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Train.

Eat.

Read.

Work.

Sleep.

Repeat.

Every hour of the day was prepared a week before. All my emotions were shoved into a box.

Now, though?

I’m surprisingly okay with losing track of time and not having every little detail of my life neatly under control. I’m still me, after all. I’ll probably always be a little stubborn, a little obsessive, and hopelessly committed to doing things my way. Mostly because I want to, and partly because I genuinely have no idea how to be anyone else.

But he’s slowly teaching me something I never knew I needed to learn.

That I can fly outside the ice, too.

And that I don’t have to have everything figured out to enjoy the feeling of falling.

Especially when he’s by my side.

I watch with a smile as morning sunlight spills across the ice, turning Stephen’s frozen lake into a sheet of diamonds. I breathe in deeply, smiling as the crisp morning air nips at my cheeks while I lace up my skates.

I step onto the ice and push off, letting my blades carve the surface. The cold rushes past me, and instantly I’m weightless.

Music plays through my phone’s speakers while I do my routine. Before arriving here I used to skate with the sound of Debussy, Chopin and Tchaikovsky.

Now I only skate with his music. Stephen’s art.

His voice drifts across the lake, rough and warm and perfect.

It’s a song from his first solo album. The one titled ‘Wrong’. He raps about things that I didn’t know before. I do know. He talks about the streets, the cold and the pain.

And although listening to that hurts, my smile grows bigger when I remember that he made it.

He’s one of the best K-rappers in the world right now, if not the best. He’s even bigger than the legends because he never bowed down to the expectations and the critics. No matter how far he’s risen, he’s stayed true to who he is, right down to his core.

The music swells, and so do the butterflies in my stomach.

I spin.

Jump.

Land.

Again.

Faster.

The ice whispers beneath my blades as I sweep across the lake, the sunlight flashing around me and making everything look like magic has taken over this dream.

My body moves before my brain can interfere, every turn flowing into the next, every landing lighter than the last.

Right now, I’m not calculating every edge.