Winners Don't Have Bad Days (Watty 2020 Winner, Romance)

34. #Companion, May 2018

The public skate in VITAL lasted one hour fifteen minutes on Thursday nights.

In Mike's estimate, it was ten minutes too short for him to complete one full lap.

Clinging to the boards with his right hand, he pointed himself in the desired direction, set one skate straight, weight on the middle of the blade, no rolling on the outer edge... because the inner and outer edge really, really mattered in his case. Duh.

The second skate glided back, as if driven by malicious intelligence. Well, Mike was one hundred percent certain he was not the one doing it. He could not glide on demand to save his life. He hugged the boards, stopping just short of kissing the glass shield. Just let me get to the closest gate, and I'll stop this farce, he prayed to Khione, the Greek goddess of snow. Surely, she managed ice as well or she ought to have been. Anyone on the ice needed a guardian deity. 

With a prayer, he hobbled to the nearest gate, ignoring the crowd passing him by, aged three to ninety-three. On the matted floor, he could walk in skates, if he was cautious of not rolling his weak ankle under. On the ice... not so much. What was he trying to prove?

He slumped on the bench, his knees falling to the sides in surrender and scrolled through his phone. Daya's texts look tired, missing punctuation and letters. She was exhausted, he could feel it, both physically and from trying to keep in touch with him. I miss you so much, she typed between the 3Lo this and Sp4 that.

Even when he looked up the ciphers to find out that BoDS stood for backward outside death spiral, he did not feel included in her life—he just didn't get figure skating.

That's how Daya must have felt when you were blathering on about Renaissance or Game of Thrones. He tossed his head back in exasperation, and it hit the wall. 

His body struggled as much as his mind with the era of scarcity he put it through. Goodness gracious, but he was exhausted! 

Twenty pounds down, twenty still to go according to some charlatan's calculator, and he was fumbling for the reasons to go through with it. What was he going to do with his feat of temperance? Send Daya the after picture? Witness his mother fall into a swoon?

That last one might be worth it, but Daya? She grew up among the fit men. Smaller love handles did not hold a candle to whatever the heck the 3Lo this and Sp4 that was.

He forced the fingers of his free hand out of his hair. It must look like a total mess between the helmet and the pulling. Enough. Whom was he kidding? No number of pounds lost would bring Daya running back into his arms. Her warm compact body on his lap was a memory. Her scent in the spare bedroom would have disappeared long ago, if he didn't find the perfume she'd used in a moment of weakness. 

She said I miss you; she'd never said, please come.

If a magic potion turned him into a likeness of divine Hasegawa right this moment, he would still be in the same place. A man who had blown his chance.

His thumbs flew over the buttons. "Alyssa, perhaps you're right, and I should acquire an ami de la science et de la volupté. A friend to science and to lust... also knows as a tabby-cat. Do you think there is a tabby out there with interest in archival science and digital storage, willing to put up with listening to thesis proposal drafts?"

The bubble popped up on the phone's screen while he was wiping dry the blades. 

"Super!"

"I'm at the CHS tomorrow afternoon. Lemme know when you're coming."

***

CHS—the Calgary Humane Society—built its headquarters in such a far-flung area, that it might as well have been in the countryside. There were paved streets still, and the chain-link fences around the warehouses, so it was Calgary, but Mike's GPS directions grew frantic, forcing him to turn around in gravel-covered yards.