Page 39 of Ice Dance

He was watching me, my face. I let my smile tick. “Yeah, ’course I am. It’s a risk. Not dancing with you, the visuals of it. I don’t want us to be a spectacle, and honestly, that’s what the industry looks at me like. I’m the ice-dance wildcard. Stay in my lane, get off the ice. I don’t want that . . . Not for this.”

“You want to be taken seriously,” he said cooly.

“Yes, I do.”

He reached for his water. “For what it’s worth, I take you seriously or I wouldn’t be here.”

I laughed. “Don’t bullshit me. You’re here because you’ve got no other option.”

“I could not dance. That is an option.”

“Right, so it’s me or you’re out. I feel so special.” I could sense the conversation veering off the rails, and a part of me wanted that, wanted to screw it all up now before we got months into it and I screwed it up then. Why waste time thinking we could make this work when we both knew history was going to repeat?

His gaze held mine across the table, like a challenge. There it was. He held his body rigid, in check, tied down, but not his eyes. There was heat in those eyes. A little touchpaper of anger, ready to be lit. By me.

The food arrived, upsetting the tension that had begun to stretch between us.

We definitely needed Dylan. I couldn’t manage him on my own.

As we ate, we talked some more about the changes to his routine I’d brought to him weeks ago, before selection day. The battle. That name had stuck, and it was fitting. The separation in the beginning, two dancers close but emotionally distant. Then the collision. The argument on the ice. Sharp, jagged movements. Fast. Angry. Lots of emotion. We were both powerful dancers. This part would be breathtaking. Then the surrender—sensual, loose, free. By the end of it, the audience should feel as though they’d witnessed an epic confrontation, not just an ice dance.

Anyone looking in from the outside, at Hasegawa and me, would think it impossible. I was too loose, too free, too wild. He was too technical, too poised, too controlled. It was never going to work.

And that was why it would.

“Dylan is going to need a few days to find us somewhere to practice,” Hasegawa said.

We’d finished our meals, and the waiter had just taken the plates away. We’d talked a lot about the dancing, and he’d loosened up once he’d been on solid ground—ground he knew.

“I have a place we can use in Hochelaga until then. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s private. Nobody will bother us.”

We both agreed that trying to practice at a public rink or anywhere near Montreal International would draw too much attention when we needed to have our heads in the game. Saga’s studio wasn’t elite, but it would do for a few days.

“Alright. What’s your schedule like?” he asked.

I told him how I’d been working with my new coach, the daily routines.

“That’s not enough. And you’ll need to drop the teaching on Saturdays.”

I smiled, because if he thought I was going to drop those kids then he could fuck all the way off back to England. “I’m not doing that.”

He waved a hand, dismissing my concerns as easily as batting a fly. “They’ll find another tutor. I need you focused on nothing but our dance, and that’s assuming the Meridian don’t want to see us perform beforehand.”

The server brought the bill. Hasegawa picked it up and ran his gaze over it.

“I’m not stopping the Saturday sessions,” I told him.

“This is the Meridian Cup. You want to jeopardize your focus because ten children idolize you every Saturday? Is your ego that fragile?”

And there it was. The whiplike words he wielded with such fucking precision and had no idea how they cut those around him. “You know, just when I think I can start working with you, you drop shit like that.”

He huffed. “It’s forty eighty-two.” He returned the bill to its plate and pulled out the exact amount of cash.

If I didn’t have to wait to add my card to the bill, I’d have gotten up and walked out right then.

We sat in silence. The server returned, glanced at both our faces, and quickly left. Hasegawa stood so fast he almost took the tablecloth with him.

“Thank you for the meal, and the discussion. I assume you’ll send me the details of this studio?”