonably claim to still be tired, long past any sensible hour for two people with lives to get back to eventually.

You talk. About everything and nothing, the way you always talk, except this morning there’s a new layer to it — the warmth of people who have stopped holding anything back, who have said girlfriend and obviously yes and I knew from your spin and have nothing left to keep careful.

She does voices for Phillip and Massimo in a story about a competition warm-up that went wrong three years ago and you laugh so hard you have to put your face in the pillow. You tell her about your first pair of skates and how they were slightly too big and you stuffed them with socks and didn’t tell anyone for six months and she looks so delighted by this information that you store the expression away carefully.

At some point she gets up to use the bathroom and comes back and gets back into bed without any ceremony whatsoever, like it’s something she does, like your bed is just a place she belongs now, and maybe it is, and you pull the duvet back for her and she gets in and finds your hand again immediately and you go back to looking at Gerald like nothing interrupted anything.

Because nothing did.

“We should probably get up,” she says eventually.

“Probably,” you agree.

Neither of you moves.

The morning light is fully golden now, lying across the bed in warm stripes through the gap in the curtains, and outside the Saturday sounds of your street are going on without you — a car, a bird, someone’s door — and in here it is still and warm and yours.

Her thumb still moving back and forth.

Your shoulder against hers.

Gerald in his usual spot.

“Five more minutes,” you say.

“Five more minutes,” she agrees immediately.

It is not five more minutes.

It is considerably more than five more minutes and neither of you minds even slightly.