Page 52 of Ice Dance

“Go away.” I chuckled, then choked on the knot in my throat.

He laughed. “I’ll call you an Uber.”

I got to the rink early, and as I had staff access from teaching, they let me skate before official opening hours. I told myself I wouldn’t do anything technical, just warm up. I was doing airborne spins inside fifteen minutes. I’d also fallen three times trying to stick the landing, knee bent, absorbing the impact, balance through the leg so the skate didn’t go wherever the heck it wanted. I’d normally have the spins down without much drama, but I’d managed about an hour’s sleep and spent the rest of the night staring at my phone.

I was going to pay for those falls tomorrow, but for this morning I’d needed the intense focus to get Hasegawa out of my head.

“You’re early. Good.” Dylan set her bags down outside the boards. I checked the big rink clock above. Nine a.m. There wasn’t any sign of Hasegawa yet.

The rink gained a few other professionals over the next twenty minutes, enough to slow me down.

Still no sign of Hasegawa.

He had never been late. Not once. Always early or precisely on time. Apart from that time he’d ditched me during selection week. Had he ditched me again? No, Dylan was here. He’d have told her if it was over.

Dylan laced up and kicked her heels into the back of the skates, a sign she meant business. “I want to run some of the more technical elements today—the kicks, some of the brackets in sequence.”

I rested a hip against the boards, on the ice side, and eyed the main swing doors at the entrance.

“You with me?” Dylan snapped.

“Sure.”

“Then act like it. This isn’t Saturday kiddy club.”

“Right.”

She skated out to join me on the ice.

“Have you heard from Hasegawa?” I asked, unable to wait a second longer.

“No. He’s probably stuck in traffic. We really need closer accommodation.”

“Yeah . . .”

I ran brackets—switching blade edges and direction, at the same time, on one leg. They looked easy, almost boring from an observer’s point of view, but the one thing they were was easy to get wrong. We ran forward-inside brackets, back-outside, then switched it up,

Hasegawa showed up at nine thirty. Thirty minutes late.

He didn’t look over.

“There he is,” Dylan said, as though she may have been worried too.

My heart, which had been behaving all morning, decided at that moment to bolt. Everything from last night came rushing back. His body against mine, the firm, powerful sensation of him. His arms around me. His gaze, those dark eyes . . . filled with lust.

I looped around, and decided to test the waters and see where we were today while ignoring my thudding heart. Skidding to a stop at the gate, I braced against the boards. “Hey, you good?”

“You’ll dull your blades.”

He’d meant the hockey stop I’d just pulled.

If he was being a bitch about my skating, then we were back to normal. Probably.

He stepped onto the ice, ignored me, and went straight to Dylan. She noticed, eyebrow up, but said nothing. She ran the morning’s schedule with him, going over everything she’d told me, then told him he’d already know this if he’d arrived on time.

He tugged at his sleeves. “Traffic.”

That was it.