CLAUSE 6(b). PUBLIC AFFECTION (SUPPLEMENTARY). Physical affection between the parties shall be performed solely for the benefit of observers, and shall not be conducted in the absence of the same.

"I cannot skate," said Noelle.

It was the third time she had said it. It was beginning to sound, even to her own ears, like a line from a very bad play. She stood at the edge of a rooftop in the city of Pellham, in a borrowed pair of rental skates, with a hot chocolate in one hand and the cold coming up through her boots like water, and looked at the thirty hockey players who had gathered to regard her with expressions of tender incredulity.

"Everyone can skate," said Jonah Ames, kindly.

"I can't."

"Everyone in Port Merrow can skate."

"I'm from Port Merrow."

"It's a medical impossibility."

"It's a very, very long story involving a pond, a cousin, and a deeply formative trauma at the age of nine," said Noelle. "I'd like to go back inside."

"No!" cried Teo, in anguish. "You can't! We came all this way!"

They had come, in fact, about forty feet. The hotel in Pellham was a tall glass-fronted tower on the edge of the river, and at the top of it, on the roof of the conference wing, the management had laid down an outdoor rink for the winter season. It was a small, bright, charming thing, ringed in strings of colored lights, with a little wooden hut selling cocoa and a loudspeaker playing something with sleigh bells. At six o'clock in the evening, with the sun gone down behind the water and the sky going slowly to violet, it was the most picturesque spot in the whole cold city.

It was also, she noted, extremely high up.

The Wolves had come up after dinner, the night before the game, in a spirit of festive anarchy. Coach Reyes had permitted it on the ground that the team needed to relax. There were fairy lights in the railings and a little drift of fresh snow in the corners of the ice, and a dozen children from the hotel were wheeling about in bright scarves while their parents watched from the benches. Eli Santangelo, the rookie, was skating backward in circles with the expression of a boy who has been allowed, for the first time in his short life, to be exactly as happy as he wanted. Rennick Okoro glided past with his hands behind his back like a courtly swan.

Coach Reyes had materialized on the bench beside her.

She did it the way she did everything: without sound, without warning, and with the air of having been there all along. She was wearing her long black coat and a knitted hat with earflaps, which on anyone else would have been comic and on her looked like the regalia of a minor deity. She held two paper cups. She held one out. It was cocoa, with a small hill of whipped cream on top.

"Thank you," said Noelle, startled.

"Don't mention it. I don't make a habit of it." Reyes sipped from her own cup, with grim satisfaction, and watched the rink. "Eleven coaches."

"I'm sorry?"

"Lindqvist's played for eleven coaches in nine years. Different clubs, a couple of loans. I've worked with him for two seasons. And I want you to know that in all that time, in all that ice, nobody noticed that his head dropped before the pass." She turned her flat dark gaze on Noelle. "I didn't notice it either. I should have. It's what I'm for."

Noelle looked at her cocoa.

"It was only a kitchen," she said. "Two in the morning. He had the tape on. I watched it three times, that's all. It's a thing you can see if you're not looking at anything else."

"That's what I mean." Reyes drank. "I've spent twenty-two years looking at hockey. You looked at the man. It's a different skill, and it's rarer, and it's the only one that matters about eight percent of the time." She was silent for a moment. "His knee's going."

"I know."

"He'll play on it until it breaks. He'll play on it with a smile, and tell the medical staff it's fine, and not sleep, and skate harder to prove it. It's what he does with anything that hurts." The eyes did not leave the rink. "I can't make him stop. I've tried. He doesn't hear it from me. He hears it, I think, from somebody he'd have to disappoint."

"Coach Reyes, I'm not..."

"I know what you are," said Reyes. "You're a contract. I read it. Helena showed me, I'm head of the bench, I'm entitled." She finished the cocoa, and crushed the cup, and rose in one economical movement. "I also have eyes. When it's time, tell him to rest. He'll be angry for a day and a half. Then he'll do it."

"Why would he listen to me?"

"Because," said Reyes, with great and terrible patience, "you're the only person in this building who has ever looked at him and asked what it cost."

She walked away across the roof, a long black upright shape in the lights. Noelle watched her go. She sat with the cocoa growing cold in her hands and a feeling in her chest like a stair that was not where she had left it.

"He listens to you," said a voice. It was Rennick, drifting by along the boards with his hands clasped behind him, a lean dark figure on the ice. He did not stop. He did not so much as turn his head. He merely murmured it, to the air, in his slow courteous voice, like a man reciting a fact about the weather, and sailed on.

"That's what you meant, in Kestrel Falls," said Noelle, finding her voice. "When you said he's not a good actor."

"It's not acting," said Rennick, over his shoulder, "if it's the truth."

Kasper had said nothing at all.

He was standing a little apart from the others at the edge of the rink, in a dark jacket, with a pair of skates slung over one shoulder by their laces. He had been standing there for several minutes. He had a way of waiting that she was beginning to recognize: a stillness that was not passive, a kind of listening. He was looking at the ice. And then, very slowly, he turned his head and looked at her, and in the colored light his face was gentle and wry and a little unguarded.

"I'll teach you," said Kasper.

The team went quiet.

It was an interesting sort of quiet. It had a texture, like a held breath. Teo opened his mouth, and Jonah, without looking, put a hand over it.

"You don't have to," said Noelle.

"I know."

"You've got a game tomorrow."

"It's a skating lesson. I'm not going to be arrested." He crossed the boards and held out his hand. "Come on. Sit."

She sat. It was a wooden bench by the hut, and he went down on one knee in front of her on the cold boards, his bad knee, and set her rental skates on his thigh and began to unlace them.

"What are you doing?"

"They're too loose."

"They're rental skates, they're all too loose."

"That's why they're bad." He drew the laces out with quick sure fingers. His head was bent. The lights along the railing made a halo of his hair, damp already with the first flakes of the evening. "You want them tight at the ankle. Loose across the toes. If your feet slide around, you can't feel the ice, and if you can't feel the ice, you'll spend an hour trying to stay upright by pure force of will. Hold still."

She held still. He drew the lace taut over the top of her foot, one hook, then another, with a firm gentle pressure through the leather. She could feel it right through the sole of her sock. His fingers did not hurry. They worked up the front of her ankle with the ease of long habit, and she became aware that nobody on the roof was talking. Not a soul. Even the cocoa man had stopped to watch.

"There," said Kasper, tying the knot. He pressed a thumb against her instep. "That okay?"

"Fine."

"Too tight?"

"No."

"Tell me if it is."

"It's perfect," said Noelle, in a voice so low that she wasn't sure he'd hear it, and he looked up.

For one instant his eyes met hers. In the colored light they were very blue and very close, and she saw the expression change in them, the small startled softening of a man who has been taken at his word. Then he cleared his throat, and rose, with a faint wince for the knee, and held out both hands.

"It's all about the edge," said Kasper.

He had made her stand at the gate of the rink, with her hands on the rail, and he had stepped out onto the ice backward, facing her, and was demonstrating. It was extraordinary. He looked as though he were doing nothing. He stood perfectly still, his feet a little apart, and the ice seemed simply to move him. "You don't push. That's the first thing everyone does wrong. You think you have to heave yourself forward like a boat. You don't. You lean, and you let it take you, and you steer with your knees."

"I'll fall."

"You'll fall."

"It's going to hurt."

"It's going to hurt a bit," Kasper agreed. "Nobody dies. Look where you want to go. Not at your feet. Your feet will go where your eyes go, I promise. That's the whole secret. That's everything."

"Where do I want to go?"

"Me," he said.

He said it quite plainly. It was a technical instruction. He was holding out his hands, palms up, a yard away on the ice, and the lights glittered in the falling snow, and she understood that it was not a metaphor, that it could not possibly be a metaphor, and that she was in considerably more trouble than she'd thought.

She let go of the rail.

It was the most frightening thing she had done in years. The ice was impossibly slick beneath her. Her ankles wobbled. Every part of her body went rigid with terror, and she gave a sort of small yelp and lunged forward, and his hands closed around her forearms and held her.

"Got you."

"I'm falling."

"You're not falling. You're standing. Look at me."

"My legs are going in two directions."

"That's normal. That's the early stage." He was walking backward, very slowly, drawing her out along the ice. She stared at him. His face was lit from the side by a string of blue bulbs, and he was smiling, a slow, warm, steady smile that did not waver for an instant. "Knees. Bend them. Good. Don't look down."

"I'm looking at you."

"That's correct."

"It's very hard," said Noelle, with feeling.

"It gets easier."

"Does it?"

"No," said Kasper, honestly. "Not really. But you get better at it."

They went around the rink once. It took eleven minutes. Around them the Wolves had taken on the grave courteous air of men attending a state occasion, and every time she passed one of them, they looked fixedly at the horizon. Teo, at the far end, was weeping silently into the sleeve of his jacket. Jonah had taken out his phone and put it away again with a look of acute moral struggle.

By the second lap she had stopped clutching. By the third she was gliding, in a series of small trembling pushes, with her arms out for balance and her teeth set. And somewhere around the far curve of the rink, in a long clear glide, she realized that his hands had loosened. He was holding only her fingers. She was moving. She was actually, impossibly, moving across the ice, on her own two feet, in the dark and the falling snow, with the whole bright city spread out below the rail like a fallen constellation.

"Kasper," said Noelle, breathless. "Kasper, I'm doing it!"

"You are."

"I'm skating!"

"You're doing great."

"I'm..." And she looked down.

It was a mistake. She knew it the instant she did it. Her eyes dropped to her own feet, and her feet, with the infallible malice of the inanimate, went in two opposite directions. The ice rose up. She shrieked, a wild high undignified sound, and flung out both hands, and pitched forward in a long helpless arc, straight into his chest.

He caught her.

He took the whole of the impact. He grunted, and rocked back, and his arms went around her in a quick hard cage, and for a moment the two of them went spinning together in a slow wheel on the ice, locked, like a pair of tops. Her face was against his jacket. Her hands were fisted in the cloth. She was laughing, she realized, wildly, breathlessly, with her cheek mashed into a zipper, and above her his chest was shaking too.

They stopped.

He was holding her. That was the thing. The wheel ran down, and the world went still, and he did not let go. His arms were around her, tight and warm and solid, and her feet had found the ice again but she did not take her weight off him. She lifted her head.

His face was about four inches from hers.

It was snowing. She had not noticed, until then, that it had begun. Fine flakes were coming down in the colored light, a slow glittering drift, settling on his hair and his shoulders and the lashes of his eyes. A single flake landed on his cheek, and lay there for a second, and melted. She watched it go. She could not look away from the place where it had been.

She could feel his heartbeat. It was going fast. It was going much faster than any amount of exertion could explain. She could feel his breath, a small warm cloud in the cold between them. And she could feel, with a clarity that went through her like a struck note, that neither of them was laughing now.

"Noelle," said Kasper, very quietly.

"Yes."

"You're okay."

"I'm okay."

"You're sure."

"I'm sure."

He did not let go. His eyes dropped. They went, very slowly, to her mouth, and rested there with a kind of helpless, steady concentration, as though he were reading something he had been trying for a long time to translate. She felt it like a hand. She felt the whole weight of it settle low in her stomach, a slow hot knot, and her own gaze betrayed her, and slid to his lips, and stayed.

She wanted to kiss him.

It was so simple. It was so plain and clear that she almost laughed. It was not a thought. It was not a strategy or a story or a problem to be solved. It was a want, uncomplicated and enormous, rising in her like a tide, and it had nothing to do with the contract or the cameras or the ring on her hand. There was no one watching. There was only the snow, and the quiet, and the unbearable gentle gravity of him bending his head.

He was going to. She knew it. She saw it in the lowering of his lashes, in the tightening of his hands at her back. She tipped her face up. Her eyes began, without her permission, to close.

"SORRY!"

Something small and fast hit the back of Kasper's legs like a cannonball.

He pitched forward. She went with him, a step, a stagger, and they both flailed, and he got a hand on the rail and a foot braced, and the two of them stood clutching one another in a ridiculous tableau of survival. At their feet, sprawled flat on the ice in an enormous pink snowsuit, lay a very small girl of about six, with a pom-pom hat and a gap in her teeth.

"Sorry!" she said again, cheerfully, from the floor. "I wasn't looking! I'm learning!"

"That's quite all right," said Kasper, in a voice that was not quite steady.

"Are you the hockey man?"

"I'm... yes."

"My dad says you're famous."

"Your dad's very kind."

"He says you're in love with the lady."

There was an absolute silence on the roof.

Noelle looked at the child. The child looked at Noelle, with enormous, unblinking, guileless gray eyes. She was waiting for an answer. In the distance, somewhere beyond the circle of lights, a long snort of suppressed laughter was cut off with a sound like a cork going into a bottle.

"We're very good friends," said Noelle.

"That's what my mom says about Uncle Pete," said the child, darkly.

Kasper made a sound. It started in his chest and came out through his nose, and then he bent over with his hands on his knees and began to laugh helplessly, silently, with his whole body, so that the pom-pom hat bounced and the child watched him with an expression of faint professional interest. Noelle put her hand over her mouth. She tried to hold it. She lasted perhaps two seconds, and then it escaped her, a high bright shaky peal, and she leaned on the rail and laughed until the tears froze on her lashes.

They helped the child up. They dusted her off. Her father, a harried man in a parka, arrived at a run, apologizing, and was told by Kasper that it was no trouble, no trouble at all, and the little girl was carried off, shouting a stream of tactless remarks about love, into the dark.

When it was over, they stood at the rail, side by side, not touching.

Neither of them seemed able to look at the other. The snow went on falling, soft and silent, in the bright air. Beyond the rail, the night city glittered. The sleigh bells jingled in the loudspeaker. And down at the far end of the rink, with an air of tremendous elaborate nonchalance, thirty large men were all absorbed in an animated conversation about the weather.

"That was not for the cameras," said Noelle, abruptly.

She had not planned to say it. It came out in a low rush, with her eyes on the ice. Heat climbed her neck. She felt it burn along her ears, and could do nothing about it.

"I know," said Kasper.

"I mean, there weren't any. There weren't any cameras at all."

"I know."

"It would have been," she said, helplessly, "completely unnecessary."

"I know."

She turned her head. He was looking at her. There was snow in his hair. His eyes were very bright, and very steady, and there was no teasing in them whatsoever.

"I don't know what to do with that," said Noelle, in a small voice.

"Neither do I," said Kasper. "Can we go in?"

It was a long walk to the elevator.

They did not speak. They stood in the glass box as it fell through the floors, a yard apart, with their skates over their shoulders and their reflections hanging in the dark window. The numbers ticked down. Her pulse was still going in her ears. She was aware of him beside her, of the warmth of his arm, of the small steady sound of his breathing. She stared at the numbers. Thirty-one. Twenty-nine. Twenty-six.

Clause six, subsection b.

It had been her own addition. A tidy little measure of professional hygiene, appended in the dead of night to make sure the thing would not get out of hand. Physical affection shall be performed solely for the benefit of observers. She had thought it very prudent. She had thought, with a faint prim satisfaction, that it would be an excellent safeguard.

There had been no observers on the roof. Nobody had been looking, in the end, except thirty hockey players pretending not to look, and a six-year-old, and the snow.

She had wanted to. He had been going to. And the only thing between the two of them and a thing she could not have taken back was a child in a pink snowsuit, and a sentence she had written herself, which had turned out, when it came to it, to be perfectly useless.

The doors opened on the fourth floor.

"Goodnight," said Kasper.

"Goodnight."

"Rule five."

"Rule five," said Noelle, and went into her room, and shut the door, and stood with her back against it in the dark with both hands pressed flat against her mouth, in a state of terrified, ecstatic, wholly unprofessional joy.