Which is why I’d just ceased my pacing, turning toward the door,knowingLila had just arrived.
Sure enough, she breezed through the door, nodding to the guy on duty, letting him take her jacket, like she fucking belonged here. My mouth went dry, and myKteerbegan to hum in need.
Taste kiss own claim.
I pressed a fist to my chest, telling it to calm down. This was a cultural event, for fuck’s sake, not a female hunt.
No matter how delicious she smelled.
When she slid her hand through the crook of my arm, I realized I was standing straighter. Prouder.Better.
Was it possible that being with Lila Fairbanks—here, on the ice—made mebetter?
We found our seats, and I spent the first few minutes doing what I always did in unfamiliar territory—taking stock. The theater was full, and the humans around me were doing their best not to stare, which of course meant I felt their eyes on me constantly. I didn’t particularly care. Lila was beside me, close enough that her shoulder brushed my arm, and that was a more interesting problem.
Hells, maybe they were looking ather. They’d be idiots not to.
The lights went down.
I’d prepared myself to be bored and not show it. I was good at that—I’d sat through enough sponsor dinners and media obligations to have perfected a look of engaged neutrality that fooled most people.
I was…notbored.
I didn’t understand what was happening on stage, exactly, not at first. Turns out that no onespeaksduring ballet, which is strange. Like, how much extra effort would it be for the guy to stop and give a little monologue about his feelings? Or for the theater to include subtitles?
Instead… Well, instead, I guess the dancers had to convey their thoughts—emotions—through their bodies.
Huh.
I watched the male dancer cross the stage and thought, clinically, that he was strong—obviously strong, the kind of strength that had been trained so long it had become invisible, which I recognized because I’d spent the last two weeks watching Lila do exactly that. Make the difficult look like nothing, make effort look like ease.
Then the female joined him, and something shifted.
Because Iknewthis. I knew the weight of a woman’s body in my hands, the moment when she committed her trust and her balance to you entirely, the way that had to be earned and then honored. I knew what it cost to make someone feel weightless.
Three weeks ago, I wouldn’t have understood what I was seeing.
Now I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t seem to take a deep breath.
They weren’t on ice, but…together, they werebeautiful.
The male caught her in a lift that took the female dancer overhead in a single clean motion, and I felt it in mypalms—the ghost of Lila rising above me in her living room, arms out, face tipped toward the ceiling, that soft word:perfection.
I exhaled slowly.
Thiswas what she’d been trying to explain. Not just the positions, not just the technical execution—thefeelingunderneath it. The reason a performance could make a theater full of people hold their breath simultaneously, which I was only noticing now because I was doing it myself.
I glanced at Lila.
She was watching the stage with an expression I hadn’t seen before. Not the professional mask—I knew that one well enough by now. Not the flustered blush, not the private delight when something clicked on the ice. This was older than all of those. Something that lived further down.
Longing?
She’d been this.
The thought arrived with a clarity that surprised me. She had been up on a stage somewhere, doing what those dancers were doing—except on ice—and she had walked away from it.
To run charity events.
