The rink closed for good tonight and came down on Monday, and she had told herself she was only coming to watch the wrecking ball do the rest of the grieving for her.
She had not expected him. He was at the rental counter anyway, signing the same waiver, lacing the same brown skates with the same two-finger yank on the laces, as if he had never once left.
They had been nineteen here, every Friday for three straight years, back when the carpet still smelled new and the mirror ball still had all its facets. They split at twenty-two over something neither of them could fully reconstruct tonight.
For an hour they orbited the rink on opposite walls, which was really just a long way of saying hello.
Then the DJ took the mic and said the words he had said every Friday for twenty years — last couples skate — and dropped the house lights, and the mirror ball scattered its small moving coins across the floor the way it always had.
He was at the rail before she had decided anything. His hand was already out. Some questions don't need asking twice in one lifetime.
She crossed her hands into his the old way, right over left, and they pushed off together, and her body remembered the rhythm a full beat before her mind agreed to any of it.
"You still skate backward wrong," he said, close to her ear, and spun her on the far turn so she faced him, skating blind on nothing but trust, the way he had taught her to a decade ago.
The song ended. The house lights came up, flat and fluorescent, and the floor emptied out around them, and she did not let go of his hands, and neither did he.
In the parking lot after, neither of them had thought to take off their skates. The laces were still knotted twice, the way the rental clerk always insisted, and the asphalt held a cold the vinyl floor never had.