The blades bit the stone. The familiar weight settled into my hips, into my ankles, into the small muscles at the outside of the calf that had been asleep since Tokyo and were now, very quietly, waking up. My body knew. My body had always known. The shift hung around my ankles. I hitched it, without thinking, the old practical tuck of competition costume, and the white silk gathered at my thighs and stayed.
He stood, removed his boots. His feet were bare—I had no doubt that he had no need of skates.
He took both my hands in his. His palms were warm. The cracks were closed. The gold of him was steady.
“I have you,” he said.
He stepped onto the ice.
Backward. One foot, then the other, his feet finding the gold-lit surface without a sound, and he drew me with him, my hands in his, and the first touch of steel on ice after all those years went through me like a current.
A noise escaped me.
It was not a word. It was the sound a body makes when it remembers something it thought it had forgotten. The blade took. The edge held. The ice under me was not like any ice I had skated on—it was warmer, somehow, the gold beneath it lending a give to the surface that human ice did not have, and the give was forgiving, and the forgiveness was his.
He drew me out.
Ten feet from the shore. Twenty. The gold light moving under my blades and his feet, lighting the white shift from beneath, lighting the bare skin of my calves, lighting the pale stone of the shore behind us. He skated backward with effortless grace, as if he had done this in other bodies, in other ages, and never stopped to wonder whether he was good at it.
Then the wrong edge rose.
It came from nowhere. The take-off. The boards. The long glide into the jump I had not taken. The crowd holding its breath. The silence before the fall. My right blade caught—not on the ice, on the memory of the ice, on the wrong edge I had taken in Tokyo in a black dress with silver beading—and I shook.
I shook as I had on the bench at Glacier Edge the first time a parent asked me why I didn’t skate anymore. The small full-body tremor of a thing the body has decided is unsafe. My handstightened in his. My blades scuffed. I was going to fall. I was going to fall here, on his gold-lit ice, in front of the only being who had ever asked to see me skate, and the fall would be the same fall, and the years since Tokyo would start over.
He stopped.
He held me. Both hands on my upper arms, his body close, his forehead near mine, and his gaze was very still.
“Listen to me,” he said.
Low. Certain. The same tone he had used on the parapet.
“You are the body that landed the triple lutz at fifteen when your coach said wait a year. You are the body that held the camel spin for eight revolutions at nationals when the girl in the flight before you held it for six. You earned every inch of magnificence you were ever given, and you got up and walked away from the earning when the earning broke you. But now, you are earning it again.”
He held my face.
“Look at me.”
I looked.
“The only eyes on this ice are mine. The only being who can still see you is standing in front of you with his hands on your face. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
He drew back. He took my right hand. He turned me, gently, so that my left side was to the shore and my right was to the open ice, and he set his palm at the small of my back, as he had in the gallery, and he said, “Glide.”
I pushed.
The edge took. A clean one. Outside edge, right foot, the blade biting the gold-lit ice as it had bitten clean ice ten thousand times before the fall, and the muscle memory woke—not piecemeal, not in fragments, all at once, the whole systemlighting up from the ankle to the hip to the core to the shoulder, and I glided.
No fall.
The ice carried me. Ten feet. Twenty. The gold light moving under the blade, the white shift streaming behind me, the loose braid coming down entirely now, the long brown hair free in the warm air over the cold surface. I glided as I had at fifteen, at eighteen, at twenty-one in the long opening of a program that had never finished, and the glide did not end. It went on. The ice was endless. The lake was endless. The gold under it was endless.
I turned.
He was watching.
