"Good." I grinned at him. "You can hold my flowers at the kiss and cry."
"Your what?"
"The place where skaters wait for scores. With their coaches." I reached across the table and took his hand. "You'd have to clear it with the team, but just for the free skate. Two days, maybe three. I want you there. If you want to be."
"I want to be," he said. "I want to be everywhere you are."
His phone rang halfway through breakfast. He glanced at the screen, and his jaw tightened.
"Agent," he said, and answered it.
His face went flat while he listened, and he said, "I understand," and, "Yeah, I figured," and, "Thanks for letting me know," in a voice that didn't sound like him.
He hung up and set the phone face-down on the table.
"Vitalade's out," he said. "They're not renewing."
"I'm sorry."
"It's fine. I knew it was coming." He stabbed at his pancakes without eating them. "They were my biggest deal. By a lot."
I reached across the table and covered his hand with mine. He let me, but his shoulders were tight.
"How bad is it going to be?"
"I don't know. My agent thinks a few of the smaller ones will stick around. The rest—" He shrugged. "We'll see."
I thought about Ro, who'd lost everything. Red wasn't Ro. He was more established, had a Cup ring, and had a team that had publicly supported him. But the money people didn't care about Cup rings.
"We'll figure it out," I said.
Red looked at me. "We?"
"Yeah." I squeezed his hand. "We."
"Okay," he said finally. Some of the tension bled out of his shoulders. "Yeah. Okay."
We finished our breakfast in comfortable silence, his fingers still laced through mine.
"Do you want to go skating?" I asked.
Red blinked. "Skating?"
"There's a public rink about twenty minutes from here. Open skate until noon."
"You want to go to a public skate session."
"I want to skate with you." I shrugged. "Not for work. Not for training. Just for fun."
He stared at me like I'd suggested we fly to the moon. "I haven't skated for fun since I was a kid."
"Neither have I."
He smiled. "Okay. Yeah. Let's do it."
The rink was called Henderson Ice Arena, a squat building off the highway with a faded sign and a parking lot full of minivans.
"You sure about this?" Red asked.