Chapter 24

You’ve been coming to this rink for two years.

You know the sound of the door. The smell of the cold when it hits you on the way in. The particular creak of the third floorboard in the changing area that you’ve learned to step over without thinking. You know the bench — your bench — the way it sits against the wall, the way the rubber mat runs underneath it, the way the light falls across it in the morning.

You know all of it.

Except this Wednesday it feels entirely different and you can’t stop smiling about it.

She’s there when you arrive.

Of course she is — two minutes early, and the sight of her on the bench already lacing up does something to you that it has always done except now you’re allowed to let it show on your face, which is a new and wonderful freedom.

She looks up when the door opens.

Her whole face does the thing.

“Hey,” you both say.

The same word.

The same moment.

Except this time — this time — she stands up, half laced skate and all, and crosses to you and kisses you hello like it’s something she does, like it’s just the next thing after hey, like it is the most natural conclusion to six months of a single word finally becoming everything it was always trying to be.

You kiss her back.

Right there in the entrance of your small cosy rink on a Wednesday morning, your bag on your shoulder and her skate half laced, and it is completely ordinary and completely extraordinary and you are so glad you walked through this door two years ago.

“Hi,” she says, when she pulls back. Softer than hey. Meant only for you.

“Hi,” you say back.

She takes your hand and leads you to the bench and sits back down to finish her laces and you sit beside her and everything is the same and nothing is the same and you wouldn’t change a single thing.

They arrive together.

They always arrive together, Phillip and Massimo, in the way of two people who have been arriving places together for long enough that it has stopped being a choice and become simply what happens. But today there is something different about their arrival — an energy, a quality of barely contained something that you clock the moment they come through the far gate.

Phillip sees you first.

His expression does a very controlled, very dignified thing that is nonetheless completely readable to anyone paying attention, which you are.

Massimo sees you approximately half a second later and does not do anything controlled or dignified at all.

“Oh,” he says, at a volume that carries across the entire rink.

Alysa, beside you, drops her head into her hands.

“Massimo,” she says, into her palms.

“I’m not saying anything,” Massimo says, already saying several things with his entire body, his face, the way he grabs Phillip’s arm.

“You’re saying everything,” Alysa says. This conversation is familiar. You’ve heard it before. You suspect you will hear it many more times and find it equally wonderful every single instance.

Phillip is doing the dignified controlled thing still except his mouth has a quality to it that means he is fighting something and not entirely winning.

“Good morning,” he says, with great composure.

“Good morning Phillip,” you say.

He looks at you.

Then at Alysa.

Then back at you.

“It’s a good morning,” he agrees, and turns toward the ice with the energy of a man who has said what he needed to say and considers the matter handled.

Massimo has not moved. Massimo is still looking at the two of you on the bench — at your shoulders touching, at the general situation — with the expression of someone watching the final scene of a film they have been invested in for a very long time.

“Massimo,” Alysa says.

“I’m going,” he says. Not going.

“We’re going to be late.”

“We have four minutes.”

“Massimo.”

“Four whole minutes Alysa—”

“Massimo.”

He goes. Slowly. With great reluctance. But at the gate he turns back and points at the two of you with both hands and mouths something that you can’t quite make out but that makes Alysa groan and makes you press your lips together very hard to keep from laughing.

“They’re a lot,” she says, to you.

“I know,” you say.

“They’ve been like this since I was fifteen.”

“I know.”

“It doesn’t get better.”

“I don’t want it to,” you say honestly.

She looks at you.

That look.

“Me neither,” she says softly.

Practice is good.

Sandra has you running the programme clean three times through and the flip lands perfectly on all three which is the kind of thing that makes a Wednesday feel like a gift. Your combination spin is the tightest it has ever been. Your step sequence flows the way it occasionally does when everything in your body decides to cooperate at once and you just let it happen and try not to think too hard about it.

You skate well on ordinary Wednesdays.

You skate like this today.

You don’t examine that too closely either.

Across the rink Alysa is working on something that looks from here like a new programme — something you haven’t seen before, something that moves differently from her usual, and you watch it for one stolen moment between your run-throughs and think about what she said in the car that first night, about skating from the inside instead of the outside, about feeling the music rather than just hitting the beats.

She’s feeling it today. You can tell from here. The whole rink can probably tell.

Phillip is watching her with his arms folded and his head tilted and an expression that means he sees it too and is not going to make a big thing of it because making a big thing of it would ruin it.

Massimo is making a big thing of it quietly beside him, hand pressed to his mouth, eyes suspiciously bright.

You look away before Sandra notices you’ve been watching.

The warm up laps are the warm up laps except now they are also something else entirely.

You push off together from the gate and fall into stride the way you always do and her hands are clasped behind her back and yours are at your sides and you round the first bend and she glances at you sideways and you glance back and the whole thing is exactly the same—

She reaches out and takes your hand.

Mid-stride. Mid-lap. Completely natural, completely unbothered, like holding hands while skating around a rink is just a thing she does now, which apparently it is, which apparently you are completely fine with, which apparently you are more than fine with because the feeling that moves through you when her fingers close around yours is so warm and so right that you look straight ahead and breathe the cold air and feel like you are skating inside a song.

“Is this okay?” she asks, not looking at you.

“Yes,” you say, immediately and completely.

She squeezes once.

You squeeze back.

At the far end of the rink, Phillip unfolds his arms.

He looks at Massimo.

Massimo is already looking at him.

They watch the two of you round the far bend, hand in hand, blades finding the same rhythm, and neither of them says anything for a moment.

Then Massimo says, very quietly, like it’s only for him: “look at our girl.”

Phillip watches her.

Alysa laughing at something you’ve said, her head tipping back, the sound of it carrying across the ice even from here, and you laughing too, and the two of you rounding the bend back toward the centre of the rink like you’ve been doing this forever.

“Yeah,” Phillip says.

Just that.

Just — yeah.

He picks up his clipboard.

Massimo wipes his eye with his sleeve.

Phillip pretends not to notice.

You separate at the centre of the ice.

The way you always do — her end, your end, the day asking you to be skaters now and people later. Except today she doesn’t just peel off toward her side. She slows, and you slow with her, and she turns to face you mid-ice for just a second with the cold air between you and the rink all around you and says nothing, just looks at you with that expression — the soft open one, the one that lives underneath everything else — and then she leans forward and presses a brief kiss to your cheek, cold lips on cold skin, warm underneath.

And then she’s turning, pushing off toward her end, and you’re standing in the centre of the rink where you once did a layback spin that changed everything, and your cheek is warm where her mouth was, and Sandra is calling your name from the boards.

You go.

Smiling at the ice the whole way.