Chapter 2

The rink is quiet at this hour.

It always is — that gentle pre-session hush where the only sounds are the distant hum of the ice resurfacer and the soft scrape of your own skate blade against the rubber mat beneath the bench. You like it this way. The stillness. The familiar cold that greets you the moment you step through those doors, wrapping around you like something you’ve known your whole life.

You settle onto the bench and set your bag down beside you, unzipping it with practiced ease and pulling out your skates. White boots, soft pink laces — a small thing, but yours. You’ve had them re-laced three times now and you’ll probably do it a fourth.

You’re halfway through threading the left one when you hear it.

The door.

You don’t look up. You don’t need to — you already know the sound of her arrival. Not because you’ve ever paid attention, you tell yourself. Just because you’ve been coming here long enough to know the rhythms of the place. The creak of that particular door hinge. The soft thud of a bag hitting the mat.

The bench shifts slightly as someone sits down beside you.

Right beside you.

You blink at your laces.

In all the months you’ve been coming here — skating your sessions, packing up, leaving — there has always been a comfortable distance between you and the girl you know only as a face, a “hey,” a blur of dark and blonde striped hair and something silver catching the light at her mouth. Your schedules have always been staggered by just enough that the bench was never this small.

Until today, apparently.

You keep your eyes down. Pull the lace through the next eyelet. Very normal. Very calm.

You are so normal and calm right now.

“Hey—”

“Hey—”

You both say it at the exact same moment.

The word hangs in the cold air between you for half a second before you both stop, and in the silence that follows you finally, helplessly, look up.

She’s already looking at you.

Up close she is — a lot. Striped hair tucked behind one ear, the little silver piercing catching the rink light just the way you’d noticed from across the ice a hundred times, except now it’s right there and so is she, and her eyes are bright and she’s breaking into this grin like the two of you have just done something genuinely funny, which maybe you have.

“Sorry,” she says, and she doesn’t sound sorry at all. She sounds delighted. “You go.”

You open your mouth.

Nothing comes out.

Her grin doesn’t waver. She just waits, patient and warm, like she has all the time in the world and she’s perfectly happy to spend it watching you remember how words work.

Say something, you tell yourself. Literally anything.

“I was just saying hey,” you manage finally, and your voice comes out softer than you mean it to.

“Me too,” she says. And then, like it’s the simplest thing: “I’m Alysa.”