Nobody in Particular(46)

She pauses until I look down at her. “Do you want Theodore to come in?” she asks. I guess she’s noticed my body language, and is trying to figure out why I’m so on edge.

If he comes inside, there will be zero tension, right? It’s impossible to imagine chemistry that doesn’t exist while some random guy stares you down. What an awesome idea.

“No, it’s fine,” I say.

My brain groans at me.

Rose doesn’t even slow down as she steps onto the ice, like there’s no difference between walking and gliding for her. Her hair whips around as she skates, and she’s alight as she turns backward to look at me. I wonder if she knows how beautiful she looks like this. Like, maybe she wanted to bring me here not so she could teach me, but so someone could witness her being completely, totally perfect.

As for me, I sort of drag myself along while clutching at the barrier for dear life. I manage to keep myself upright doing that for ten whole seconds, but then my legs shoot out in different directions out of nowhere and I go down hard.

Rose doubles over laughing at me, and I would hate her a tad for it, but my elbows and tailbone hurt too much for me to focus on anything else. At least she apologizes when she helps me back up.

“I’m going to make you learn snowboarding,” I grumble as I try to straighten my wobbling legs. “And I’m gonna laugh at you the whole time.”

“You should, I deserve it. But I’ll warn you now, I’m a fast learner.”

“I’ll find something to laugh at,” I promise. My back is straight now, and both of my hands are in Rose’s. She’s wearing a pair of woolen gloves, and they’re fuzzy against my bare skin. She holds eye contact with me, and it’s like when she touched my leg. A little too soft, and a little too long. And it burns, just a little too hot.

“I’ll make sure I give you something,” she says. “Just to be fair.”

My nerves are fucking frayed. I hope to god she can’t tell.

“But seriously,” she says. “I do want to hold you to that ski race sometime. If you can bear the thought of being cooped up in a chalet with me.”

“Totally! Put me on the list next time you all plan a trip.”

Something weird crosses her face, and it takes me a second to realize I’ve said the wrong thing. I just don’t know what.

“Our friends aren’t big skiers,” she says, and it clicks. She wasn’t inviting me to a group snow trip. She was asking me to join her sometime. Alone. In a chalet. Together.

I don’t trust myself to reply without stammering, so I opt to keep my mouth shut.

She starts to move backward, pulling me in large circles around the rink. Bit by bit, I graduate from slipping and sliding around to sort-of-kind-of skating. She lets go of my hands a few times to see how I do, but I barely last a few seconds before I start to overbalance. Every time I do, she swoops in to catch me with steady hands. At first, I’m worried I’m going to pull her down with me, but I don’t actually think I can. She’s stronger than she looks. I’m pretty sure she could lift me by the waist right now if she wanted.

Eventually, with her encouragement, I manage to skate more than a couple of steps without her. Thank Christ, because I was starting to feel self-conscious about how amazingly terrible I was at skating. Anything I learned as a kid was clearly lost. But now, I’m starting to remember. It’s fun, even,

“Next stop, the Olympics,” Rose crows as I find my rhythm. “Can you imagine the crowd cheering?”

“I’d prefer not to,” I say. “It’s kind of my nightmare.”

“What, being cheered?”

“Being center stage.” I realize I’m about to fall seconds before it happens, but it’s too late to stop myself, and Rose is too far away to interfere. I hit the ice and slide, hissing with pain. Why the hell doesn’t this sport have padding? Any other sport where people throw themselves hard at the ground has helmets, and for good reason.

“Here, here, here,” Rose says in a low voice as she crouches down to look me over for permanent damage. When it turns out all my limbs are still attached, she helps me back up, but this time she sticks closer to me. I’m a liability, I guess. God forbid she has to use the panic button. I’d die of shame.

She grins sideways at me as we skate. “Wait, so you’re a wildly talented pianist, yet you don’t like the spotlight? How do you handle performing?”

“By doing it as little as possible,” I say. She gives me a confused look, and I go on. “I mean, I’ll do it for people I trust, or to audition, or whatever. But I have really bad stage fright.”

“Oh. How will you pursue piano if you can’t perform, though? Or don’t you intend to?”

I shrug. That is a great, excellent question. One my mom’s asked me about a million times. “I don’t know. I keep promising myself I’ll get used to performing, but every time I chicken out. And I do want to pursue it if I can. I mean, I’ll probably never be a concert pianist, but I think I’d like to be in an orchestra. Like Caroline was. If I can be that brave. If not, maybe I’ll just play for myself.”

Rose does a little one-eighty shuffle so she’s facing me going backward again. Show-off. “But you have so much talent. Surely you can learn to overcome any stage fright?”