“Are you even allowed in the rink after hours?”
“What’s the point of being the star of the hockey team if I can’t get a few perks here and there?” He smirked and pulled up his phone. “We just have to take a small detour.”
He ordered a rideshare to a residential address in Back Bay and rubbed my arms to keep me warm until the car arrived.
“Where are we going?” I asked as we climbed into the back seat.
“What size are your feet?” he asked.
“Eight.”
“Perfect. I’m going to run up to my aunts’ and grab Lavi’s figure skates,” he said.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “This feels like a lot of trouble. We can do something else.”
He took my hand and squeezed. “I want to do this. Let me show you what it feels like to be on the ice, Hawaii. I want you to experience the thing I love most in this world.”
My heart pounded at the notion that Leo cared enough about me to put in effort to share this experience with me.
“Okay,” I said. “But do we really need to borrow your aunt’s skates?”
“Well, Reynolds is the smallest guy on the team and even his skates are going to be humungo on you if I try to put you in something at the rink. So, yes. I think it’s necessary.”
He asked the rideshare driver to wait while he ran into the building and booked her on the app for the drive back to campus. I waited patiently in the warm car, and Leo returned a few minutes later with a pair of women’s skates and a Måneskin sweatshirt.
He climbed in and tossed me the sweatshirt. “I didn’t want to ruin your ensemble, but it’ll be cold in the rink, so I stole this from Aunt Sloane.”
“Thanks.” I pulled it over my head. “Your aunts were just cool with you stealing their stuff?”
“They weren’t there. I have a key to their place. I’ll call them tomorrow to tell them what I took, but they won’t care.”
I smiled as our rideshare driver started the drive back to campus.
“What?” Leo asked, looking at me curiously.
“It’s just nice to see someone who also has a family they’re close with. I’ve never met anyone else who is as casual with their family as I am. I like it.”
He smirked and we rode in silence until the driver dropped us off at the arena. Leo took my hand to help me out of the car and we walked together to the arena where he used his ID to get us into the building. Apparently, players had access to the facilities at all hours. He took me straight to the locker room and I looked around, taking it all in. I’d stood outside in the hallway waiting for him many times, so I’d had a lot of time to imagine what it looked like in here.
“There are fewer lockers than I expected.” We were surrounded by open cubbies filled with hockey gear; each cubby labeled with a player’snumber. I spotted number twelve and recognized Leo’s jersey hanging inside.
He laughed. “Yes, it’s a bit of a misnomer.”
He grabbed his skates and sat down on the bench to pull them on. He had his feet in them and was lacing them up in no time. Meanwhile, I stood there cluelessly holding his aunt’s skates.
He side-eyed me as he laced up his second skate. “Take your boots off, Hawaii. I’ll lace you up.”
I did as he said and sat down on the bench, pulling both skates on. When he’d tightened his own, he knelt down in front of me and took one of my feet in his lap to tighten and tie my skates. “I feel like Cinderella,” I said with a laugh. “Only, I’ll probably look more like Bambi out there.”
Leo laughed and grabbed my other foot. “I won’t let you fall.”
I looked around the room again. “This is kind of crazy. What if we get caught and you get in trouble?”
“Okay, little miss rule-follower. At the risk of sounding like an asshole”—he finished my skate and set my foot back down, resting his hands on my knees—“what are they really going to do? Coach won’t bench me for this. At most, I get a lecture that will definitely be worth taking you skating for the first time.”
“Okay,” I said as he stood up. I let him pull me to standing and lead me to the rink where he flipped on the lights. He explained that we were walking on guards that protected the blades from damage, and we took them off at the edge of the rink. He stepped onto the ice first and glided around like it was nothing, his whole body relaxed and at ease.
“This is a terrible idea,” I said. “I’m a surfer, not an ice skater.”
