"Don't think you got away with that," she murmured as she passed.
"What?" Aaron asked, breaking off mid-sentence.
Katie kept walking.
“Uh, catch you later!” he called to Cal who, long accustomed to the oddities of figure skaters, waved him off with a chuckle.
“What?” he asked again, hustling after Katie.
She glanced at him over her shoulder as she walked down the hall. “You and Zack and your coffee date."
"It wasn't a date," he protested.
“You wanted it to be.”
“Well, sure.”
"I told you no. Him, too."
"Right then, because we had ice time. I wasn’t going to skip out on work.” Aaron was somewhat offended. He hadn’t come back from the islands to fuck off from work with a boy.
"Aaron," Katie said slowly, like he was one of the little kids learning how to skate who needed reminding to bend his knees. "I didn't tell you no because we had ice time."
“Then why? You’re the one who told me to show off and be nice.”
Katie stopped at the door to the little office she and Brendan shared with the other TCI coaches. “Yes, but there’s being nice to the journalist and there’s being boy crazy at the journalist.”
Aaron couldn’t exactly defend himself against that one.
“I’m not saying you can’t be friends with him or get coffee with him,” Katie went on. “Just...be aware, okay? Because every moment I have known you, you've had a crush on someone. Usually ill-advised."
"You didn't mind when Huy and I were dating.”
"Because Huy is sensible. He has good boundaries and knows how to balance his personal life and his skating.” She shot him a sideways look. “I’d hoped he’d be a good role model even if you two want different things out of the people in your lives.”
“Are you saying I have a bad work-life balance?”
Katie sighed. “It’s hardly your fault. Your home and your family are out there in the middle of the lake and your work is exhausting. That’s a big gulf.”
“So maybe I want to close that gulf.”
“Do you?” Katie gave him a keen look. “Or do you want a fun distraction because the work is hard and you’re lonely? Look,” she said, slinging her arm around his shoulders and steering him farther down the hall in the direction of the locker rooms. “You’re a competitive figure skater. The work is brutal and involves too little reward most days. I get it; I’ve been there. But be smart about what you’re doing. And seriously, don’t fuck the reporter. Okay?”
“Do you want me to say ‘okay, I hear you’ or ‘okay, I won’t fuck the reporter’?”
She levelled her gaze at him. “Honestly? I’ll take what I can get.”
“Well,” Aaron said as he laughed and ducked out from under her arm, “that makes two of us!”
Chapter 6
JUNE AND JULY
Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN
ZACK SPENT THE NEXT several weeks falling head over heels in love with Twin Cities Ice.
Aaron never let him miss his twice-weekly skating lessons—not that Zack was inclined to skip them. The hour was early and the rink was freezing, yes, but he’d have gone through more discomfort and lost more sleep if it meant spending more time with Aaron.
Aaron was funny, charming, handsome, and absolutely, unbelievably, strong. Not just because he could and did keep catching Zack and picking him back up when he fell. But because the more Zack skated, the more he appreciated the ocean that separated his own physical abilities from Aaron’s talent that had been honed by years of hard work.
Zack had always spent time in a gym when he could; living in conflict zones had made a certain level of physical strength and endurance a distinct asset. But now he was spending most of his time at the rink watching the TCI skaters do hours of on-ice drills and even more hours in the gym and dance studio. They didn’t have the sort of bodies Zack had historically associated with strength, but they were, to a one, all stronger than him.
No one kept him at a distance; everyone from the front desk staff to the maintenance people at the rink greeted him by name and stopped to chat. The skaters bantered and gossiped around him while he sat in the break room transcribing notes or trying to thaw out. Brendan persisted in asking Zack how he was and whether he needed anything with a warmth and sincerity that made Zack relieved his inappropriate crush wasn’t on him. Back at his apartment, Marie took to inviting him upstairs frequently for coffee, pastries, surprisingly good bourbon, and gossip.
There was a camaraderie here that came from doing something hard and dangerous that other people didn’t understand. It made Zack miss the good things about the work he used to do: the friends, the teamwork, what it felt like when you’d done something almost impossible—whether it was getting the story or surviving the night.
And Aaron stood out from all of them, like a star serving as a beacon across a twilight horizon.
Zack didn’t think that was only because he found Aaron devastatingly attractive, but it didn’t hurt. Zack began to feel a thrill of anticipation every time he saw Aaron setting up a jump, and an even bigger thrill of satisfaction when he landed them. When he finally did sit down to formally interview Aaron, Aaron was funny and odd and charming in all the ways that, Zack was sure, would make readers fall for him.
He came to know which jumps Aaron was stronger at—theoretically, at least; he still couldn’t distinguish the jumps as they were happening in front of him. He watched Aaron spend days drilling a quadruple loop that would not happen as much as he and Katie seemed to think it should. And he watched as Aaron began working with Brendan on the choreography for what would become his programs for the competition season.
He wanted to write about it all. Not just Aaron and his hustle and the race to make the U.S.
