Chapter 8

It happens on a Wednesday.

Not a planned Wednesday. Not a this is what we do now Wednesday. Just a Wednesday where practice runs long and you’re both unlacing at the same time and Alysa says, completely casually, “do you want to get food after this, there’s a bakery café thing about ten minutes from here that’s actually really good” and you say “yes” before you’ve fully processed the question.

So now it’s a Wednesday where you’re getting food after practice.

You’re still lacing down when you hear it — a low whistle from the far end of the rink, and then Massimo’s voice carrying across the ice with absolutely no attempt at discretion.

“Phillip.”

A pause.

“Phillip.”

You glance up. Across the rink, Massimo is leaning against the boards with his arms folded and a very specific expression on his face, looking between you and Alysa with the energy of someone watching a film they’ve already seen and love. Beside him, Phillip has turned to look, and his expression is — you don’t know him well enough to read it exactly, but it looks something like delighted and something like I knew it all at once.

Alysa, beside you, makes a noise that is very much a groan.

“Don’t,” she says, loudly, in their direction.

“I’m not saying anything,” Massimo says, spreading his hands wide.

“You’re saying everything.”

“I’m just standing here.”

“Massimo.”

“He’s just standing here,” Phillip confirms, and he is absolutely lying.

You are looking very intently at your skate bag zip and you are definitely not smiling.

“Sorry about them,” Alysa says, dropping back down onto the bench beside you. Her ears are very slightly pink, which is new, and something about that does incredible things to your composure. “They’re — they have no chill. Like none. Zero chill between the two of them.”

“They seem sweet,” you say honestly.

She looks at you for a second. “Yeah,” she says, softer. “They really are.” She glances back over her shoulder at them, and Massimo waves cheerfully. She turns back around shaking her head but she’s smiling. “Absolute menaces though.”

The bakery café is exactly what Alysa promised — small and warm and the kind of place that feels like someone’s living room if someone’s living room happened to sell exceptional pastries. The windows are slightly fogged from the cold outside, there’s soft music coming from somewhere you can’t identify, and the whole place smells like butter and vanilla and something with cinnamon.

You find a small table near the window and settle in, unwinding your scarf, and Alysa drops into the chair across from you with the easy comfort of someone who has been here many times and considers it a safe place.

“The almond croissants are genuinely life changing,” she says, already looking at the small chalkboard menu on the wall. “Just so you know. That’s not an exaggeration.”

“High praise.”

“I don’t give it lightly.”

You look at the menu. You look at her looking at the menu, chin resting lightly in her hand, striped hair falling forward slightly, that little silver piercing catching the warm light of the café in the same way it always catches every light, like it was made to.

You look back at the menu.

A person comes to take your order and Alysa orders for herself with the confidence of a regular, and you order tea and a slice of something with lemon that caught your eye, and then you’re just sitting across from each other in a warm café after practice and it is so far from the bench at the rink and yet somehow it feels exactly the same.

Easy. Warm. Like something that was always going to happen eventually.

You talk the way you’ve been talking — about skating, about music, about Phillip and Massimo and the time Massimo cried at a programme Alysa skated at a small local showcase and tried to pretend he wasn’t, which she recounts with such fond exasperation that you’re laughing before she even gets to the end of it.

“He wasn’t even subtle about it,” she says. “He was just standing there with his arms crossed trying to look normal and there were literally tears—”

“He sounds wonderful.”

“He’s the worst.” She’s grinning. “He’s the absolute best.”

Your food arrives and the almond croissant in front of Alysa does indeed look life changing, and you tell her so, and she tears off a piece without hesitation and puts it on the edge of your plate and says obviously like it was never a question.

Like sharing food with you is just something she does now.

You eat the piece of croissant.

She was right. It’s life changing. You tell her that too and she points at you triumphantly.

You’re finishing your tea, warm all the way through in a way that has nothing to do with the drink, when Alysa reaches down into her bag.

“Oh — I’ve been meaning to give you this since I got here actually, I just kept forgetting.” She says it lightly, casually, like it’s nothing, and sets something small on the table between you.

You look down at it.

It’s a pin.

Small and round, enamel, a little vintage camera on a pale background, delicate and pretty in a way that is — it is so specifically your taste that for a moment you just look at it without saying anything because your brain is buffering.

“I found it in the thrift store after you left the other day,” she says, and she’s watching you with that soft expression, the careful warm one. “I don’t know, it just felt like yours. You don’t have to—”

“Alysa.” Your voice comes out quieter than you mean it to.

She stops.

You pick up the pin and hold it in your palm and it is small and light and she found it and thought of you and went back for it and carried it here and—

“Thank you,” you say. And then, because it’s true and she should know it: “This is genuinely one of the nicest things anyone has done for me in a while.”

Something moves across her face. Something quiet and pleased and just a little bit relieved, like she’d wondered how it would land and is glad about where it did.

“It’ll look good next to the rainbow one,” she says simply.

She holds your gaze for just a moment longer than necessary.

Then she picks up her croissant and takes a bite and says “okay tell me about your programme music because I’ve been trying to figure out what it is for weeks” and just like that the moment folds itself away gently, saved for later, not gone.

You tell her about your programme music.

Outside the café window the evening is coming in soft and blue, and inside it is warm and lit and the music is still playing from somewhere you can’t find, and across the small table Alysa is listening to you with her chin in her hand and her eyes bright and attentive.

You stay until they start stacking chairs.

Neither of you suggests leaving first.