Mike felt lost the moment he walked into the Terwillegar Community Recreation Center. He missed VITAL and its simple layout, its familiar faces on every corner, its everything.

The Challenge booklet said it was for over 500 athletes from novice to senior, and they didn't exaggerate. Even with four arenas, the bloom of Canadian figure skating and their parents unnerved him. He looked more weird on his own here, than he did in the craft store last Christmas. 

Next time I'll wear 'my girlfriend is a figure skater' tee shirt.

He thought he glimpsed Daya once, jerked forward to get to her, and nearly tripped over a kid hotly telling his voluptuous mother that if it were an underrotation, then he'd be fine with it, but it wasn't. Wasn't! the kid emphasized, throwing Mike a dirty look. He assumed the kid hoped for a solicitous expression and shrugged guiltily. My girlfriend is a figure skater...

Her phone was probably off. He tried anyway before crawling into the arena slotted for the pairs' tests. Daya wasn't picking up. And the skaters didn't look like pairs. They looked like junior ladies.

Mike abandoned calling to frantically search the lists, the flowcharts and the updates. Who knew one had to have a flowchart to be a figure skating fan. Correction: a hard-core figure skating fan, because the arena was almost empty. If he missed Daya, she'd notice his absence for sure...

No, he was in the right place, just too early. Dhawan/Sorokin would compete here. And he would be here for it, if his nether regions had to freeze to the bleachers. Mike Williams, representing the Calgary Public Library... damn it.

He slanted his eyes to his right where two aunties settled in the choice spots behind the judges. Triple axel, lutz, technical score, they whispered to one another while the skaters waited for the scores. Oh, that scarlet with that pink looks horrid on her dress...

The lady closest to him, the one in a checkered wrap over a black turtleneck, scanned the arena between the test skates, her eyes slipping over him twice. He smiled, feeling like a kid caught pilfering Halloween candy ahead of time—my girlfriend is a figure skater, ma'am—and stared straight ahead at Zamboni clearing the ice for the pairs.

Despite the hypnotic way the metal hippo moved, Mike's heart raced. It had been so long since he'd seen Daya... 

The arena emptied again; the loudspeaker called the first group of senior pairs to warm up. Daya sprung on ice pummeling her thighs. She tossed him a smile, then her attention turned towards the guy who was holding her hand. So did Mike's.

The guy—Pavel Sorokin, presumably—blurred the line between Greek and Scandinavian pantheons. He had Thor's mighty hamstrings and Hermes' fleet calves; Loki's nimble fingers and Hephaestus' hammered span of shoulders; Frey's summer eyes and Apollo's wiry waist.

That mixed divine anatomy carried him over the expanse of the ice with a deceptive facility. Having had suffered an embarrassment after an embarrassment when skating, Mike wanted to weep watching Pavel glide hand in hand with Daya.

The ladies next to Mike came to life, whispering excitedly about the new pair and why they were so early in the warm-up groups. 

Daya again found his eyes across the arena before stepping through the gates, and Mike fashioned a goofy smile, despite the needle in his heart. He came to see Daya, and he'd just wasted the precious minutes of the warm-up on studying her blond partner.

The two pairs that came before Dhawan/Sorokin could have sprouted golden wings and took off to circle under the ceiling beams, and he wouldn't have cared one whit. 

And here she was out again, in front of him, an inseparable entity with Pavel. Her glide matched his, his mohawk anticipated hers, blade to blade, arm in arm. 

Instead of baggy warm-up jerseys stretch fabric hugged the two perfect bodies. Hers, electric blue, with a black corsage slashed with silver. His, black with a blue V hinting at a historically inaccurate yet romantic collar. Both had more crystals sprinkled on than a Tim Horton's vanilla dip donut.

Mike fidgeted in his seat as Daya skated to the center of the rink, and leaned into Pavel's embrace, hands pressed to her chest, eyes closed. As the music started, she took off, first with her back to Pavel, then spinning to extend her expecting arms towards him. He chased her, as if nothing else in the world mattered. Their fingertips met, then their hands.

The judges were probably watching the footwork too, but Mike could not take his eyes away from the intertwining hands, pale and rich brown. Daya's face looked ecstatic then regretful when the music tore her away from that blasted palm to palm contact.

Her blond god-prince-partner did not go far. No, how could he! An invisible hand lifted both of them in the air and set them back down, the two matching feathers. The double axel she was texting about twenty times...

Mike pressed his bottom into the seat. Nobody warned him that sitting would become uncomfortable after loosing thirty pounds. But he should have guessed that there would be less cushioning... and Pavel reminded him of his once-lover. Not in appearance, in the emotional energy he projected outward: light as a feather, eager to please, futile to resist when his attention drifted to you.

Daya's lithe frame cleaved to Pavel for a moment before she miraculously flew above the blond head spinning in the air to land in the waiting arms. That would be the triple twist, Mike told himself through the grinding sound his teeth made.

Pavel's hands flowed down her waist in a fluid and familiar fashion.

Before Mike could take in a deep breath to calm himself, Daya was draping Pavel's sparkling shoulders, mere meters away from his face. Despite the proximity, she didn't spare a glance to the bleachers. 

"They don't give points for that, I guess..." Mike thought sourly.

Every fraction of a second that she could, Cinderella maintained eye contact with her green-eyed prince. To be fair, that may have been for safety reasons, given that the prince was rotating on the ice, and she was swirling around the column of his neck like a sable boa.

Why did they call it a lasso lift? If it were a lasso, she should have strangled the lifting partner with one fighting move of her thighs.

Mike's hands shook when he remembered how her thighs felt when she sat in his lap, so he clutched them together, suppressing the ache. Except, there was more than one thing that was aching.

"They're stunning together..." the Checkered Wrap shared with her friend in a whisper loud enough for Mike to overhear. It pounded on his strained nerves.

"Uh-huh, very pretty. The skating is nice too. If they don't foul up in the free, they might get into the Nationals."

Nice? His soul was being sliced into bleeding ribbons, and they thought it was nice?!

"Isn't Dhawan too old to switch to pairs though? Did they say twenty-four?"

"Yes, but look at Savchenko, an Olympic gold at thirty-four..."

"I won't say they're Olympic quality. That landing was shaky."

Mike would have fixed his chatty neighbors with a death glare, but he couldn't look away from Pavel lowering Daya on the ice, sitting up with an unnaturally straight back, showing off to the whole world Daya's arching body. One circle. Two. Three. Enough. Enough already...

Alas, there still was a combo pair spin for them to survive.

The two on the ice, beautiful together. Him, on the firm bench, deafened by the blades shaving the ice right next to him. 

His fingers lifted to his brow on their own volition, but he peeked through that grid to watch the embraces in front of him. Each pose should have been as awkward as Kama Sutra's suggestions, but Pavel and Daya flowed through it.

Mike wished he didn't think about Kama Sutra. The spinning figurines in a music box was by far a more apt comparison. A nice Victorian music box with porcelain figurines, devoid of sensuality.

The sweet fairy tale music washed over him and swept Daya and Pavel into the step sequence to finish the program. That's it. His three and a half minutes stay in the Gehenna was over. He could go now, drink some water and... and eat something sweet.

Daya pressed her face into Pavel's rapidly expanding and contracting chest before he spun her out for a bow to the row of seats opposite Mike, then facing him... he smiled to cover up his shredded nerves.

The Checkered Wrap and her ally clapped in delight. He jerked out of his stupor, joining in too late, so his clapping made a lonely sound all on its own.

Pavel's arm found its way back to Daya's shoulders. He said something with a white flash of teeth. Her chin tilted up toward his smiling face, toward something he was yammering into her ear on the way to the gate. 

The next pair was out, trying not to look in Dhawan/Sorokin's direction.

She doesn't see me, Mike thought, following the next competitors' suit for entirely different reasons. She linked to Pavel, plugged into him to shine like a string of Christmas lights.

Why did she want him there? It was abundantly clear she had everything in Pavel, her soulmate, a man barely even detachable from her... what did she need a plump librarian for?

His thoughts scattered like beads from a broken pearl necklace, as Mike pushed up to his feet. 

That daze... the clenching stomach... the dry throat—more things they didn't talk much about, those dips in blood sugar when one stayed in the caloric deficit for long. His shivering intensified, despite him zipping up his jacket. He had to get out of here; he wasn't some chickadee to perch for hours in the cold.

He needed warm food, something low on nutrients and high on feel-happy. Today was a cheat day, no questions about it. Mike excuse-me'd his way past the whispering ladies and got the hell out of the Terwillegar's Temple of Public Fitness.

***

While he drove back to the hotel, the familiar frilly red letters and blue waves logo caught his eye. It was a sign, all right. 

Before his parents started fighting, Boston Pizza was a place to go for lunch on Saturdays. He fought his way to the turning lane and pulled the hood on against the chilly wind. His back, legs and hand felt stiff, his stomach ached from hunger. 

He dove into the warm interior and shut his eyes for a minute. The aroma of fried dough, roasted garlic and innocent naughtiness seeped through the pores, releasing the lock in his joints, bringing a smile to his lips. Another deep breath, and the shivers disappeared. 

He peered around, looking for a table. The interior was dim enough to see the fake candles twinkling. They reflected in the mirror behind the bar counter and the laminated menus. A large family passed the bread rolls around; the sight made his mouth water, and his stomach clench again, causing a spell of queasiness.

At a separate table, a young mother made scary eyes at two girls with identical blonde pig-tails. They fearlessly grinned with gap-toothed mouths and slithered down their chairs to disappear and reappear above the tabletop. How his mother used to roll her eyes when his dad insisted on the Hawaiian pizza, an insult to the Roman Empire... she rolled them differently after the divorce.

Mike's voice had the same tremble as his hands when he said "the Hawaiian" to his waiter. He took his order and collected a half-finished coloring sheet and broken crayons from the checkered tablecloth. Ah, yes, nothing had changed since the last time he had been to BP, back in... back in the happy times.

The pizza was the same, that's for sure. Mike picked out the scents of dry thyme, basil and fennel, nothing as fancy as in the fancy places, but distinct. Ham and pineapple bits lay encrusted in the bubbling cheese, fighting over if tangy or salty goes better with hot cheese. Mike made peace by taking a big bite to mix the flavors in his mouth. The invisible tomato sauce soaked the crust, so the warm mass of cheese slipped off it.

This wouldn't be nearly as good reheated, Mike decided after two slices, and the hotel had breakfast. Not that corn flakes were as good as pizza, but hey, the cheat day was today, so he might as well enjoy it to the fullest.

And full he was... the food sat heavily in his roiling stomach while he drove. The dough expanded, filling his gut with a hardening mass like concrete. The tendrils of spoiled fatty fumes tickled the back of his throat. The cheese tasted foul coming back up to his chest.

The only saving grace was that he did not throw up in the hotel's lobby in public.

He threw up in the privacy of his room's bathroom. He'd just ate from a checkered tablecloth, now he tossed the food out while staring at the checkered floor tiles. Again and again, each trip to the bowl—the first clue that he wasn't just being punished for his gluttony.

By four-thirty in the morning, he crawled downstairs and stared at the sleepy face of the night shift teen. The teen could have passed for something dug up from the crypts over the Halloween, and yet he winced at the sight of Mike. "Man, are you okay? There is a walk-in clinic a few blocks away."

"Stomach flu," Mike lied in a monotone. No fluids came out of Mike's mouth, but the teen still shuffled uncomfortably to create as much distance as he could while still doing his job. Well, keeping it down was an achievement nonetheless, because the last glass of water Mike drank didn't pause in his stomach for five minutes, and hurt like hell on the way up.

"I'm driving home before I pass out." At this hour he could stop on the highway when he had to. There was no question of spending a day in the frigid arena, with a looming dread of the horrid virus tearing his insides apart. With his rotten luck, he'd shape-shift into the Great Vomit Dragon in the middle of Daya's performance.

***

After an interminable drive from Edmonton to Calgary, Mike buzzed at Carol's door. Given that it was only half-past eight in the morning, she came to the door fast enough, in a cacophony of barks. The frown she was wearing in a combo with a hair wrap and a housecoat, changed to alarm. 

"Michael! Good Lord, what happened? You look like a Tim Burton's movie extra."

"I want to pick up my dog..." Mike mumbled, picking Toby out of the vortex of white fur created by Carol's two toy dogs. "I'll call in sick, and go see a doctor about this plague or whatever it is... sorry. I've been scaring myself with thinking about dysentery during WWI for the last ten hours. I'm... I'm sick." 

"And Daya?"

He hung his head. Daya had her all-important test skate. The free program. She didn't need to see him like that, if she needed to see him at all.

Carol drew the magenta house coat closer around her. Somewhere from the depth of the house, her husband asked if something was the matter. She shushed him, then turned back to Mike. "I can watch Toby for a few more days, it's no problem. He's a sweet boy."

Mike just shook his head, his energy too low to bother with words. He limped back to the car, bending under Toby's miniscule weight, making no efforts to fight off the pink cheese-grater of a tongue licking his face. 

He had a sinking feeling he'll need the dog as much as medicine before he could gather up his wits to phone Daya.

"Michael," Carol called after him, "phone me if you need help." 

He crawled back into the car and made a run for home.