Page 21 of The Lies We Play

I am beginning to realize she is very good.

“Yes,” I say.

She waits.

The air shifts again, cool against the back of my neck.

“I love it,” I admit.

Her face softens, but only a little. She will not rescue me from my own answer.

“Why?”

I look out over the park.

Because there is a second before a play breaks when everything becomes honest. Because a forward can lie with his eyes, his shoulders, his stick, but his skates always confess. Because the ice tells the truth faster than people do.

“Because it’s the one thing I do where my body and my head are in the same sentence,” I admit. “Most of the time, my body knows something is happening, and my head is half a second behind. On the ice, they arrive together.”

“You might teach me to like hockey,” she says and then looks away first, toward the river, and I understand that she has heard more than I meant to say.

For a minute, neither of us speaks.

Livia tucks one sleeve-covered hand under the other arm.

“What about you?” I ask.

“What about me?”

“What do you do, Livia Sabine?”

Her mouth opens. Then closes.

“I go to Columbia,” she says. “Art History and Chemistry.”

“Those are two things.”

“They’re related.”

“In what universe?”

“In the universe where you want to know whether a painting is a forgery, and the only way to know is to ask the canvas, and the canvas only talks to chemists.”

Then, before I can say anything, she asks, “How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

She nods. “Acceptable.”

“Acceptable for what?”

She smiles.

She lets it happen this time. Full. Wide. Not for half a second, not buried, but the whole smile arriving and settling on her face like she’s done pretending she’s not having a good time.

“For sharing a roof,” she says.

“Right.”