Chapter 26 Sloan #2
One hand grips his jaw before he presses his fingers to his temple. He gives a jerk of his head before he looks at me, just a strained smile and sad eyes.
“You can skate, if you want,” the attendant says, scrambling out of his chair, the flash of his name tag finally visible. Enrique. “Won’t you be cold?”
“We’re fine,” we both say quietly and in unison.
“Oh. Sure. Yeah. Whatever you want.” He nods, holding up a clipboard. “You just need to sign the waiver and I’ll get you fitted for—”
Bohdan cuts in. “I can fit the skates.”
Enrique blinks before tugging on the end of his curls. He nods again. “Sure, yeah. Okay. I mean, that’s not strictly allowed but . . . if you sign the waiver and promise not to tell.”
“We won’t tell.” I smile again, trying to go for encouraging, but I can’t really take my eyes off Bohdan.
If this was a movie—it might cut to a sad, tragic montage of what Bohdan sees.
I don’t need the visual.
I know what he’s looking at when he stares out onto the empty ice.
His whole life. His first dream. His first love, and maybe his greatest love as it turned out.
Blood.
Crimson, pooling along the ice and suffocating all those beautiful sparkles that reflect off the surface of a clean sheet.
The two of us drowning in it.
Bohdan’s eyes pinch closed, and I can’t help it—I walk behind him, dropping my chin to his shoulder, wrapping my arms around his chest. His hands find my forearms, and he drops his cheek to the crown of my head.
It’s a gesture worth more than one strike, certainly.
But everything gets so quiet—the arena, my heart, my brain.
I can’t hear anything.
Just Bohdan’s breathing. It turns ragged for a second, and I have to squeeze my eyes shut.
But it feels a bit like, maybe nothing could hurt either of us again while we’re standing there together.
Certainly not more than we’ve hurt ourselves.
I don’t know how long we stand there, but Enrique clears his throat and awkwardly asks if we still want to skate.
Leaving Bohdan staring out at the ice, I sign the waiver for both of us, and Enrique cranes his neck, like he’s looking down at my feet before he starts piling pairs of skates haphazardly onto the desk.
“Can I see them?” Bohdan asks quietly, coming to stand beside me, running a hand over the back of his neck.
“Oh, uh—yeah, sure, why not?” Enrique blinks, holding his palms out like he’s presenting Bohdan the skates.
It’s one of those surreal moments in your life—where it really does feel possible to be two places at once.
I’m here, on this cruise ship docked in the Mediterranean, skin pebbling against the cool air of the rink, watching a thirty-year-old Bohdan run his thumb along skate blade after skate blade, pushing down on the spurs, moving the tongues back and forth, and tugging on the laces.
I sit down, kicking off my sandals and extending my feet. Bohdan’s sliding socks with the cruise emblem up my feet, followed by skates with laces he ties and tugs, rotates every which way until he decides they’re perfect and sits beside me to do the same with his.
Our thighs just touch, the muscles in his tensing and stretching as he tightens the laces.
My hands lie flat against my thighs, somehow too warm for the temperature of the rink.
But I’m there, too.
Eighteen and watching a twenty-year-old boy make all these same movements, not at all clumsy like most boys are.
Tying up my skates and telling me I’m beautiful. Trying to impress me.
Falling in love and staring down the barrel of the rest of my life.
In both places, he stands first, holding a hand out to me.
In that old, forgotten, lovely place of youth—he keeps his hand in mine.
In this one, he drops it, making a fist, and tips his chin towards the empty ice before asking, words all hesitant and rough, “Sloan . . . can I—do you mind?”
I shake my head, voice soft. “Go ahead. Please.”
Bohdan exhales, maybe a bit relieved, and he stares at me, grey eyes unblinking, before a muscle feathers in his cheek.
He turns, hopping over the boards with the grace of someone who’s spent years doing this thing—who could have been doing it just yesterday—and then he’s gone.
He’s just a blur. A beautiful one. But a blur.
“Holy shit. He’s fucking fast,” Enrique mutters before whistling.
“He is.” I smile, so wide I think my cheeks might split open and every good thing that’s ever happened to me might spill over the jagged edges and find its way to the ice to be with that man who might also be in two places at once.
I lose count of how many times he skates by.
I lose count of the tears, too. But I can taste the salt of them on my smile.
It’s this funny thing that’s haunted me—a question I never really got an answer to, even back then. Whether he could still skate the same, could still do this thing he loved so much.
And right now, he looks like nothing’s ever hurt him.
He stops, abrupt and with more precision than I’ve ever managed to do anything, sending a spray of ice over the boards just as I’m wiping my cheeks.
Bohdan inhales, not because he’s winded. He hardly looks like he’s worked up a sweat.
He looks impossibly happy.
Impossibly relieved, actually.
He steps towards the boards just as I do. His arms wrap around me when mine find his neck, one tangling in the waves curling there.
Bohdan takes another rough inhale, and everything around me blurs, I forget really, how badly he hurt me, and I bury my face in the crook of his shoulder.
“I never thought I’d get to see you do that again,” I whisper into his skin. Warm, and already damp with my tears.
His lips find my temple, pressing roughly. “I never thought I’d get to do it again, either.”
Bohdan’s hands tighten against my skin, before one moves up and down my spine.
I count each sweep of his palm.
One. Two. Three.
His palm stills, pressing down against the base of my neck before he starts again.
I hear a lot of things when he does—not just the numbers.
I hear all the ways I’ve never been enough, but I hear these other quiet, tiny things, too.
Facts and truth he’s given me over the years when I’ve struggled to fall asleep.
The way he loved my brain enough for the both of us.
But I can’t stay here, listening to them. I know that much.
“You haven’t . . . skated?” I pull back, looking up at him. Beautiful, illuminated under the rink lights.
He gives a slow shake of his head. “Sometimes. . . but not like that. When I was . . . trying to rehab and recondition, I couldn’t go fast enough for long enough before I got dizzy.”
It’s more than he’s ever said to me about it.
It was like pulling teeth, trying to get him to tell me anything, and it turned out my hands weren’t enough for those extractions, so somewhere along the way, I gave up.
“Are you dizzy now?” I ask quietly, a bit scared he might shut down again and I’ll never know.
“No.” He gives another slow shake of his head. “Not at all.”
I nod, scrunching my nose against the tears. “Why don’t you go again? I’ll watch.”
He might have hurt me impossibly, but as much as I don’t have it in me to pretend not to know him, I can’t pretend not to want every dream he’s ever had to come true.
But Bohdan stares, and I think his eyes trace the freckles on my cheek, before he murmurs, “I’d rather see if I could skate with you again.”
“Okay.” I sniff, finally taking a step back from the boards and untangling my hands from where they were gripped around his neck.
He holds a hand up, and before I can think better of it, I interlace my fingers with his, and he skates slowly beside the boards as I walk to the entrance, a bit unsteady on the blades, like I was all those years ago.
His fingers tense against mine when I step onto the ice. “I can pull you.”
“Okay,” I say again, and he lifts my other hand, palms pressed together for just a minute, and then my fingers are in his and he’s skating.
I’m in two places at once again—then and here.
I don’t try to stop the tears, I let them fall, sniffing occasionally, never taking my eyes off Bohdan.
He doesn’t take his off me, either. He skates backward, legs crossing over one another, blades slicing across the ice that’s only ever belonged to him.
“You said you haven’t skated like that . . . do you not skate?” I’m as afraid to ask as I am of the answer.
“I go out sometimes. But not like that. I’ve never tried to push my body again.” Bohdan shrugs, rounding the corner with ease. “If I can’t have the real thing, I don’t want it.”
“Is that why you’re still alone?” I ask, a half attempt at humour, but it’s a real question.
His eyes narrow on me, cheekbones sharpening. “It’s why I’ll be alone forever, Sloan.”
He’d rather be alone than be with you, my brain whispers.
I snort to try and cover the sob.
I squeeze my eyes shut with a sharp jerk of my head. Go away, I want to whisper back.
The way I used to when I was little and didn’t understand why or how my brain could be so cruel.
I focus on the feeling of the ice beneath my skates. Bohdan pulling me along, and I’m so sure he won’t let me fall that I keep my eyes closed and I breathe in and out.
He doesn’t say anything, but his thumb draws small circles across the back of my hand.
I open my eyes after I think we’ve done one lap of the rink.
And I must be back in time—or maybe I’m being slowly torn in two by the way Bohdan looks at me—just like he used to, before he became someone who could hurt me.
“Why’d you try today?”
He shrugs again, indifferent. “You’ve already seen me at my worst. I did the worst thing to you that you can do to a person. Why would you care if I couldn’t?”
“I’d care.” I say it so, so quietly, I don’t even know if he heard me, or if I even wanted him to—but his eyes shutter, and his grip tightens on me before he swallows, blinking them back open.
Bohdan glances over his shoulder when we round the corner, blades of his skates slicing the surface in movements that still look practiced. “You’re finally moving home.”
“Yes.”
He looks back at me, a faint smile, and my heart stutters when the left side kicks up just a bit more. “What are you teaching? Researching?”
“Teaching. A course on the intersection of archaeology and medicine.” It all sort of tumbles out before my brain even has the chance to tell me that it’s not the type of thing regular people care about.
It would be right—maybe most people wouldn’t care.
But I know Bohdan will, and he’s not regular.
“There’s so much we don’t know about how medical practices were developed, how they were used .
. . how they were influenced by the power structures of past societies.
You know, recently, we’ve found medical instruments that were used by Roman surgeons.
There are some really cool field study opportunities, and who’s to say there isn’t evidence for old psychiatric practices just waiting to be dug up? ”
His fingers flinch, like he might want to let go.
He doesn’t—he sort of rolls his right shoulder back, angling his head, and I wonder if he wants to touch the scar.
If that’s become the type of habit for him counting is for me—one you do when you’re in so much pain, you’ll do anything to try and make it stop.
But he smiles, sad and resigned. “You never did get to go on one of your digs.”
“No,” I say quietly.
I don’t want to wake my brain up. I don’t want the past and the rules and the way he broke my heart to hear. I don’t want them to stomp all over the highlight reel—the reasons I never did.
I could have gone for a semester, in the summer, anytime really. But I wanted to be with Bohdan more.
I didn’t want to miss a single game with Tia. I didn’t want to miss the nights in their house afterwards, crushed red cups and sticky floors, laughter—so much laughter that even though it was so, so loud and Tia had to get me earplugs, everything was quiet.
I didn’t want a whole semester even further away from Seattle.
I didn’t want to miss a single whisper, a single smile, a single laugh—I didn’t want to miss any of it with him.
And it never occurred to me until much, much later that I was giving something up for something else—something I wouldn’t get to keep.
“I’m happy for you, Sloan,” Bohdan says, voice rough. “I’m sorry that you followed me and that . . . that it didn’t work out.”
He stumbles a bit over the last few words, and I do, too, but his grip doesn’t.
I pull my head back, blinking. I’ve tried to reorganize and remap the whole thing in my brain—that it’s better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all.
But those words tip the bookcase over, the one where I keep all those memories of him and me, shiny, sparkling trophies of this world-ending, heart-stopping love I was so lucky to have, and all of the new directions on my map twist and turn, and they lead me back to the place I try to avoid—the one that tells me it all must be true, that it was never enough.
That I made it all up.
That he doesn’t think it was worth it and it never was, and maybe he never loved me anyway, because how could he love someone like me? Someone bad and awful and horrible and entirely lacking.
“You think it didn’t work out?” I whisper the words, stumbling over them and blinking too much because I can feel my heart rate pickup.
Bohdan just shakes his head, and I think there’s a point, but I must be missing it. I can’t really see anything, the edges of my vision go fuzzy, and he asks, “When was the last time you said I love you?”
I don’t want to think about that. I squeeze my eyes shut again, whispering, “Before something very, very bad happened.”
“Something very, very bad did happen. You’re right. But it wasn’t—” He’s saying it in this maddeningly patient way, how he used to, when he was trying to help me. But he can’t possibly be trying to help me. I’m not worth loving, and I’m certainly not worth helping.
He swallows, finally letting go of one of my hands to scrub his jaw, but he doesn’t slow down our speed.
We loop past Enrique at the desk, back on his phone again, when Bohdan says, “It wasn’t what you think.
The worst thing that happened to me wasn’t losing my career, Sloan.
It was losing you.” He jerks his head, grabbing my hand again.
“If I had one wish, it wouldn’t be to skate again.
It wouldn’t be for hockey. It wouldn’t be for a stupid fucking game. It would be for you.”
I can’t breathe.
Or maybe I just don’t.
But I do manage to say, “I’m sorry—sorry, I’m just—no.”
And then I run.