Chapter 41

The alarm is set for seven.

It is currently six fourteen.

You know this because you are awake — have been for a little while, lying in the particular stillness of a hotel room in a city that isn’t yours, the curtains doing their not-quite-meeting thing and the pale Paris morning coming through the gap, grey and soft and entirely unbothered by what today is.

You are on your side.

She is beside you.

The lingerie is on the carpet.

You notice it peripherally — a small soft heap near the foot of the bed, and something else draped over the chair in the corner, and the silk robe pooled near the bathroom door where it ended up at some point in the warm unhurried dark of last night — and you look at all of it and feel something move through you that is warm and private and completely yours.

You did that, you think.

You walked out of that bathroom in a silk robe and you opened it and you kissed her first and you were certain and brave and completely yourself and you did that.

The girl who fumbled her laces the first time Alysa sat next to her.

You did that.

You turn toward her.

She’s asleep.

Deeply, properly asleep — the sleep of someone who needed it, who gave everything to last night and is now replenishing, her face completely relaxed in the way it only is when she’s fully under, all the effortless cool and the warm brightness and the constant gentle attention she gives the world, all of it set down for now, just her underneath, just Alysa in the pale Paris morning light.

Her hair is everywhere.

The raccoon, you think, and feel so fond about it that you have to press your lips together.

One hand curled loosely near her face. The silver ring on the nightstand where she always puts it. Her breathing slow and even, the breathing of someone who is not thinking about today yet, who is still somewhere safe and warm and unaware of what the next twelve hours will ask of her.

You look at her for a long moment.

At the girl who drew two hearts under a bench in permanent marker.

Who remembered a book from a single mention.

Who said you will to a teenager in a competition corridor like it was simply true and needed saying.

Who kissed you in the middle of an empty rink because a layback spin made it impossible not to.

Who brought you to Paris and bought you roses and gave you gold at your throat and said your most beautiful to a hotel ceiling like it was the simplest fact in the world.

I love you, you think, looking at her sleeping face.

Not for the first time.

Not for the last.

Just — right now, in the six fourteen pale morning, before the day takes her, before the competition and the arena and the ice and all of it, just right now in the quiet:

I love you.

The alarm goes at seven.

She surfaces the way she always does — in stages, consciousness arriving gradually, and then something shifts and you can tell the exact moment she remembers what today is because her whole body changes, something focusing, something gathering itself.

She opens her eyes.

Finds you immediately.

“Hi,” she says. Sleep-rough. Warm.

“Hi,” you say.

She looks at the ceiling for a moment.

Then back at you.

“How long have you been awake?” she asks.

“A while,” you say.

She looks at you.

“Were you watching me sleep?”

“I was watching the ceiling,” you say.

“The ceiling is behind you,” she says.

You say nothing.

She smiles — slow and morning-soft and so completely herself — and reaches over and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear and leaves her hand there against your face and you lean into it and close your eyes and just — be here. One more minute. Before the day.

“Today,” she says quietly.

“Today,” you say.

Her thumb moves once across your cheekbone.

“Thank you,” she says. “For last night. For—” she pauses. “For all of it. This whole trip.”

You open your eyes.

“You planned the whole trip,” you say.

“You made it—” she stops. Searches. “More than I planned it to be.”

You look at her.

She looks back.

And then the alarm goes again — the snooze, seven oh nine, insistent — and she closes her eyes briefly and exhales and when she opens them again she is Alysa the competitor alongside Alysa yours and both are beautiful and both are entirely her.

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay,” you say.

She gets up.

The day begins.

Breakfast is the four of them.

Massimo with his coffee and his energy and his particular brand of pre-competition intensity that expresses itself as talking slightly more than usual about everything except the competition. Phillip with his clipboard and his measured calm and the quality he has on competition mornings of being a fixed point — steady and sure and completely reliable in the way of something that has never moved and never will.

You sit beside Alysa and she eats properly — she always eats properly before a competition, disciplined about it in the way she is disciplined about everything that matters — and you drink your tea and listen to Massimo and catch Phillip’s eye once across the table.

He looks at her.

At the quality of her this morning — something in how she’s sitting, something in her eyes, something that is different from other competition mornings in a way that is hard to name but entirely visible if you know where to look.

He looks at you.

Nods once.

You look at your tea.

The venue.

The warm up.

You watch from the stands with Massimo as she takes the ice and the first thing she does is find you — across the distance of the arena, through the other skaters and the officials and the particular busy quiet of a warm up session, she finds you in the stands and something in her face settles.

Massimo sees it.

“She’s going to be extraordinary today,” he says quietly.

“She’s always extraordinary,” you say.

“No,” he says. “I mean—” he pauses, finding it. “There are days she skates well and days she skates like herself. Today she’s going to skate like herself.”

You watch her push off into her first element.

Clean. Sure. Like she’s been waiting.

“Yeah,” you say.

“I know,” he says.

Her name is called.

She takes the ice to the response she always gets — this arena knowing her, having watched her before, the particular warmth of a crowd receiving someone they’ve seen grow up on ice.

She finds her starting position.

Finds you one more time.

You raise the sign.

The raccoon. The croissant. WE LOVE ALYSA.

Something in her face — just for a second, just for you — goes completely soft.

Then the music starts.

It is the best programme you have ever seen her skate.

Not because it’s technically perfect — though it is, every element clean and certain, every jump landed with the sureness of someone who is not thinking about landing it because their body simply knows — but because of what lives underneath the technical. Because of what Phillip has always been asking her for and what she has always been capable of and what today, for whatever reason, she has completely and entirely found.

She skates from the inside.

You can feel it from the stands.

The whole arena can feel it.

It is not a performance. It is not something she is doing. It is something she is, something that moves through her and out into the music and the ice and the cold arena air and reaches the third row where you are sitting with Massimo’s hand on your arm and your sign in your lap and your eyes full.

The combination spin.

You grip the sign.

It is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.

Not because it is perfect — though it is — but because of the quality of her inside it. Present and certain and completely free, the way she was on a warm up lap in a small rink on a Wednesday morning when she took your hand mid-stride and skated one-handed like it was nothing.

Like it was everything.

The jump.

Clean.

The step sequence — the arena responding, actually responding, the particular sound of a crowd that has forgotten to be an audience and become something more present than that.

The final spin.

She exits it.

Comes to her final position.

And the arena does something you feel in your chest like a physical thing — a sound, a response, a collective recognition of something witnessed, something that will be remembered.

Massimo is standing.

You are standing.

You didn’t decide to stand.

Your sign is above your head and your eyes are doing the thing and Massimo has both hands pressed to his face and across the arena Phillip is standing too — Phillip, who does not stand, who watches competitions with the stillness of someone who has seen everything — and he is standing and his eyes are closed and his jaw is set in the way of someone holding something in with great effort.

Alysa is in the centre of the ice.

Breathing.

Chest rising and falling.

And then she looks up.

Finds you.

Third row. Slightly left of centre.

Sign above your head.

Your face, which you have completely lost control of, which is doing everything it feels and hiding none of it.

She looks at you across the arena.

And she smiles.

Not the competitor smile.

Not the performance smile.

Yours.