"Better now."
I looked down at him. His face was calm. Open. Not performing. The real Jonah. The one who existed underneath the helpfulness and the humor and the chronic caretaking.
"Jonah?"
"Mm?"
"I love you. Since the dock. Since before I knew what the dock meant. Since always."
"I love you too. Since sixteen. Since before I knew what sixteen would cost. Since always."
"That's our word, isn't it? Since always."
"Since always."
The rink was quiet. The ice hummed. Through the glass, the Atlanta sun was doing its late-morning thing, warming a city that had no business loving hockey but did.
The lobby door opened. I looked up.
Mars Santos walked in from the left, carrying his goalie bag. Early for his own practice, as always. The 5 AM goaliewho had been coming to Decatur for weeks, orbiting the edges of the youth program, watching through glass with the particular, sustained attention that goalies bring to everything they observe.
From the other entrance, a different person.
He was my age, maybe younger. Lean, with the specific posture of a figure skater: shoulders back, neck long, weight centered. He carried a small duffel and wore a jacket too thin for the rink's air conditioning and had headphones around his neck and an expression that was both entirely present and entirely elsewhere. The expression of a man who lived in his body in a way that most people did not, who was always conscious of his own weight and balance, who moved like the floor was ice and every step was a performance even when no one was watching.
Theo Kimura. The figure skater who trained at 5 AM in an empty rink because empty rinks were the only place he could skate without the audience that had destroyed him.
They saw each other across the lobby at the same moment.
Mars from the left entrance. Theo from the right. Ten feet of industrial carpet and recycled air and the humming of a building that existed for people who loved ice.
I recognized the look on Mars's face because I had seen it on my own face in the mirror. The look of a person whose analytical system has encountered data that doesn't fit any existing model and is crashing, gently and completely, in order to rebuild around the new information.
Theo recognized something too. He stopped. His duffel shifted on his shoulder. His eyes, which had been in transit, locked onto Mars with the startled, arrested attention of a man who had been seen by someone and was remembering, after a long time of forgetting, what being seen felt like.
They stood. The lobby hummed. The ice waited behind both of them.
Theo spoke first. "You're the one who watches."
Mars: "And you're the one who doesn't know he's being watched."
A beat. The air held weight it was not supposed to hold.
"I'm Mars."
"Theo."
"I know."
They stood ten feet apart in a rink lobby in Decatur, Georgia, and the distance between them was not the distance that separates strangers. It was the distance that separates two people who have not yet begun but who both know, with the certainty of a body recognizing its own reflection, that the beginning is here.
I looked down at Jonah. He had opened his eyes and was watching the scene with the quiet, knowing expression of a man who recognized the opening chapter of a story because he had lived inside one for a decade.
"Another one," he said.
"The Reapers are becoming a dating service."
"The Reapers are becoming a family. There's a difference."