I should eat.
I should unpack and shower and write up my session notes from the weekend and be a functional person.
I sit there a while longer instead.
It’s fine, I tell myself. Last night was only one night. Two adults making a choice. Nobody’s career is over. Nobody got hurt. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
But I know even as I’m thinking it that it’s already complicated.
I shower and eat then I get into bed. Eventually I manage to fall asleep.
The rink in the dream is Stockholm.
I’ve dreamed it so many times that some part of me recognizes it immediately and knows what’s coming. But I can’t stop it.
Erik is at the boards.
He’s exactly as I remember - tall, composed, and attentive. He’s watching me run the combination. I can feel that it’s good. He skates out to meet me.
“Better. But here-”
His hands on my waist.
And this time in the dream something is different - I can see it clearly - the thing I couldn’t see at twenty-one. It’s the calculation underneath, and the way his eyes move over me like I’m something he’s already decided to have. But still I lean in when he kisses me because dreams don’t let you rewrite the past even when you can see it coming.
Then it’s later. Months later. His apartment in Stockholm, the one I knew as well as my own by then. I’m in his bed and he’s beside me. It feels like the most natural thing in the world because he’s made it feel that way so carefully and so deliberately over so many months.
I loved him.
I loved him and I trusted him and I gave him everything - my career, my body, my absolute belief that he saw me clearly and wanted what was best for me.
And then the photographs appeared.
Someone had taken them - when, how, I still don’t entirely know - and they were everywhere overnight. I woke up to my phone exploding and Erik beside me already on his - talking to someone in a low careful voice. I lay there and watched his face while he spoke and understood, with a cold clarity, that he was not talking to someone about how to protect me.
He was talking to someone about how to protect himself.
I wake up at 3am, gasping.
I sit up and press my hands flat on the mattress and breathe - in, out, in, out - the way my therapist taught me.
And then, without meaning to, I think about last night.
And my brain does a terrible thing - takes the lovely memory of last night and holds it up against the memory of Erik and finds the shape of them horribly, suffocatingly similar.
A professional relationship with blurred edges.
Me, giving in, laughing, sayingyou’re supposed to be coaching melike it was a joke, like the line was already so blurred-
I pull my knees to my chest.
It’s not the same, says a small voice.
Eventually I get up and stand at the window in the dark drinking coffee, trying to figure out what to do.
By the time the sky starts to lighten, I’m sure of one thing.
I can’t do this with him.
