Luke approaches the ice the way Luke approaches everything. He stands at the edge, studies the surface, watchesthree other kids skate past, and then steps on with both hands gripping the boards. He moves one foot forward. Then the other. His face is pure concentration, his jaw set. He makes it about ten feet along the wall before he looks up at Archer with a smile.
“I’m doing it,” he says.
“You’re doing it, buddy.”
And then there’s me, standing at the boards in rental skates that smell like feet, gripping the ledge with both hands.
Archer steps onto the ice beside me. “Give me your hands,” he says.
“I’d rather hold the wall.”
“The wall isn’t going to teach you to skate. I am.” He holds out both hands, palms up, and waits.
I look at his hands. They’re big and steady, and the last time I held them we were eighteen and getting matching tattoos, and I was squeezing so hard he told me later I left nail marks in his palm.
I let go of the wall and grab onto him.
My feet slide immediately. I lurch forward, and his hands tighten around mine, and he pulls me in, steadying me, and now I’m about six inches from his chest and my legs are doing things I didn’t authorize.
“Bend your knees a little,” he says.
He grins and pulls me forward, skating backward, guiding me across the ice with the patience of a man who has taught three-year-olds to do this and knows that the secret is going slow. My ankles wobble. My arms are rigid. I’m gripping his hands hard enough to leave those nail marks again, and he doesn’t flinch.
“There you go,” he says. “You’re skating.”
“I am absolutely not skating. You’re dragging me, and I’m trying not to fall.”
His lips quirk. “That’s how it starts.”
We make it to the center of the rink, and he lets go of one hand and moves beside me, his right hand finding my waist. His palm settles against my hip, firm and warm through my sweatshirt.
“Keep moving your feet,” he says. “Just small steps. Push out, glide.”
I push out. I glide. His hand stays on my waist, steady, and his other hand holds mine, and we’re moving together across the ice at a speed that a grandmother with a walker could outpace, but I’m upright, and he’s next to me, and his thumb is pressing into the curve of my hip, and I am paying so much attention to that thumb that I forget to keep pushing.
My feet stop moving. Momentum carries me forward. My body does not follow the plan.
I go down.
Or I start to go down, except Archer’s arm hooks around my waist and yanks me back up against him, and suddenly I’m not falling anymore. I’m pressed against his chest, both his arms around me, my hands fisted in the front of his shirt, and we’re face to face on the ice.
Close. Very, very close.
I can feel his breath, warm and quick, against my mouth, and his arms are tight around me and my feet are barely touching the ice because he’s essentially holding me up, all of me, like I weigh nothing.
He’s not laughing.
I was laughing a second ago, that panicked breathless laugh you do when you almost fall, but I’ve stopped because of the look on his face. He’s staring at me with his jaw set and his chest rising and falling and his arms locked around my waist, and his eyes drop to my mouth for a second, and I stop breathing entirely.
The rink is loud around us—kids laughing, music playing over the speakers, the scrape of blades on ice—but inside the circle of his arms everything has gone quiet, and I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears, and I’m thinking: if he doesn’t let go of me in the next three seconds, I’m going to do something I can never take back.
“You good?” he asks, and his voice is lower than it should be.
“Fine,” I say, and I am the opposite of fine; I am standing on ice in rental skates being held upright by a man I’ve been in love with since I was a teenager, and his mouth is right there, and his hands are on my waist, and fine is the most absurd word in the English language right now.
“DADDY, LOOK! I’M SPINNING!”
Lily’s voice cuts through the rink, and we both turn, and she’s in the middle of the ice with her arms out, slowly moving, and she’s beaming like she just landed a triple axel.
