Chapter 11

You ask her.

That’s the thing. That’s the part you keep turning over on the way to the rink on Wednesday morning, the part that still surprises you a little even though you were there when it happened — you asked her. You, who spent months saying hey and looking away, who fumbled your laces the first time she sat next to you, who has been carefully, quietly, devastatingly falling for a girl you only just learned the name of.

You texted her Tuesday night.

There’s a café near the rink I’ve been meaning to try — do you want to come after practice tomorrow?

You’d stared at it for a full minute before sending it.

She’d replied in four seconds.

yes obviously. see you tomorrow 🖤

You’d put your phone face down on your bed and stared at the ceiling for a while after that.

Practice is good.

Sandra is pleased, which means she only stops you four times instead of seven, and your flip is consistent in a way that feels like it might finally be settling into your body properly. You run the program clean on the third attempt and she makes a note on her clipboard with the energy of someone who won’t say well done out loud but absolutely means it.

At the far end of the rink Alysa is working on something fast and technical, a sequence you don’t know the name of but that looks like controlled chaos from here — all sharp edges and quick turns and then suddenly a jump that seems to come from nowhere, clean and light as anything. Phillip says something when she lands. She does it again.

You watch for exactly one second.

One very long second.

Then Sandra says your name and you go back to your footwork.

The café is called something with bloom in the name and the window is full of trailing plants and it is exactly the kind of place you would choose and Alysa tells you so the moment you walk in, which makes something in you warm in a way that has nothing to do with coming in from the cold.

You find a table in the corner — small and round, two chairs close together, a little candle in a glass even though it’s the afternoon. The kind of table that doesn’t leave much space between people and doesn’t apologise for it.

Alysa is in her element the way she always is, reading the menu with genuine interest, asking the person who takes your order a question about the soup that gets a two minute answer she listens to completely, and you sit across from her with your hands around your water glass and think about how she is so thoroughly, entirely herself in every room she enters and how you find that more lovely every single time.

“Good pick,” she says, when the person leaves. Nodding at the café generally.

“I thought you’d like it,” you say, and then wonder if that was too much, if that revealed too much — I thought about what you’d like, I have been thinking about what you like —

But she just smiles at the table. Small and private. Like she’s keeping it for herself.

“I do,” she says.

Your drinks arrive. Hers something with oat milk, yours tea because some things don’t change. There’s a small speaker somewhere nearby playing quietly — indie, gentle, unhurried. The kind of music that fills a room without demanding anything from it.

You talk the way you always talk. Easy and warm, following threads wherever they go — her program, your program, a story about Massimo attempting to demonstrate a spin last week and Phillip’s reaction, which she acts out with her hands and her face until you’re laughing properly, and she looks so pleased to have made you laugh that you have to look at your cup.

And then the song changes.

It takes you a moment to place it — a guitar, unhurried, a voice you know—

We fell in love in October—

Something shifts.

Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone else in the café would notice. But you feel it — the way the song lands in the space between you like it has something to say, the way Alysa goes just slightly still across the table, her cup halfway to her mouth, her eyes doing something complicated.

You look at her.

She’s looking at the table.

And she is — working up to something. You can see it happening. The Alysa who is breezy and easy and says whatever she thinks the moment she thinks it is very slightly elsewhere right now, and in her place is something quieter, something that is choosing its words with more care than usual.

Your heart is very loud all of a sudden.

You wait.

The song keeps going, soft and certain, and the candle flickers once, and Alysa sets her cup down and looks at her own hands for a moment and then looks up at you.

“Can I ask you something?” she says.

Her voice is gentle. Careful. The same voice she used when she mentioned the pin, that same quality of I mean this kindly and I’ll follow wherever you need to go with it.

“Yes,” you say.

She holds your gaze.

“Do you — ” a breath, small and almost imperceptible, “— like girls?”

The question sits between you on the small round table, next to the candle and the cups and the quiet song, and it is the simplest question in the world and the most enormous one and the answer has been true for so long it lives in your bones.

“Yes,” you say softly.

Something moves across her face — something that was wound quietly tight releasing all at once, something relieved and warm and luminous.

She smiles.

Not her big bright grin. Something smaller than that and worth considerably more — a smile that starts slow and stays, that reaches her eyes and just lives there, that is so unguarded and so Alysa that you feel it like something physical.

“Me too,” she says quietly.

Me too.

Two words sitting in the space between you, small and enormous, and the song is still playing and the candle is still lit and neither of you looks away.

You don’t say anything else for a moment.

You don’t need to.

You’re both just — smiling at each other in a small warm café in the afternoon light, the kind of smiling that happens when something has been understood without being explained, when two people arrive at the same place from different directions and find each other there.

Under the table, very slowly, her foot nudges yours.

You nudge back.

And that’s enough. For now, that’s everything.