"Since the first morning."
"Since the first morning."
He smiled. The full smile. The one I had been tracking for six weeks, watching it evolve from the almost-smile of the lobby to the conditional smile of the stands to this, the complete, unconditional, unreserved smile of a man who had been kissed at center ice by a goalie who had finally decided to let something through.
"Same time tomorrow?" he said.
"Same time. But I'm going to kiss you again."
"I'm counting on it."
THEO
The relationship began in the liminal space between 5 AM and sunrise, which was fitting because Mars and I were both liminal people. We existed in the spaces between: between the mask and the face, between the ice and the world, between the person we performed and the person we were.
The first week of being together was an exercise in discovery that was both thrilling and terrifying, because the discovery was not limited to the pleasant revelations of early romance. It also included the discovery that two people who were brilliant at being alone were spectacularly unprepared for being together.
Mars did not know how to share space. His apartment was organized with the single-occupant precision of a man who had never had to accommodate another body. Everything had a position. The vinyl records were arranged chronologically. The coffee mugs were aligned by handle direction. The bathroom contained exactly one toothbrush, one towel, one razor. The singularity of the objects was a statement: this space belongs to one person. One person is sufficient. One person is all there will ever be.
I did not know how to be seen without performing. My entire relationship to being observed was transactional: they watched, I performed, the performance was evaluated. The concept of being watched casually, without evaluation, without the implicit demand for excellence, was so foreign that I kept catching myself "performing" at Mars's apartment. Making my movements more deliberate. Sitting with better posture. Arranging my face into the pleasant, camera-ready expression that competitive skating had drilled into me.
Mars noticed. Of course he noticed. The man noticed everything.
"Stop performing," he said, on the third evening I spent at his apartment. We were on his couch, which was new territory since his couch had never previously hosted two bodies simultaneously. "Your shoulders are up and your face is doing the pleasant thing."
"The pleasant thing?"
"The face you make when you think someone is watching. It's not your real face."
"What's my real face?"
"The one I saw at the rink when you landed the quad loop and thought nobody was looking. The one you make when you're sketching costumes. The face that isn't arranged for an audience."
"I don't know how to not arrange my face."
"Then don't think about it. Think about something else. Tell me about the Chopin costume."
I told him about the Chopin costume. The midnight blue. The way the fabric needed to move during a spin without wrapping around my legs. The specific weight of the sequins and how they affected the garment's air resistance at high rotational speeds, which was a sentence that Mars found fascinating because it married artistry with physics and the marriage was exactly thekind of interdisciplinary connection that his analytical brain loved.
While I talked, my face rearranged itself. Not because I told it to. Because the talking occupied the part of my brain that monitored the face, and without monitoring, the face defaulted to its natural state, which was animated and asymmetrical and real.
"There," Mars said. "That's the face."
"This face? This is not a good face."
"This is the best face."
We were learning. Every day, in the rink and outside of it, we were learning the specific, personalized curriculum of each other's fears and habits and the places where the fears and habits intersected and produced friction and the places where they intersected and produced heat.
The regional competition was in four weeks. Fumiko had registered me. The registration was a fact that lived in my phone's calendar like a countdown to either redemption or catastrophe, and the binary nature of the outcome was the thing that kept the panic close to the surface.
We tested the signal theory. Mars in the stands. Ren added. Then Luca, because Luca inserted himself into situations with the inevitability of weather. Then Cole and Mik, because Cole went where Mik went and Mik went where Cole wanted.
Five people in the stands. Mars in row three, center. The others distributed.
I stepped onto the ice. I began.
The first jump wobbled. My body registered the additional observers and the registration produced the familiar tightening, the edges going soft, the timing dissolving.
