Chapter Twelve
Learning Something New
Sydney
I’ve never been on skates in my life, and I want that on the record before this goes any further.
I’m a dancer. I’ve spent years training my body to do exactly what I tell it to do—I can balance on one leg with my eyes closed and not wobble. Put me on a stage, in a studio, on any solid surface, and I am grace itself.
Put me on ice, and I am a baby deer learning to walk for the first time while the ground actively tries to kill me.
“You’re going to be fine,” Archer says, lacing up the twins’ skates on the bench while I stare at the ice through the plexiglass like it’s a crime scene I’ve been asked to enter.
“I’m not going to be fine. I’m going to die.”
“Nobody dies at family skate.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
Lily is already on the ice. She lasted about four seconds before her feet went in opposite directions and she hit the surface with a splat that would’ve alarmed me if she hadn’t immediately popped back up, laughed, and done it again on purpose.
Luke approaches the ice the way Luke approaches everything.
He stands at the edge, studies the surface, watches three 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.
Archer loosens his grip. I step back, find my balance, go to the boards. He skates over to Lily and scoops her up, and she tells him she’s going to be in the Olympics, and I stand at the wall gripping the ledge and trying to get my heartbeat back to a rate compatible with human life.
Luke glides over to me along the boards, still careful, still methodical.
“Auntie Syd, you look funny when you skate.”
“Thank you, Luke.”
He nods, satisfied that he’s delivered both knowledge and honesty, and glides away.
I pull out my phone and text Lauren from behind the boards where Archer can’t see my screen.
Me: I’m so screwed.
Lauren: ???
Me: I think I almost kissed Arch *!$%&!!!
Lauren: Finally.
Me: That’s not helpful!
Lauren: It’s the most helpful thing I’ve said in fifteen years.
I put my phone away. Archer is skating with Lily on his hip now, making lazy circles around the rink, and Luke is following along the wall at his own pace, and I’m standing here with my pulse still hammering and the ghost of his hands on my waist and the memory of his breath on my face, and Lauren is right.
She’s always right, and that’s what scares me most.
We go for pizza after because Lily demands it, and we all decide pizza sounds good.
The place is a block from the rink—red vinyl booths, paper plates, a jukebox in the corner that only plays songs from before any of us were born.
Lily wants pepperoni. Luke wants cheese.
Archer orders a beer, and I order a glass of prosecco because I’ve earned it, and the four of us wedge into a booth, and it feels the way it always feels when we’re out together—easy and warm and a bit like a family.
Lily is telling Archer about a girl at preschool who has a pet lizard, and Luke is carefully pulling every piece of pepperoni off the slice Lily convinced him to try, and Archer is half-listening to both of them while eating his pizza with one hand and wiping Lily’s face with a napkin with the other, and I’m watching him do all of this at once and marveling at the way he makes it look natural.
“Can I ask you something?” he says, and the shift in his voice makes me set down my wine.
“Sure.”
“Why are you still single?”
The question lands in my chest like a rock thrown into still water. I stare at him across the table.
“I mean—” He runs a hand through his hair, which is what he does when he realizes he’s said something that came out bigger than he meant it to.
“I just always figured by now you’d be, uh—married.
Maybe have kids of your own. You’re so good with people, Syd.
You’re good with the twins, and you’re good at taking care of—you’re just—” He stops.
Regroups. “I guess I always assumed someone would’ve figured out how great you are by now. ”
I can’t look at him. If I look at him, I’m going to say the reason I’m single is you, and it’s always been you, and every man I’ve ever dated has been a placeholder for the one sitting across from me, and I would rather die than say any of that in a pizza restaurant with two toddlers between us.
“I need more napkins,” I say, and I slide out of the booth.
“There’s napkins right—”
“I’ll be right back.”
I walk to the counter at the front of the restaurant and stand there looking at the napkin dispenser, and I breathe.
In and out. Upbeat oldies music plays overhead, and a teenager behind the register asks if I need help, and I say no, and I just stand there holding a stack of napkins I don’t need, trying to pull myself together.
I always figured you’d be married by now.
He always figured. Like it was a given. Like some other man was supposed to find me and keep me and give me the life he never offered. Like the idea of me ending up with someone else was not only possible but expected, and he’s confused about why it hasn’t happened yet.
Because of you, Archer. You absolute ass.
I take the napkins back to the table and sit down, and Lily immediately hands me a crayon and tells me to draw a shark for Luke because Luke wants a shark and she can’t draw sharks and “you’re good at everything, Auntie Syd.”
I draw the shark. I drink my wine. Archer watches me from across the booth with that crease between his brows that means he knows he hit a nerve but can’t figure out which one.
Good. Let him wonder. I’ve been wondering for fifteen years. He can sit with it for one pizza dinner.