Chapter 14

You unlace slowly.

Not because you need to. Just because the bench feels different right now and you’re not quite ready to leave it yet — this bench, your bench, the one where everything started with two voices saying the same word at the same time and two people who didn’t know yet what they were beginning.

Alysa is beside you, unlacing her own skates, and she is quiet in the way she only gets when something is sitting warmly inside her and she doesn’t want to disturb it with too many words. You understand. You feel it too — this full, careful, luminous thing between you that is brand new and also feels like it has always been there, like it was just waiting for the right Wednesday.

Your shoulders are touching.

Neither of you moves away.

At the far end of the rink Phillip holds the door open for Massimo with great ceremony.

Massimo walks through it dabbing at the corner of his eye with his sleeve.

“You need to stop,” Phillip says, without any real conviction.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re doing the thing.”

“I’m simply—” Massimo gestures vaguely at the rink behind them, at the ice, at everything that just happened on it — “experiencing emotions. About our girl. Who just—” he does the gesture again.

Phillip looks back through the small window in the door at the two figures on the bench, shoulders together, heads bent, the quiet comfortable closeness of people who have just figured something out and are sitting inside it gently.

He lets the door close.

“Yeah,” he says quietly.

Massimo looks at him.

Phillip clears his throat. Straightens his jacket. Assumes his normal expression of composed authority.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s give them some time.”

Massimo smiles at him — soft and knowing — and falls into step beside him down the corridor.

“I knew it first,” Massimo says.

“You did not.”

“Phillip. The very first Wednesday. I said—”

“You said Phillip in a tone of voice. That’s not the same as knowing anything.”

“It absolutely is and you know it.”

Their voices fade down the corridor and the rink settles back into its quiet, just the hum of the building and the ice and two girls on a bench taking their time.

You’re packed before she is.

You wait, which you wouldn’t have done before — before you would have said goodbye and headed for the door, polite and careful and keeping the right amount of distance. But that was before the café and the film and the pins and the ice and her mouth warm against yours in the middle of an empty rink, and distance feels like something that belongs to a different version of this Wednesday.

So you wait.

She zips her bag and stands and slings it over her shoulder and looks at you with that expression — the soft one, the careful one, the one that is so full of something she hasn’t finished saying yet — and says “ready?” the same way she said it that very first day at the gate.

“Ready,” you say.

The same answer. A completely different meaning.

The door opens and the afternoon hits you both at once — cool air and pale gold light, the car park quiet, the world entirely ordinary and somehow also completely different from how you left it this morning.

You walk beside her across the tarmac.

Your bags on your shoulders. Your blades wrapped and tucked away. Your breath small and visible in the cold.

And then — without thinking, without planning, without the agonising internal debate you might have expected from yourself — you reach out and take her hand.

Just like that.

Your fingers finding hers in the space between you, easy and certain, and you look up at her with a smile you can feel taking up your whole face, bright and helpless and entirely yours, and you don’t try to make it smaller.

Alysa stops walking.

Just for a second. Just long enough to look down at your joined hands and then back up at you with an expression that does something extraordinary to your heart — something overwhelmed and delighted and so openly, unguardedly fond that you feel it like warmth from the inside out.

Then she squeezes your hand.

And she starts walking again, her fingers laced through yours, and she is smiling at the ground the same way you smiled at it that very first Wednesday, that helpless private smile of someone who has been handed something they weren’t sure they’d get to have.

“Your car or mine?” she asks, after a moment.

You look at her. “What?”

“I thought maybe—” she glances at you sideways, something almost shy in it, which is new and devastating, “—we could get food. If you want. No pressure, we don’t have to—”

“Yes,” you say.

She stops the almost-nervous rambling.

Looks at you.

You swing your joined hands once, lightly, just because you can. “Obviously yes.”

The shy thing in her expression melts back into that smile — her real one, her whole one, the one that reaches everything — and she turns back to the car park and says “okay good because I’m starving” in a tone of great relief that makes you laugh out loud in the cold afternoon air.

Your laugh bounces off the tarmac and she glances at you like it’s something she wants to collect and keep.

Maybe she does.

Maybe you’re both keeping things now.

You reach her car.

She unlocks it and opens the passenger door for you — just does it, naturally, without making anything of it — and you get in and she closes it gently and walks around to the driver’s side and the whole thing takes maybe fifteen seconds and somehow it is one of the loveliest fifteen seconds you can remember.

She gets in. Starts the engine. The radio comes on low — something soft, something unhurried.

She pulls out of the car park and your bag is at your feet and the three pins are on it, pink and orange and red and white and rainbow and the little vintage camera, all sitting together exactly where they’re supposed to be.

You look out the window at the road ahead.

Alysa’s hand finds yours on the centre console.

You turn yours over.

She links her fingers through yours and drives one handed and doesn’t say anything and neither do you and the afternoon stretches out ahead of you golden and open and full of every good thing that hasn’t happened yet.