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“I can’t believe you don’t know how to skate.”
“It’s literally the first thing I told you, Norrie, it’s not my fault you forgot.”
“Oh, I didn't forget. This is pure, genuine disbelief, Lucy. ”
Lucy wasn’t sure who started laughing first, but it didn’t take long for them to dissolve into giggles. It wasn’t even that they’d said anything funny - well, Lucy not knowing how to skate was maybe a little funny - but it was the sort of laughter that fizzed up uncontrollably when you were too giddy to even try and stop it. The sort of giddiness, for example, that accompanies going on a date.
It’s the God’s honest truth and a real kick of irony that Lucy didn’t know how to skate. Skateboarding, ice skating - not relevant, but they fall under the umbrella of skating and so are also outside of her skillset. Lucy didn’t know how to rollerskate or rollerblade, purely, she hoped, due to lack of trying. Which is where irony enters, stage left: Lucy Carlyle worked at a rollerskating rink.
In her defence, she didn’t work on the rink itself, so it’s not like she’d ever needed to learn. Lucy mostly handled admissions, the slushy machine, the mop bucket, and dabbled in the skate hire, none of which required putting on skates. That suited her just fine, thank you.
…or, it did. For several months. Until Norrie kicked out an obnoxious skater for hitting on Lucy and making her uncomfortable. Jacobs had protested, of course, in that slurred voice that had enough alcohol on it to disinfect, but Norrie had stood her ground and Lucy didn’t fall in love so much as crash through love’s dining room ceiling. Suddenly, she wanted to do stupid things like borrow Norrie’s lip balm, and kiss her neck when they hugged, and give her the perfectly crunchy chips from her own meal, and watch the sunset together, and rollerskate.
Luckily, Norrie had wanted all those things, too, which made them seem a little less stupid and a little more like a relationship.
“Let’s get some safety gear on you. I don’t want you bleeding on my rink,” Norrie said, reaching into her duffle bag to pull out all sorts of boring things with straps. Elbow pads, wrist guards, knee pads, and even a helmet made their way from the bag onto the rickety table between them. There’s two sets of each, though Lucy could’ve sworn she’d never seen Norrie actually wear any of the kit on the rink. She certainly hoped it wasn’t all for her to wear at once - she only had so many limbs.
“Your rink, is it?” Lucy mused as she leaned forward, closer to the smile that stretched its way into Norrie’s dimples. Painted in the swirling red-green-blue-white lights of the rink, she looked stunning - none of that oh, even in this strange lighting she’s still pretty bullshit, because this was the very same lighting that had sparked Lucy’s crush. Norrie looked comfortable and confident and competent.
“For tonight,” she said, holding up the keys dangling from her neck. “Come on, safety first. Give me a leg.”
Lucy obliged, sliding her leg forward, and Norrie hooked a hand beneath her knee to drag her closer. Her other knee fell open as she found her calf trapped against Norrie’s side. Sure, nimble fingers worked to fasten the knee pad in place, cinching the velcro back and forth to check that it was tight enough. One finger slipped between fabric and skin, running along the edges to check that the kneepad was just this side of too tight. The other hand burned hot against Lucy’s skin, and she was as acutely aware of each fingertip as Norrie seemed oblivious of them. Norrie was entirely efficient in her man-handling; Lucy was about 10 seconds away from suggesting they abandon the date and just make out instead.
“Good?”
Lucy’s mouth was dry. “Yeah. Good.”
The other kneepad was secured within nine seconds. Such was the way of an exceptionally kind, yet exceedingly cruel, universe.
The wristguards came next, hard plastic against soft padding the fit over her forearm and palm almost as well as Norrie’s hands did. Her touch was gentler here, fingertips dwelling on the callouses at the edges of Lucy’s fingers, nails carefully tracing the lines in her palms before covering them for safety. It was sealed with a kiss against the plastic; a blessing.
There was an intimacy to it that didn’t fluster Lucy or make her ache in the way that teenagers stereotypically ached for another’s hands. Norrie wasn’t stripping her, after all - quite the opposite - but offering her protection and guidance as she had the whole time they’d known each other. Teaching her what to do through the doing of it. Just as she had with the job, with falling in love, and now with skating.
“Do you know how to put skates on?” Norrie asked, popping the soapy, sappy thought bubble and showering the girls in its remains.
“I hope so,” Lucy said, “They’re just shoes having an identity crisis, and I passed reception class. They’ll probably even go on the right feet.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Norrie muttered as she riffled through her bag, “Shoes with an identity crisis.” The smile on her face canceled out the bite that tried to add itself to her voice, and grew even further when she pulled two pairs of rollerskates from her bag.
The first pair were a familiar sight, and Norrie had been wearing them as she rounded up the session’s stragglers just an hour ago. They were predominantly Jacob’s shade of muted orange, the original white accents having faded to a dusty grey made darker by the presence of stripes Norrie had hand-drawn on the skates. The toe stop was shaped like a daisy drawn by a five year old, it was so worn down from use. The wheels, by contrast, had an even wear and shine, and Lucy had sat through enough of Norrie’s skate maintenance to know how much effort went into keeping them that way.
The second pair, however.
Lucy was almost too nervous to ask. She looked at Norrie through her fringe, eyes wide, lip bitten, voice hushed. “Are these for me?”
“If you want.” Norrie seemed just as anxious to answer. “You don’t have to take them, but if you want to skate, I want you to be able to skate. They were my second pair, but they’d be great for your first.”
The second pair of rollerskates were a well-loved navy blue, the colour darker and richer and better for all its use. Scuff marks bloomed on the slopes of the toes and the ankles, the most severe of which vanished behind mismatched patches.The wheels looked softer than Norrie’s, better suited for outdoor skating than speeding over polished floor boards, and the stop was worn down in ragged jags like it’d lost a fight with some bitumen. Objectively, they were well past their prime, but Lucy couldn’t imagine a more perfect pair.
Thank you was too big for her mouth in the moment, but “Will you help me put them on?” fit just fine. Lucy wriggled each foot into the correct skate as promised, and Norrie produced a metal hook to pull the laces tight before looping the excess through the eyelets. The boot barely shifted when she tentatively picked her feet off the ground, the wheels making them heavy and unfamiliar. They skimmed pleasantly across the stained carpet as Norrie efficiently corsetted her own skates.
They walked - Norrie leaning into each step, Lucy tottering and holding on with a vice-like grip - across the carpet to the rink. The transfer between surfaces had Lucy’s life flashing before her eyes. At least it ended well: on a date, in her girlfriend’s arms.
Lucy tried desperately to keep her feet beneath herself, though her skates seemed to have different plans. She flung one hand at the guardrail in a bid for safety. The mad wheels on her skates were competitive bidders. It was a close thing. “I’m going to fall over. I feel like a newborn foal,” she muttered.
“You can’t have one.”
“You’re lucky I like you.”
Norrie hummed, in sympathy or agreement Lucy wasn’t sure, and spun herself around to face Lucy. Carefully, she pulled Lucy’s hand from the guardrail and held it in her own, her thumb smoothing over trembling fingers, her skin warm where it wasn’t blocked by protective gear. The mischievous slant to her smile slipped into something softer, her teeth shining white-red-blue-green between her lips as the lights danced over them.
“Hi,” Norrie breathed.
“Hey.”
“How’re you going?”
“Scared shitless,” Lucy confessed, “But excited. I trust you.”
They smiled at each other, and Norrie pushed herself forward for a gentle, chaste kiss, and Lucy felt steadier in an instant.
“Bend your knees, angle your toes wide, and take little steps. Like a penguin.” Norrie nodded encouragingly as she skated backwards, gently pulling Lucy into motion, her weight staggering from foot to foot as she tried to follow the instructions.
“Oh, so I can’t have a foal, but I can be a penguin?” Lucy quickly found that trying to keep her balance was like trying to pick up a coin someone had glued to the ground: it was pretty obvious to everyone involved that it wasn’t going anywhere. But whenever she felt like she was going too far one way or another there was Norrie, nudging her upright.
“Them’s the breaks, Luce.”
“Bad time to mention breaks,” Lucy muttered. Norrie snorted, her fringe swooping in front of her eyes to offer a little privacy as she laughed. But the glint she got in her eyes when she laughed, really laughed, was too beautiful to miss, so Lucy reached out with greedy fingers to tuck Norrie’s hair behind her ear. Her weight shifted easily onto the opposite foot to inch closer, and suddenly the smile on Norrie’s face could put the sun to shame.
“Look at you,” she said, awed, and even though Lucy was just learning to skate she felt a rush of pride at the words. “I’m going to let go now, okay?”
“Don’t go far.”
“Never.”
Lucy spread her arms wide, her fingers dancing in the air above the railing, her knees bending to keep her balance in check. Each push into the opposite foot grew stronger, longer, surer, and it started to feel less like stammering across the floor and more like gliding. She figured out when to shorten her stride so she could make her way around the curve of the rink, and when she could straighten her leg to give herself more speed along the straight. All the while, she skated toward Norrie.
Norrie was easy to watch. Her body swayed as she skated backwards, leaning into the edge of her feet to propel herself, and she barely had to take her eyes off of Lucy to navigate the rink. When she took the corners she did so in crossovers, one foot lifting from the floor and sweeping around the other without even the slightest wobble for her troubles.
Once it stopped being so terrifying, Lucy’s focus shifted from her feet to the burn in her legs. Her thighs ached from the constant push; her glutes were screaming that she’d basically been doing a squat for the last 20 minutes and it would be nice to stop now, please.
Norrie, on the other hand, looked like she could do this for hours, and she’d already been on the rink during the last session of the night. The only indication that this was a workout for her, too, was the way sweat had mussed her hair, her skin glowing where the strobe lights caught on her sweat. Without breaking stride she picked up the hem of her shirt and brought it to her face. Lucy entirely missed what happened because she was distracted by the midriff suddenly on display, a strip of pale flesh framed by the muted orange and grey of her uniform and trimmed with the black of her bra.
Something went wrong with Lucy’s form - her foot slipped from under her, maybe, or she forgot to straighten one leg before bending the next knee, it didn’t matter - and she found herself falling, very, very slowly.
“Lucy!”
Norrie lurched forward to save her, and Lucy pulled her down with her. There was the dull thud on her arse saying hello to the ground, the weak clatter of plastic as her hand made contact with wood, the whine of her wheels zipping across the floor as her legs went out, and the two of them were mostly on the floor. Norrie wrapped her arms around Lucy and twisted so that Norrie’s back hit the ground first, and the two of them were officially a heap on the floor.
The fall didn’t really hurt - Norrie had taken so much care to prepare her, and Lucy had already been most of the way to the ground, and she’d expected it would happen anyway. The shock of it still pulled the breath from her lungs, and bubbling laughter was quick to replace it. She threaded her arm around Norrie’s neck to pull her even closer; Norrie cupped her face and pressed their foreheads together. The old, worn, dusty rollerskating rink floor was the most comfortable thing Lucy had ever lain on simply because she shared it with Norrie.
“Let’s stay like this forever, okay?”
“Yeah,” Norrie said, guiding the point of contact down their faces until their lips met, “I can work with that.”
And even if they didn’t stay there forever, they etched their names into the rink’s guardrails so that a part of them could.