Bonus Epilogue Cold Coffee
MARS
Theo slept like a figure skater. This was not a metaphor.
He slept with his arms above his head and his body straight and his center of mass precisely aligned with the mattress, as if even in unconsciousness his body maintained the postural discipline of twenty years of competitive training.
Axel was between us, occupying the exact center of the available space with the territorial certainty of a cat who believed all surfaces existed for his benefit.
I made coffee. Brazilian roast. Double grounds.
The routine was the same. The coffee maker in my kitchen had been joined by a second mug, a Japanese ceramic cup that Theo had brought from his apartment and that sat next to my mug on the counter.
Two mugs. Side by side. The most significant change in my kitchen in eight years of living alone.
We drove to Decatur. Separate skates in the back seat: his figure skating blades, my hockey skates. The rink was dark. The parking lot was empty. The rink manager's white Toyota was in its usual spot.
We laced up in the locker room. Side by side. The sound of laces through eyelets, doubled, was a duet.
We stepped onto the ice.
Theo went left. I went right. He began his program. I began my drills. The rink held us both, hockey and figure skating, geometry and movement, the goalie and the skater, and the ice did not distinguish between us. The ice was ice. It held whoever asked to be held.
At 5:15, I stopped my drills and went to row three. Center. My seat. I sat down. Coffee in the cup holder.
Theo skated. The Bolero. The program that had broken him and that he had rebuilt, note by note, jump by jump, morning by morning, in this rink, with me in this seat. The program that he had skated at the regional competition while I cried in row three. The program that was his and mine and ours.
The quad loop. The setup. The entry. Four rotations. The landing, clean and perfect and absolute.
I did not cry this time. I smiled. The smile was real and full and visible from the ice, and Theo saw it and he smiled back, and the two smiles across eighty feet of frozen water were the conversation. The whole conversation. The only conversation that had ever mattered.
You fly. I watch. The watching is love. The flying is trust. The love and the trust are the same thing, and the same thing is the space between us, which is not empty but full.
Full of mornings and cold coffee and a cat named Axel and costumes on a dress form and bossa nova and the specific, unreducible beauty of one person seeing another person completely.
The coffee went cold. It always went cold.
That was the whole story.
Thank you for reading the Power Play series.