“I missed you so fucking much,” I tell her.
“I love that you did,” she says with a laugh.
She pushes off, and I let her go. She builds speed with long, graceful strokes that look nothing like hockey skating. Where I’m all power and hard stops, she’s fluid and elegant. She does a turn that transitions seamlessly into backward skating, her arms extended like she’s performing for a crowd before tucking in for a spin.
She pulls her arms in and rotates so fast that she blurs, then extends one leg and slows, landing perfectly.
“Holy shit,” I say.
She skates back to me, barely winded. “You’re too easy to impress.”
“You think I’m impressed?” I playfully roll my eyes. “That wasokay.”
“Show me how it’s done then.” She smirks.
“Oh, sweetie. When I was a kid, I took several lessons from figure skaters. You don’t think I can?”
She crosses her arms, and that’s when I realize I have to show her up.
I push off and build speed, focusing on keeping my edges smooth instead of choppy. Figure skating is about flow, not power. I learned that the hard way when I was twelve and ate shit, trying to impress a girl at a birthday party.
I attempt a simple spin, pulling my arms in the way I learned nearly twenty years ago. It’s not terrible, but it’s not practiced either. I rotate maybe four times before my edge wobbles, and I have to put my foot down.
“Not bad,” she calls out, and I can hear the shock in her voice.
I skate a wide loop to build speed again and try a backward crossover into a turn. My hockey instincts want to dig in and stop hard, but I force myself to let the momentum carry me through. The transition is actually smoother than I expected.
“Okay, now I’m actually impressed,” she says.
Next, I go for a jump. Nothing crazy, just a single rotation, the kind figure skaters do a hundred times during practice. I launch off my toe pick, rotate, and?—
Land flat on my ass.
“Fuck,” I say. “The ice never feels soft.”
It’s cold and hard, and my tailbone is definitely going to feel it later. I slide a few feet before friction stops me, sprawled out like a starfish.
Kendall’s laughter echoes across the rink. She skates over and stops in a perfect spray of ice that dusts my face.
“Graceful,” she says, looking down at me.
“I meant to do that.”
“Then you nailed it.”
She offers me her hand, and I take it, but instead of letting her pull me up, I yank her down to me. She yelps and lands on top of me, her hands bracing against my chest.
“You’re such an asshole,” she says, but she’s laughing.
“You love it.”
Her face is inches from mine, her breath fogging in the cold air between us. The string lights reflect in her eyes, and her cheeks are flushed pink from the cold. She’s so beautiful that it physically hurts.
The laughter fades from her expression. She studies my face for a long moment. I want to tell her I’m in love with her, but the words are caught in my throat.
“We should probably get up,” she says.
“You’re right,” I tell her.
