Page 68 of Ice Dance

He bent through the knee, and took us into the curve.

Good. Clean. Blades held. Upper body open.

He stepped in.

His weight had to come into my hands, into the lift, into the line we’d marked a hundred times off the ice. It should have been simple. Transfer. Rise. Extend. Trust the base.

His blade left the ice.

The rink shifted, or so it felt. Navarro’s weight offset, his hip twisting.

I tried to correct, to get my right arm under him. Navarro clamped down on my shoulder. At that point, we were done, and the hard ice was our inevitable ending. My blade juddered, caught, unbalanced, my toe pick dug in. The rink tilted violently sideways. The ice came up, and we both slammed down hard. I lay for a moment, stunned, listening to ice chips fall and my own pounding heart.

Then I heard Dylan’s skates hissing closer, moving fast.

Navarro.

I looked up and over, even as I tried to dig my toes in and push off.

He wasn’t moving.

My heart dropped through the ice. All noise vanished. Just the pounding of my heart again, but for a different reason now.

Then his head lifted, he shifted his torso, and came up swearing.

“You good?” Dylan asked him.

“Yeah, yeah.” He seemed more annoyed than injured, but in those terrible motionless seconds, my heart had been torn out.

I was done.

“Okay, we go again,” Dylan said.

“No.” I got to my feet, winced at what would be a new bruise tonight, and made for the gate.

“Ren, we’re not done.”

“I’m done. We’re done. We need a break.”

“We have an hour left!” Dylan called.

I ignored her, left the ice, tore off my skates, wiped them down, and stuffed them into my bag.

“I’m okay,” Navarro muttered, coming in closer.

I side-eyed him and hadn’t mean it to look furious, not at him. But he frowned and backed off, hands going to his hair, like they did when he needed a moment to breathe. I didn’t say another word, didn’t know what to say, and left the rink. We had dinner and debrief later, that I planned to go to, but my body was screaming to slow down, and I knew to listen.

I’d been back in my apartment long enough to shower some of the aches away, then considered heading to the studio early, but instead found myself outside Navarro’s apartment door. Dylan had rented us apartments in the same building. He’d never been more than a few steps way. Was turning up unannounced socially acceptable?

He opened the door without me having knocked, and startled. “Oh, hey. I was just heading⁠—”

“Are you alright? The fall⁠—”

He chuckled. “It was no worse than the others. Just winded me.”

I stayed in the corridor; he stayed at the threshold. We fell silent.

“Do you uh . . . wanna come in?” he asked. “Just don’t judge, okay? I wasn’t expecting visitors.”