I’d pulled back instinctively, slowing to a wide back edge along the boards, giving her the center. The crowd had already shifted, I could feel it, four hundred people turning toward the new presence on the ice, and I kept moving because stopping felt wrong, because this wasourice, and we were both on it and that was enough for right now.
Lila was wearing her gala dress.
Black and teal, the skirt hitting her knees, and she’d changed into her skates, and I had approximately one second to register how wildly impractical this was before she dropped her center of gravity and drove into a hockey stop that kicked ice across the boards.
The crowd gasped.
An approving laugh burst from my lips.
She came out of it clean, weight distributed exactly right, chin up, and her smirk saidyes, I know exactly what I just did. Then she went into crossovers, low and aggressive, nothing like her figure skating crossovers, and I understood she’d been watching me the way I’d been watching her.
Not just the games. Not just the broadcasts. She’d been learning from me,learning me.
I picked up my pace along the boards, letting her have center ice, because if I stopped moving, I was going to do something embarrassing in front of four hundred people, like get a hard-on from how fucking proud I was of my Mate.
She pulled up and held her arms out—not figure skating, not quite hockey—justLila, standing in the middle of the rink in a cocktail dress, looking at me across the ice with an expression I was going to be thinking about for the rest of my life.
Maybe, if the gods wereverykind, I could tell our grandkitlings about this moment.
I started toward her.
She started toward me.
We met somewhere in the middle, no choreography, no Joshua, just the two of us finding the same point on the ice and arriving there at the same time. I did a back crossover, slow and deliberate, circling her without reaching for her as I so desperately wanted.
She matched it, grinning up at me, then added the arm extension, that elegant reach she’d been drilling into me for weeks. I copied it without thinking.
It was her turn to laugh.
The sound carried, and I heard the crowd react to it—a warmth moving through all those people like they’d just understood something, even though it was impossible for them to see the thrill in Lila’s blue eyes.
She went into a spin. I did my version—the two-footpivot, graceless by her standards, but controlled—and she came out of her spin still grinning.
Then she dropped into a hockey stance, low and ready, that aggressive crouch I’d spent twenty years not thinking about because it was just how you skated, and I felt myself grin back because she’dnoticed that too.
I matched her.
We were both in the hockey stance, circling each other slowly, and I heard laughter from the crowd—warm, surprised laughter, the kind that meant they hadn’t expected to feel this—and then without either of us deciding it, we switched.
She rose into her figure skating posture, arms lifting, back lengthening, every inch the champion. I drove into my hockey stride, low and fast around the perimeter, and we were doing what the choreography had always been asking us to do: being exactly ourselves, at the same time, on the same ice.
And the audience had gone quiet again, as if four hundred people were holding their breaths.
Well, we’d give them their money’s worth.
Together.
I came out of the circuit and slowed to meet her again at center ice.
She held out her hand.
And really? What could I do except take it?
There we were, center ice, being watched by hundreds of people whocouldn’t knowthat I loved this female…and atthe same time, I was helpless to keep from touching her. Helpless to keep my smile from my face, my pride—in her, inus—from my eyes.
So yeah, I enveloped her hand in mine, and the warmth of it hit me the same way it had on that afternoon of our first practice—like a live wire, like something clicking into place—except now I knew what it meant.
We fell into the side-by-side position without discussing it. Inside hands joined, outside arms free. The position I’d held so many times in practice that my body knew exactly how far to stand from her, exactly how to match her stride. My edges to her edges, my push to her glide, and we moved down the ice together with the ease of two people who hadlearnedeach other.
