I sit down, kicking off my sandals and extending my feet. Bohdan’s sliding socks with the cruise emblem up my feet, followed by skates with laces he ties and tugs, rotates every which way until he decides they’re perfect and sits beside me to do the same with his.
Our thighs just touch, the muscles in his tensing and stretching as he tightens the laces.
My hands lie flat against my thighs, somehow too warm for the temperature of the rink.
But I’m there, too.
Eighteen and watching a twenty-year-old boy make all these same movements, not at all clumsy like most boys are.
Tying up my skates and telling me I’m beautiful. Trying to impress me.
Falling in love and staring down the barrel of the rest of my life.
In both places, he stands first, holding a hand out to me.
In that old, forgotten, lovely place of youth—he keeps his hand in mine.
In this one, he drops it, making a fist, and tips his chin towards the empty ice before asking, words all hesitant and rough, “Sloan ... can I—do you mind?”
I shake my head, voice soft. “Go ahead. Please.”
Bohdan exhales, maybe a bit relieved, and he stares at me, grey eyes unblinking, before a muscle feathers in his cheek.
He turns, hopping over the boards with the grace of someone who’s spent years doing this thing—who could have been doing it just yesterday—and then he’s gone.
He’s just a blur. A beautiful one. But a blur.
“Holy shit. He’s fucking fast,” Enrique mutters before whistling.
“He is.” I smile, so wide I think my cheeks might split open and every good thing that’s ever happened to me might spill over thejagged edges and find its way to the ice to be with that man who might also be in two places at once.
I lose count of how many times he skates by.
I lose count of the tears, too. But I can taste the salt of them on my smile.
It’s this funny thing that’s haunted me—a question I never really got an answer to, even back then. Whether he could still skate the same, could still do this thing he loved so much.
And right now, he looks like nothing’s ever hurt him.
He stops, abrupt and with more precision than I’ve ever managed to do anything, sending a spray of ice over the boards just as I’m wiping my cheeks.
Bohdan inhales, not because he’s winded. He hardly looks like he’s worked up a sweat.
He looks impossibly happy.
Impossibly relieved, actually.
He steps towards the boards just as I do. His arms wrap around me when mine find his neck, one tangling in the waves curling there.
Bohdan takes another rough inhale, and everything around me blurs, I forget really, how badly he hurt me, and I bury my face in the crook of his shoulder.
“I never thought I’d get to see you do that again,” I whisper into his skin. Warm, and already damp with my tears.
His lips find my temple, pressing roughly. “I never thought I’d get to do it again, either.”
Bohdan’s hands tighten against my skin, before one moves up and down my spine.
I count each sweep of his palm.
