Chapter 25

Alysa finishes early.

You notice it peripherally — the way her session wraps up on the far side of the rink with a quiet word from Phillip, the familiar sound of the gate, her blades on the rubber mat — and then Sandra has you running your step sequence again and you stop noticing anything that isn’t the ice directly in front of you.

Your competition is Saturday.

Three days.

The flip is consistent. The spin is good. The step sequence needs to stop thinking about itself quite so much and just happen, which Sandra communicates to you in slightly more technical terms but means the same thing.

You run it again.

Alysa, meanwhile, has disappeared.

Not left — her bag is still at the bench, her guards still propped against the boards — just gone, in the way of someone who has somewhere specific to be and is being quiet about it.

Phillip watches her go with his arms folded.

Massimo watches her go with his head tilted.

They look at each other.

Neither of them says anything.

You finish with ten minutes of program run-through, clean on the second attempt, and Sandra makes the note on her clipboard that means she’s satisfied and you cool down with a few easy laps and then glide to the gate and step off the ice.

The rink is quieter now. Mostly cleared out, just the last few skaters doing their own cool downs, the particular hush of a morning session winding toward its end.

You’re reaching for your water bottle when you hear her blades.

You look up.

Alysa is skating toward you from the far end, unhurried, hands in her hoodie pocket, and she has an expression on her face that you have not seen before — something carefully neutral that is nonetheless doing a very poor job of containing whatever is underneath it, like a wrapped present trying to look like ordinary paper.

She steps off the ice beside you.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” you say. “Where did you go?”

“Nowhere,” she says, which is not suspicious at all.

You look at her.

She looks back with complete serenity.

“Okay,” you say slowly.

“I want to show you something,” she says.

She takes your hand.

Leads you to the bench — your bench, the bench, the one that started all of this — and stops you on one side of it, positioning herself on the other, and you look at her across the width of it with your head tilted and your water bottle still in your hand and absolutely no idea what is happening.

“Okay,” she says. She is still doing the carefully neutral thing. “Lay down.”

“I’m sorry?”

“On the floor. On your back.” She is already lowering herself to the mat on her side. “Make sure your head goes under. Close your eyes.”

You stare at her.

“Alysa.”

“Trust me.”

You look at the rubber mat. You look at her, already lying on her side of the bench, looking up at the underside of it with her hands folded on her stomach like this is a completely normal thing to be doing in a rink on a Wednesday morning.

You lie down.

The mat is cold beneath you. You slide your head under the bench, the wood close above your face in the dark, and you can feel her there on the other side, ear to ear, the warmth of her proximity in the cold air.

“Close your eyes,” she says. Her voice is close and quiet.

You close them.

A breath.

Two.

“Open,” she says.

You open your eyes.

And there, on the underside of the bench directly above you — drawn in black marker in Alysa’s handwriting, her careful deliberate lines — are two hearts.

Interlinking.

One slightly overlapping the other, connected in the middle, and in one heart in letters that are so recognisably hers:

Alysa

And in the other, in the same hand, the same marker, the same quiet permanence of something meant to stay:

y/n

You look at it for a long moment.

At the two hearts linked together on the underside of this bench that has held you both since the very beginning, that heard the first hey and the first conversation and the first laughter, that knows everything about how you got here and is apparently now keeping a record of it.

Something happens in your chest that is too large and too warm and too everything for the size of the moment and also exactly the right size for it.

“Alysa,” you say.

Your voice comes out very soft.

“Yeah?” Hers does too.

“You drew on the bench.”

“I did.”

“In permanent marker.”

“It’s permanent, yes.”

You look at the hearts. At your names in them. At the fact that she disappeared during your practice and lay on this mat in this rink and drew this, quietly and deliberately, just to show you.

“You’re going to get in trouble,” you say.

“Probably,” she agrees, completely unbothered.

You look at your name in its heart.

At Alysa in its heart.

At the place where they link in the middle.

“It’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me,” you say quietly, to the underside of the bench, to the two hearts, to her.

A pause.

“Yeah?” she says, and she sounds — pleased, genuinely pleased, in that way of someone who thought something might land well and is glad to find out it did.

“Yeah,” you say.

You find each other.

It happens the way things always happen between you — without negotiation, without ceremony. You turn toward each other on the cold mat, the bench above you, the rink quiet around you, and she is right there, close and warm and looking at you with that expression, and you kiss her.

Softly.

The way you kiss each other when there’s no hurry and nowhere to be and nothing required of either of you except this — just this, just her mouth and yours and the two hearts above you and the cold rink air and the bench that has heard everything.

She smiles against your mouth.

You feel it before you see it.

When you pull back her eyes are bright and she looks — happy. Simply, quietly, completely happy, in the way of someone who had an idea and carried it out and is very glad they did.

“We should probably get up,” she says.

“Before someone sees us lying under the bench,” you agree.

“That would be hard to explain.”

“Even for you.”

“Especially for me,” she says, which is honestly fair.

You sit back on the bench properly — normal, upright, two completely normal people who were definitely not just lying on a rink floor — and Alysa is still smiling at her hands and you are very busy looking at your water bottle and neither of you is remotely subtle about any of it.

“You ready for Saturday?” she asks, after a moment.

You look up.

“I think so,” you say. “As ready as I’m going to be.” A pause. “It’s not a big competition. Not your kind of big—”

“Don’t do that,” she says quietly.

You look at her.

“It’s your competition,” she says. “That makes it big.” Simple and certain and entirely without qualification. “The flip is consistent. The spin is beautiful. You’re going to be wonderful.”

You hold her gaze.

“How do you know about the flip?”

“I’ve been watching you practice for two months,” she says, like this is obvious, like of course she has, like paying that quality of attention to you is simply what she does. “The flip has been consistent for three weeks. I counted.”

She counted.

You look at your water bottle again because your face is doing something you can’t entirely control.

“You’ll be there?” you ask quietly.

“Obviously,” she says. “Front row if I can manage it. Phillip and Massimo too, they’ve already asked.” She pauses. “Massimo may or may not be making a sign.”

“A sign.”

“I told him absolutely not.” A beat. “He’s making a sign.”

You laugh — properly, helplessly — and she watches you laugh with that look, that collecting look, and you think about two hearts linked together on the underside of a bench and she counted and front row and feel so completely, staggeringly loved by this person that the word for it hasn’t been said yet but it is absolutely true and it lives in everything.

“Okay,” you say, when you’ve recovered. “Okay. Saturday.”

“Saturday,” she says.

She bumps her shoulder against yours.

You bump back.

Above you, hidden under the bench where only the two of you will ever know to look, two hearts stay linked in permanent marker.

Permanent.