"Shanti!" Daya yelled the moment she stepped over the threshold. "Shanti, do you have a pair of sneakers with white soles? For the gym?"

Shanti looked up from a paperback in her lap. Her feet rested in a shallow steaming basin. The kids were staying overnight at Sameer's place, so she was intruding on an impromptu me-time. 

She took the bubbliness down a notch. "Oh, I'm sorry."

"It's okay. And I have thirty-something pumps, four pairs of sensible work shoes and two dozen sandals, some of them even matching. But gym stuff... unless you want it baby-sized, you're out of luck. You should have brought your own. I can't believe you thought you could go for a week without a gym. You should have asked me. I would have told you, 'no, Daya, not gonna happen.'"

Daya sat cross-legged on the floor by Shanti's armchair. "I can take a week off gym once in a while. It's just something came up, and I wanted to practice for it."

On the cover of Shanti's book, a couple wrapped each-other in a passionate kiss, and a curly font along the bottom said Passionate. Shanti's thumb covered the rest of the title, but Daya figured that the book had nothing to do with accounting.

"Pavel wants to do a dry run for pairs. It's crazy, but—"

"I'm intrigued, but I don't follow," Shanti interrupted. "Pavel who? Wants to do what?"

Daya backtracked, explaining Sorokin, his minuscule role in her life to date, and his last-kick-at-the-can plan.

"Wait a minute. I thought you wanted to go small and local in Calgary?"

"I still do," Daya muttered to her sneakers. She felt like a naughty child asking for candy after she had already had had ice cream. "But there is no harm in having a Plan B, you know? Besides, it probably won't work. I haven't done anything with a partner in forever, and Pavel is dreaming in technicolor, and... maybe you're right, I should call him and say it's off. No reason to lead him by the nose if I am not truly invested and—"

"I didn't say you should not go," Shanti said. "It's just you are so excited that someone appreciates you, that I am afraid you'll build a fairy tale around it. Like that time with India. It ended up in tears."

Daya sighed. "I would have qualified for the international competitions if I had switched the flag. But it is in the past, and I know our family could never have afforded it." 

"Sorry to bring it up, Daya, but it's relevant."

Shanti opened her book again where her forefinger saved her place. The full title revealed itself. Passionate Snare. 

How appropriate, Daya thought.

"So go and try out with Pavel the Cool Guy, just don't expect miracles." 

Daya suspected that Shanti used that same tone of voice on the twins. 

"I'm too old to believe in miracles." If only! The cloud castle in the back of her mind was already sprouting turrets and unfurling banners.

"What did I tell you about calling yourself old? Now go buy yourself a pair of gym shoes. Go, go, before your fiddling gives me a nervous tick."

Shanti was right: despite making conscious efforts to simmer down, Daya bristled with energy. She jumped up and dashed out of the house like a rocket-propelled grenade.

***

Pavel was half an hour early for their meet up. Daya knew that because she was an hour early. 

She stretched and jogged to keep the jitters down, and have her body warm and supple enough to dance. But the jitters came back the moment she saw Pavel's trim figure.

He walked in a bubble of confidence. It emanated from the frost-blush on his cheeks, his ready smile and the beautifully straight back. His shoulders announced to the world that no worry had power to bend him. 

And his energy projected outwards too, inducing the same belief in the onlookers. He was like an inverse energy vampire. The closer she'd come to him, the harder it would be to pull away from that source of here I am! sass.

Pavel gave her a cursory hug before vaulting on the treadmill. They had time to partner-stretch too before the booking, and Daya finally felt like her old self again, when the last inches of stiffness got squeezed out of her legs.

The small choreo room with a mirror wall and a barre opened up, and Pavel sauntered in to set up a Latin rhythm mix on the speakers from his cell. "Show time, Daya."

His musicality was not unexpected, but in her time away from the figure skating fold, she didn't meet many consummate dancers. Men who could dance were becoming scarce in the general population, a sad fact.

But, she did not have time for reflections, giving herself to the joy of having each movement anticipated by her partner and the perennial need to show off for one another.

Latin dance was not his strongest, she judged, noticing the residual stiffness in the hip and knee, but his hands were steady and precise, if not passionate. She let her hands do the talking, fueled by the genetic memory of the temple dancing, but not profaning the mudras.

The last bits of apprehension fell from her soul. Whether or not their trial came to anything, she was having fun.

He swung her upward, bringing her in front of him, parallel to the floor. This was not just precise, it was exactly as playful as the music demanded, timed just right. Her body snapped straight in response, toes pointed, hands outstretched. 

The dance lift lasted less time than he'd have to hold her on ice, and it would not count for more than a part of a choreo-sequence between the money-making over-the-head lifts, but this was what music dictated right there and then.

"A moment of truth?" he asked, setting her down after an extra whirl. He pointed to the corner lined with the mats.

She nodded. "From axel?"

He turned off the music, and started backing away to let her step into the lift, with an old-school allez as an invitation.

"Up!" she said, speeding towards him. And up she went with reassuring ease, his hands not squeezing the life out of her under the armpits but supporting her. "Well, we might eke out a group one," she conceded. "Providing we can repeat it with the skates on."

He wiggled his eyebrows. "You think?"

As they tried a couple more lift positions from the lower tiers, then went up in difficulty, she loved how truly his hand linked with hers when they switched position up in the air, how simple it was to hold herself up on his unwavering shoulder.

This reassuring presence would have been welcome not just in dancing, she realized as she hovered between the floor and the ceiling, but in her private life too.

She was tired of the unanchored shaky state of life where she never felt anything through to the end, and all her desires dissipated into nothingness like mist in a river valley.

Was one excluding the other? Pavel and Ontario, Mike and Alberta?

Pavel rotated on the spot, holding her up like a platter. "Switch position or too chicken?"

"Not today."

Did she have a toehold on either? Or was it all up in the air? Working with Pavel could end up in a lot of hard work to delay facing the inevitable. And was she anything but busy work for Mike, sort of like that LEGO model?

She cartwheeled through the air to dismount, touching down on one foot, and stepped back again. Her memory revived the thrill of being carried over ice at a speed of a breathless run, and the incredible span of the jumps, the arrow from the bow feel... when things went right.

"Daya," Pavel called out, interrupting her reverie. "What do you think?"

"I'm rusty," she said honestly, "and the skill erasure is real."

He guffawed. "That explains the blissful smile on your face."

Blissful it might have been, but there were a million things they didn't try yet. "Lifts weren't terrible. But there're throws, and side-by-side work, and the spins. And the off-ice is—"

"Different from being on the ice, and we need to do the qualifiers, meet the testing standard, and yada-yada-yada. Understood. But we'll have breathing room in pairs. If we can't qualify this year, there's the next." His speech lost its pathos by that last sentence, but he waved it off. "Stop being such a scaredy cat. It was good. Come on, admit it! Just say 'it was good'."

Maybe it was because his lower brow made his eyes look that much more intense, or because of his fervor, or maybe because it was simply true, but Daya said it: "It was good."

"And... Don't add 'but' now!" Pavel pressed the finger to her lips for a moment. "You're going back to Calgary, fine. Cool down, think it over. I'll try out some more, but if I get a commitment from you, I'm cool to bring you before Irina Andrevna's august eyes."

"I'll get back to you the second I decide. I'll buy as much ice time as I can afford in January and see if I can stabilize my doubles if I can find a coach to work with."

"Now you're thinking!" He gave her a thumbs up, then gathered his hoodie and backpack. "Don't be a stranger and say hi to all the cowboys for me."

She stayed in the gym for a little longer, working off the spell. Did she want to set off on the wild unicorn chase?

Fresh starts were becoming harder and harder every time, and the Calgary gig with VITAL was decent. Singles, skating for India, pairs, singles... each one of those was a bright hope once that ended in failure. 

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. 

She did not know if she failed better, but fail she did every time she tried.

And there was Mike Wilson to consider... and could she still land a triple salchow from a throw?

On and on her mind circled, as she ran to nowhere fast on the treadmill.