I caught the apology in my mouth and bit down on it.
The back of my neck went cool. The cool of it ran down the back of my hoodie, found the place between my shoulder blades where the knot lived, and sat there.
I was not alone.
I had not yet looked up to see who was watching. I had not had the courage to. But the held silence of the hall held someone within it.
The wind moved through.
I made myself look.
At the far end of the hall, very far, on a throne of pale unornamented marble raised on a shallow three-step dais, a man was sitting.
I want to call him a man. The word is wrong. He was more—so much more.
He did not rise.
In fact, he did not move at all. He sat on the pale marble throne with both hands resting on the arms of it. I felt for a moment as though the room itself, the wind, the sky, they had all risen for him. He would not rise for anything.
He was the most perfect, beautiful, wonderful being I had ever seen.
I had seen beautiful men. I had skated with two of them in pairs in juniors, before I’d gone single, and one of them was on a Wheaties box now. I had seen the Russian men’s singles podium in Sochi in person. I had seen, once, across a hotel lobby in Vancouver, a film actor whose face had stopped a roomful offigure skaters mid-sentence. I had a baseline for our species. But this was not our species.
He was tall even seated—long-thighed, broad through the shoulder, the long-limbed sculptural proportions of something a Renaissance master would have spent two years carving and then signed his name to with a shaking hand. His skin was the color of warm cream marble, shot through with gold. I do not mean it looked gold like tanned skin looks gold. His skin was lambent—the cheekbones, the bridge of the nose, the inside of the wrists where his hands rested on the throne—it glowed slightly, as though there were a low patient light somewhere just under it. His hair was a deep gold, the color of honey held to a candle, falling neatly just past the jaw. He wore white and gold and the deep red of old wine, fabric cut to perfection, every seam exactly where the seam was supposed to be. There was a single ring of dark iron on his right hand. The ring was the only thing on his body that was not luminous, and the contrast was so precise that I had the absurd thought, looking at it, that it was on purpose—that he had put a piece of darkness on himself the way a woman puts a single dark stone in a necklace of pearls, to give the eye somewhere to rest.
His eyes found me across the long floor. They were gold.
Not yellow. Not amber. Gold—the actual color of the metal, with the faint warm patina that real gold takes on when it has been handled, and the irises shifted in fine concentric rings like a coin shifting when you turn it slowly under a lamp. The pupils were vertical. I noticed it and then I noticed I had not flinched from noticing it, which was its own small surprise, because everything else about me was already flinching.
They found me, and they did not let go.
I had been looked at before.
I had been looked at by judges, by spectators, by other skaters. I had been looked at by network camera operators withtelephoto lenses six feet from my face. I had been looked at, on the night of the Tokyo free skate, by approximately two million human beings on six continents, and then, in the long quiet aftermath, by approximately a twenty million more, frame by frame.
None of it had prepared me for this.
He was not looking at me to appraise me. He was not measuring me. He was not weighing me. He was not, God help me, comparing me to anyone.
It was a look of recognition.
This was the look of a person who had, somewhere very far away and very long ago, set a place at the table, and now the guest had finally arrived.
My right shoulder twitched.
The wind moved between us, clean and enormous. It had a scent; lilac.
I let him look at me, because there was no other option available to me, and somewhere very far down under the sternum, the place I kept the thing I did not let myself want, that thing—small, ancient, ferocious—woke up and lifted its chin a quarter-inch.
He spoke.
“I have been waiting for you.”
The voice came from somewhere deep in his chest. Somewhere low and old and big. I heard it across forty feet of marble as clearly as if he had said it three inches from my ear. The hall did something with his voice. The hall ushered the voice to me. The hall was on his side.
He rose. Without hurry. Without effort. Without concession.
He was taller than I had estimated and I had not been low on the estimate. The white-and-gold fabric of him fell into place around him as he stood. His shoulders were back. His chin was level. His weight was forward over the balls of his feet, not backinto his heels. He had skater’s posture. He had it perfectly. He had it without trying.
