Chapter 40

You take your time getting ready.

Not anxiously — not the way you used to take time, second guessing and reconsidering and talking yourself in and out of things. Just slowly. Deliberately. With the particular pleasure of someone who knows what they’re doing and is enjoying the doing of it.

The dress first.

Dark plum satin, fitted at the bodice, the skirt pouffing out just enough at the hip to feel like something — like a small occasion, like a reason. You smooth it down and look in the mirror and think — yes. That’s the yes she would say. The going somewhere special yes.

The white shirt underneath, long sleeved with the slightly puffed shoulders, just visible at the neckline and the wrists where the satin ends. Black tights. The heels you bought today, small and black and perfect, that made her say those when you held them up with a quality in her voice that you filed away carefully.

Your hair down.

The gold necklace at your throat — the crescent moon, catching the bathroom light.

The bracelet at your wrist — the figure skater mid-spin.

You look at yourself in the mirror.

You look like yourself.

The fullest, most complete version of yourself — the version that existed before all of this too, you think, but didn’t quite know how to stand in yet. Didn’t have anyone looking at her the right way to help her see it.

You put your coat on.

Go to the door.

She’s in the room when you come out of the bathroom.

Standing by the window, phone in hand, and she turns when she hears you and—

She stops.

Completely.

The phone drops to her side.

She looks at you the way she looked at you that very first competition morning outside your building — that particular stillness, that caught-before-she’s-ready quality — except this is Paris and you’re in a plum satin dress and her gold is at your throat and the look on her face is so open and so completely for you that you feel it from across the room.

You look at her.

Wide leg black trousers, perfectly fitted. A white button down, collar open just slightly, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Her coat over the back of the chair, doc martens already on. Her hair half up in a way that is effortless and considered all at once, the stripes of it and the silver piercing and the ring on her finger.

She looks — both things. Both completely. Handsome and beautiful in the same breath, the way she always manages without trying, like her face and her presence simply contain more than one thing at once.

“Hi,” you say.

She blinks.

“Hi,” she says. Her voice is slightly different from usual. Slightly lower. “You look—”

She stops.

Shakes her head slightly like the word she found isn’t big enough.

“Come here,” she says instead.

You go.

She meets you in the middle of the room and takes your face in both hands and looks at you properly for a moment — just looks, the way she does when she wants to keep something — and then she kisses you softly and when she pulls back she says against your mouth:

“My pretty girl.”

You close your eyes.

Feel it settle.

“Ready?” she says.

“Ready,” you say.

The roses happen outside.

You come through the hotel doors into the cold Paris evening and there is a flower seller on the corner — the kind that exists in certain cities at certain hours, entirely natural and entirely perfect — and she stops without breaking stride and buys them.

A dozen.

Deep red, the colour of something serious, wrapped in paper that crinkles in the cold.

She hands them to you on the pavement outside the hotel like it’s nothing.

Like of course. Like obviously. Like bringing you roses in Paris on the rest day before the European Championships is simply what one does.

You hold them against your coat and look at her.

“Alysa,” you say.

“Don’t,” she says, already walking.

“I’m just going to—”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“It’s incredibly romantic—”

“It’s flowers,” she says.

“It’s roses in Paris,” you say.

She takes your free hand.

“Walk,” she says.

You walk.

With your roses and her hand and the cold Paris evening and the gold at your throat and the city going on around you like it does this every night, like it doesn’t know it’s part of something.

The restaurant is the most beautiful one yet.

You know when you walk in — the particular quality of a place that has been doing this for a long time and knows exactly what it is. White tablecloths and candlelight and the low music of a room full of quiet conversations, and a table by the window that looks out onto a lit Paris street going about its evening, and a waiter who seats you with the particular grace of someone who takes their job seriously and means it as a kindness.

You sit across from her.

Roses propped against the wall beside you.

Candle between you.

Paris outside the window.

“Here we are,” she says.

“Here we are,” you say.

Dinner is everything dinner should be.

Food that is worth describing but that neither of you pays as much attention to as you should, because you are too busy talking, too busy being here, in this specific candlelit corner of this specific city on this specific evening that she built for you piece by careful piece.

She tells you about the first time she came to Paris for a competition — sixteen, terrified, Massimo crying at the airport departure gate and Phillip pretending not to notice. How the ice felt different here, she says, like it had opinions. How she fell on a jump in the warm up and Phillip crouched down beside her on the ice and said this is just a rink. It’s the same rink and she believed him and got up.

You tell her about watching the Winter Olympics on television when you were small, before you’d been skating long, before it was anything more than something you did twice a week on weekends. How you watched a skater — you don’t remember who, just the shape of it, the feeling — and thought I want to do that. How that wanting has been there ever since, quietly, like the moon.

She looks at you when you say that.

At the necklace.

Back at your face.

Doesn’t say anything.

Doesn’t need to.

Dessert arrives and you share it — her fork and yours, the way you eat now, the natural sharing of someone who has stopped thinking about where one person ends and the other begins at a dinner table — and at some point the candle has burned lower and the restaurant has quieted and Paris outside the window has settled into its late evening self and you look at her across the white tablecloth and think —

I want to do this forever.

Not just tonight. Not just Paris. Just — this. Her across a table from you in whatever city the world sends her to, candle between you, sharing dessert, being each other’s person in the particular complete way you have become each other’s person.

Forever is a large word.

You let it be large.

You let it sit in your chest alongside everything else and take up exactly the space it needs.

Back at the hotel.

The roses in the crook of your arm. Her hand in yours. The corridor quiet at this hour, just the two of you and the soft sound of the carpet underfoot and the low light of the hallway.

She opens the door.

You go in.

You put the roses in the water glass on the bathroom counter — improvised, slightly ridiculous, entirely right — and look at them for a moment. Deep red against white tile. Paris roses in a hotel bathroom water glass.

You look at yourself in the mirror.

The dress. The necklace. The bracelet. The heels you haven’t taken off yet because you weren’t ready to let the evening be over.

You look at the boutique bag on the bathroom counter.

At what’s in it.

You take your time.

The dress comes off carefully. The shirt. The tights. The heels, finally, set neatly beside the door.

The lingerie is — exactly what it was in the shop. Delicate and soft and the colour of something deliberate, and you put it on and look at yourself in the mirror and feel — something. Not nerves. Not the old anxiety of being seen. Something warmer than that. Something that is certain and soft and completely ready.

The silk robe from your bag — your own, packed with some vague intention that is now a very specific one — over the top. Tied loosely.

You look at yourself.

At the crescent moon at your throat.

At the figure skater at your wrist.

At the roses in their water glass beside you.

Your most beautiful, she said.

Yes, you think.

You open the bathroom door.

She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, coat off, shoes off, phone set aside — waiting, in the particular way of someone who has understood that you’re taking your time and is completely content to wait for as long as that takes.

She looks up.

You walk toward her.

Slowly.

Certain.

And when you reach her you take the lapels of the robe in both hands and open it — just that, just the simple quiet gesture of showing her — and watch her face.

She goes very still.

Her eyes move over you once and then find your face and what’s in them is — everything. Everything she has ever looked at you with, every version of that expression from the bench to the ice to the corridor in Paris after the fans to the restaurant table twenty minutes ago, all of it present and all of it for you and all of it completely, entirely certain.

She reaches up and takes your hand from the robe.

Pulls you gently toward her.

And she kisses you — slowly, warmly, with all the time in the world and Paris outside the window and the roses in the bathroom and the gold at your throat and her hands warm and sure and—

The robe falls.

And she looks at you — really looks, the way she looked at your spin that very first Wednesday, the way she has always looked at you when she wants to keep something — and what’s in her face is so tender and so certain and so completely without condition that you feel it before she’s even touched you.

Her hands find your face first.

Always your face first.

Warm and careful, the way she handles everything she loves, and she pulls you down toward her slowly and you go, and the kiss is different from the ones before it — deeper, more deliberate, the kind that says I have time and I intend to use all of it — and you feel yourself exhale something you didn’t know you were holding.

“Hey,” she says softly, against your mouth. Just that. Just hey, the word that started everything, said now in a hotel room in Paris in the dark with her hands at your face and her eyes finding yours and meaning something so far beyond its two letters that you almost laugh.

Almost.

“Hey,” you say back.

And then her hands move — slowly, unhurriedly, like she is learning something she already knows and wants to know again — and the gold is warm at your throat and the city is quiet outside and the roses are in the bathroom in their water glass and everything narrows to this, to her, to the specific electricity that starts where she touches you and goes everywhere, the way it always does, the way you told her about in the dark of her bedroom and she held your hand against her heart and listened.

She is so gentle.

That’s the thing you keep coming back to, in the soft warmth of it — how gentle she is. How much care she takes. How every touch says something that her voice doesn’t need to because her hands have always been honest, have always said the true thing, and right now the true thing is I love you I love you I love you in every possible language, in the language of hands and warmth and the particular unhurried certainty of someone who is exactly where they want to be and intends to stay.

You close your eyes.

Feel Paris outside.

Feel her.

Feel the specific completeness of being loved by someone who sees you — all of you, the pink laces and the quiet and the layback spin and the raccoon pin and the courage you didn’t know you had — and loves every part of what they see.

Electric, you thought once.

Yes.

And warm.

And like coming home.

And like the beginning of something that doesn’t have an end.

Soft. Warm. Certain.

The way it always is with her.

The way it always will be.