"One more small confession," she said.
"Yeah?"
"I can stop going backward. I just don't always want to. Some things are prettier in reverse. Like that first lap. Like you, wobbling toward the rail. Like the way the whole night looked in the mirror ball—broken into pieces that still made a whole."
Jake's eyes were bright in the cold.
"Then we'll keep both directions," he said. "Forward for the days. Backward for the songs. Sideways for the kid when he zooms through."
She rose on her toes and kissed him, soft and sure, nothing explicit, everything clear.
Somewhere a car passed, radio leaking a carol through a cracked window into the white air. They did not need the song to know what night it echoed. They had the rink in their bones. They had the laugh from the fall. They had the kid's cocoa mustache memory. They had each other, which was never a prize handed out at closing and always a practice renewed under whatever lights were available.