Page 38 of Ice Dance

“Eight p.m.?”

“Yes, eight p.m. I assume you need to make some calls to see if we can even enter this late.” The door swung shut behind me, and he was gone, out of my life until eight p.m. I needed the day to deal with the fallout, to get my head around it all.

On the bus, I texted him the address to the noodle house where I’d had dinner with Casey and Jen the previous night. If we were going to do this, then we needed to talk it through, work it out somewhere safe, where there wouldn’t be eyes watching. Dance studios and ice rinks were out of the question. We needed neutral ground.

I leaned my forehead against the warm bus window and let my thoughts roll.

Was I really going to dance the gender open with Hasegawa? It seemed like a dream and a nightmare in the same headspace. The man was a brilliant dancer, but he pushed my buttons like nobody else. I wasn’t sure I could rein myself in enough not to explode around him. He did something to me that tore out any patience and had me racing to level eleven without even realizing. Like when he’d thrown a drink in my face.

A good partnership required some push and pull. Some discussion. That was healthy. Whatever I felt around Hasegawa wasn’t healthy. But I was going to have to put that aside if we were going to win. And we could do it. I had faith in that, even if I didn’t have faith in my own control. Not just the gender open either. Winners from each category went into the final. With my changes to his routine, we could win the whole damn cup. The money would go a long way to helping get my life in order. Could send some of it home too, prove to my folks I wasn’t the screwup I’d been up until now.

But I was getting ahead of myself.

If we could get through a simple dinner without one of us storming out, then we might survive the next eight months. At this point, the chances of that were fifty-fifty.

Hasegawa was already seated when I arrived, ten minutes late. His dark eyebrows pinched together as the server showed me to the table and handed over the menu. Not a great start.

“You’re late.”

“Yeah.” I sat and put my phone on the table. He looked at it as though I’d just dumped my shoes on the tablecloth. I’d forgotten he was Japanese. He probably had a whole array of social etiquette rules that I knew nothing about. “Sorry, no phones on the table in Japan, huh?”

“I was born in England.”

I flashed a smile. This was so going well. I’d keep my mouth shut for the next few minutes, until he stopped scowling. If that ever happened.

“I was going to show you some routines on my phone,” I said, immediately ignoring my own advice. “We are working. This isn’t a date, right?” I laughed.

“Of course.” That seemed to do it. He stopped staring at me and picked up his menu instead. “I assume you come here often. What’s good?”

Do you come here often? I smiled at how my brain went there, then fiddled with the chopsticks to keep my hands busy. “If you like spicy go for the tantanmen. If not, then the beef udon is safe.”

He’d dressed smartly, but he probably always dressed smartly. I hadn’t really seen him outside of training sessions. The shirt was good, nice quality. Button undone at the collar. Smart casual. It suited him. For some reason, that one undone button fascinated me. He seemed like the “buttons all done up” type, and that one little undone button said something that I was clearly overthinking.

We ordered, and after a few minutes of awkward silence our drinks came. The restaurant hubbub meant our silences weren’t excruciating. Again, I found myself wondering how I was going to connect with this guy. I knew we could connect, but I hadn’t really figured out how yet. Emotion got him fired up. Anger. Frustration. Whenever he got pissed off with me, it seemed to unlock the real him, but we couldn’t rely on that for eight months.

“I spoke with Dylan,” he said. “She’s flying out tomorrow. She’s going to make some calls and confirm we can actually do this at such a late stage.”

I reached for my water, sipped quickly, and nodded. “They’ll allow us in preliminary, I think. They probably won’t need to see us dance together to let us into the category. They’ve seen us dance already. Besides, they want more dancers in the gender open. I bet they’d bite their own hands off, you and me together? It’s going to raise eyebrows.”

“I realize that.” He was looking at a wrinkle in the tablecloth. “I saw the interview.”

I knew the one he meant without asking. “Ah, yeah, that.” A laugh, and I looked away. “Sorry about the whole uptight thing. She put me in the spot. I had no idea what to say. Damn pictures.”

“I could see that. You handled it as best you could, I thought.”

Was that a compliment? A very small one, but a compliment nonetheless. And he’d been looking up interviews of me online? Probably in desperation, after Alisha had been pulled.

“Well, if we’re going to do this, that’s going to get worse . . . The press, I mean.”

He swallowed and his gaze darted sideways, toward the other diners. “Agreed.”

“We’ll need to get our stories straight about why we’re dancing together, and do some press runs so we’re not fucking up in front of a microphone.”

I’d seen his interviews with Alisha. They were painful to watch. He said all the right words in the right order and clearly knew the sport, but Alisha had looked as though she wanted to start crying halfway through. And it wasn’t her. It was him. He had no idea half the time that his comments cut like razor blades. I was mostly certain I could handle that, though. I wasn’t going to take his cutting bullshit. He was going to have to get used to that, used to me, or we wouldn’t work.

So many things could throw this whole thing off the ice.

“You’re worried,” he said.