I still had no idea what Montreal actually meant.
I only knew I’d spent the last ten minutes watching Luka slowly relax, and I’d just watched it vanish.
The door had slammed shut again.
Luka
The words leftmy mouth before I could stop them.
“I do not know what I would be allowed to like.”
The effect on Dean was immediate.
His head lifted sharply, surprise wiping away the easy humor that had been sitting in his eyes a moment earlier.
“Allowed?”
I looked away from him and out across the rink, following the path of a skater running jump entries near centre ice.
“It does not matter.”
Even as I said it, I knew the answer sounded inadequate.
Dean was quiet for a moment.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “I think it does.”
I had not expected those words to matter. The fact that they did left me off balance.
Around us, practice continued uninterrupted. Music drifted through the arena. Coaches called corrections from the boards. Skaters crossed the ice in intersecting patterns, each one occupied by their own preparation, their own concerns.
None of it seemed real anymore.
My pulse had not settled since the conversation started.
And standing beside Dean, I could no longer remember why I had thought distance would make any of this easier.
I was acutely aware of Dean beside me. The space between us, the warmth of his presence.
The fact that I could still remember exactly how his hand had felt on my arm.
Kvrat.
This was getting worse.
Most people would have let the comment go. They would have recognized the hesitation behind it and moved the conversation somewhere safer. Dean, however, possessed a frustrating tendency to stay where other people retreated.
He wasn’t demanding answers.
That was part of the problem.
I could not remember the last time someone had looked at me as though understanding me mattered more than managing me.
For a dangerous moment, I found myself wanting to tell him. Not everything, but enough to make him understand why a simple conversation about Montreal had left me feeling as though I’d been standing on unstable ice ever since.
The thought unsettled me so badly that I almost stepped back.
Before I could, a familiar voice cut across the rink.
