Aleksey turned his head and looked at me, and all the nervous tension he seemed to have been carrying since my car pulled up outside was just completely gone.
“There’s somewhere I want to take you,” he said.
I didn’t ask where. I simply followed him back inside, snatched my car keys off the kitchen counter, and let him direct me down streets I’d never seen before as I drove.
Corner stores with barred windows gave way to empty lots, the kind of blocks where streetlights flickered like they were thinking about giving up.
“Left here,” Aleksey said, pointing at a narrow turnoff.
I slowed the SUV and squinted through the windshield. “Pretty sure this is a dead end.”
“Just drive.”
“Should I be worried? Is this where you finally murder me and dump the body?”
He snorted. “If I was gonna do that, I wouldn’t have let you eat my mother’s stew first.”
I pulled up next to a rundown park, the grass more dirt than green. Beyond a rusted chain-link fence, an outdoor rink sat under two working streetlights. It was a concrete slab with no boards; the goals were just metal frames bolted into the ground.
As I shut off the engine, Aleksey leaned back and fished two sets of inline skates out of the footwell behind his seat. One pair looked like they’d survived a war, the leather scuffed to hell and the laces replaced three times over. The other pair was brand new with the size tag still attached to the heel.
I raised an eyebrow. “You bought me skates?”
He tossed the new skates into my lap and reached for the door handle. “I saw them at a shop last week and figured you’d need something for the summer.” A pause, and then he glanced back at me, a crooked grin pulling at his mouth. “Size ten and a half, right?”
“Of course you know my shoe size.”
“Don’t make it weird.”
“Oh, it’s already weird.” I turned the skate over in my hands, running my thumb over the wheel tread. “So you bought me a gift. Just like a boyfriend would.” I leaned across the center console and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek.
Aleksey went still. The muscle in his jaw twitched, and a flush crept up past the collar of his jacket. He muttered something in Russian and shoved his door open before I could get a good look at his face, but the tips of his ears were burning red. A couple of minutes later, the chain-link fence rattled as I ducked through the gap behind him, still holding the skates.
We sat on an overturned bench near the slab and laced up in silence. The air was warm in a way that felt wrong for a rink; no ice fog, no chemical bite from the Zamboni. Just crickets and the low buzz of those dying streetlights.
Aleksey pushed off first. His wheels cracked over the rough concrete, the sound harsher and louder than anything on arena ice. I tightened my last strap, stood, and stepped onto the slab.
Aleksey was already halfway across the concrete, carving lazy loops through the orange glow of the streetlights. His shoulders were down, movements looser than I’d ever seen them.
I pushed off and fell in beside him, the rumble of our wheels filling the quiet.
“How old were you when you started skating here?” I asked.
He didn’t slow down and skated a slow circle towards the goal. “Nine. My mom bought me this pair of used skates. They were three sizes too big. So I stuffed ‘em with newspaper so they’d stay on.” His fingers wrapped around the flaking metal of the goal frame, going white for a second before he let go. “My feet bled for a month.”
“But you never told her.”
Aleksey shook his head. “She worked extra shifts for those skates,” he said. “I wasn’t about to complain.”
I coasted to a stop beside him. “And now you’re buying skates for me.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
He didn’t answer.
“I used to come here every night,” Aleksey said finally, his voice dropping.
