They were bathed in sunlight, basking together on a beach Freya had never seen with her own eyes. There were no clouds, just a perfect line dividing the azure of the sky from the cerulean of the gulf. The sand beneath them was as white as bone, darkening to slate where the surf retreated.

The dream was a piece of Dan, and she cast around, eager to feel his presence, but he was missing. Freya reached out for the body beside her, but it came apart in her hands like foam. She looked upward, searching for the sky, but it was missing, too, stolen by the void at the top of her dreams. In the distance, she heard thunder. There were clouds at the horizon. The booming grew closer, and she realized someone was knocking at the door.

Freya jolted awake and felt Dan shifting in her arms. Her eyes darted around the unfamiliar room. She couldn’t remember where she was. She had a wild thought it was Lassa on the other side of the door, pursued by the police. Freya held her breath for five knocks, hoping whoever it was would go away. But the knocker persisted.

A gloved hand appeared at the window and waved, sweeping its shadow across the room. Freya realized it was just the room service she’d ordered the night before. She’d forgotten all about it. Freya waved back before realizing the owner of the glove couldn’t see her.

“I’ll be right there!” she called out, and Dan rumbled something senseless in response.

Untangling herself, Freya threw on a bathrobe and darted over to get the door. She was stunned by the blast of freezing air. An old man in galoshes and a green blazer held a tray. There was a trail of deep footprints on the snowy path behind him.

“I’m so sorry!” Freya apologized.

“No trouble a’tall. Just a light dusting.” The old man grinned and tilted his head at the snow covering everything. Nearly a foot of snow had fallen overnight.

Freya thanked him again and accepted the covered tray. As the old man loped away, she heard the rumble of a plow truck in the distance. She brought the tray inside and set it in front of the fireplace, then rushed back to shut the door. The wind whooshed as the weather stripping sealed. She felt like she’d just closed an airlock.

Dan was still blinking and scrubbing his eyes with the hams of his thumbs. She wanted to tell him not to do that, it was bad for his corneas, but there was no need. He would hear her thinking it later.

“There’s so much snow!” Freya exclaimed. She brought Dan the other bathrobe. He climbed out of bed and moved to take the robe from her, but she held it out. She meant to put it on him.

Her eyes drifted between his legs. He was hard again. Did that always happen when men woke up? Looking a little sheepish, Dan held out his arms, and she slipped the bathrobe onto him. She tied the sash at the front and couldn’t help but slip her hand down and squeeze him through the robe. His eyebrows arched in surprise, but it was just a tease. She was too hungry to start fooling around again.

“They brought us breakfast?” Dan said as if he’d never considered that was possible. He joined Freya by the fire. She lifted the silver lid from the tray, releasing a plume of fragrant steam.

There were two fried eggs perched atop a spicy corned beef hash with ají de cocona, and a bowl of Greek yogurt and granola with cantaloupe and mangoes. The toast was a dense walnut-raisin pumpernickel with fresh butter in a little ceramic crock, and there was hot chocolate, very dark and not sweet at all. Each mug came with a big cube of marshmallow.

They sat close together in front of the fire as they ate, too focused on devouring everything in sight to speak. The silence grew deeper after they ate. Freya found Dan’s eyes. There were too many things unsaid between them, and neither knew where to begin.

“I wish we could run,” Dan said, and Freya nodded at once. That was exactly what they needed, exertion to clear their minds.

“I don’t think they have a gym here, but I’ll ask,” Freya offered. Dan watched every step as she walked across the room to call the concierge, and her cheeks warmed.

He can’t take his eyes off me. The feeling hummed in her so intensely she stuttered into the phone and had to repeat herself.

“Okay, so some bad news, they don’t have a fitness center. But if we’re up for digging the car out, there’s a farm near here that rents cross country skis.”

“Oh! That’s cool, but I don’t know how,” Dan said.

“It’s a perfect time to learn. It snowed thirteen inches last night.”

“That’s crazy. Is skiing as much of a workout as running, though? Aren’t you doing a lot of gliding?”

Freya snorted at Dan, and then put a hand over her mouth.

“You’ll see,” she promised.

* * *

Overnight, the world had been remade in grayscale. The trees were reduced to faint outlines embossed against a field of endless white. Drifting snow smoothed every contour of the landscape. Gray clouds stretched from horizon to horizon, warbling from light to dark like a wall that needed another coat of paint.

Through a thin patch, Freya made out the sun, pale and ringed by a faint corona. They didn’t see a drop of color until they reached Interstate 93 and joined the crimson train of brake lights crawling south.

Ski Hearth Farm was well prepared for the sky fall. The road to the big red barn that acted as the lodge had been freshly plowed. Inside, there were plenty of skis waxed and ready to go. There was a wood burning stove blazing inside the lodge, and Freya caught Dan shutting his eyes and inhaling deeply, a dreamy look on his face. He wasn’t the only one. Everyone was friendly and excited for the first snowfall of the season. Renting clothes and skis was no problem, but there weren’t any classes until noon.

“We could snowshoe for a bit, and then come back to take a class,” Freya suggested.

“Do we have to? How hard can it be?” Dan said.

Freya and the ski tech exchanged a look.

“You can swap to snowshoes anytime. The Orchard Loop is the best to learn on, and there’s a short uphill part,” the tech offered.

Dressed in rented ski clothes, they set off for the Orchard Loop, and Freya was certain they would be swapping to snowshoes when they finished their first loop. She’d forgotten how difficult it was to learn cross country. There were just so many spots where her body knew exactly how to do something, but her mouth didn’t know how to explain it.

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Dan had never surfed or skateboarded or even roller-skated, so just balancing was new and difficult for him. For the first half of the trail, he spent more time on the ground than upright.

The rental clothes didn’t fit quite right, and cold seeped in. With Dan floundering, they weren’t keeping a fast enough pace to stay warm. Freya’s eyes narrowed when they were passed by a pair of giggling girls who couldn’t have been older than ten.

“Let me know if you want to pack it in and snowshoe.”

Dan winced, and Freya wished she hadn’t suggested it.

“I’ll get it,” Dan said, trying for determined, but his frustration leaked through.

She wished for Unity, remembering the effortless way he’d shared his understanding of trigonometry. It didn’t come. Freya kept trying to remember what Randall had said when he’d taught her. She’d only been nine. She remembered him describing moving the poles like you were bowling, but when she tried to explain that to Dan, she found he’d never been bowling either.

Dan tried to bottle his irritation, but she knew him well enough to read the sharp intake of air through his nose, the slight pause before he rose from the snow. Freya tried to teach Dan the herringbone. As he attempted it, the tails of his skis got tangled, and he went down hard.

“FUCK!” Dan shouted into the snow.

There was a terrible danger she was going to start to laugh, and she had to fight to swallow it down. Dan’s gloves were scrambled at his bindings, like he wanted to tear his skis off and fling them into the trees.

“You okay?” Freya asked and, behind his goggles, she saw him shut his eyes tightly, as if he wanted to shout at her. She was ready to yell back, her patience close to gone. He flopped over on his back in a clatter of skis.

“Oh, my God,” he complained to the sky theatrically with his hands spread wide. “I’ve never eaten so much shit in my LIFE. This is impossible!” Freya smiled with relief. She was glad he made a joke out of it.

“You gonna cry, Gregulus?” Freya gave her best Vitko imitation.

“Maybe!” Dan shot back, jutting his bottom lip.

“Aww,” she said, prodding him in the butt with the tip of her ski. He grabbed it and dumped her into the snow with him.

“Oh! I’m not the only one!” he teased.

“Dan!” Freya shouted. She was livid.

“I’m literally dragging you down to my level,” he teased. She was too mad to get words out, and as she opened her mouth to yell, he scrambled over and kissed her.

“Ow!” She said as the frames of their goggles clacked together.

“You gonna cry, Jokela?”

“Maybe!”

Suddenly, it all seemed so stupid, and they giggled like mad, helping each other to their feet and brushing snow off each other.

“I’m sorry. I forgot how hard this was,” Freya said.

“I just suck,” Dan groaned.

“Me too,” she said, and he started to protest, but she lowered her eyes, and his eyebrows shot up in understanding.

“Oh, shit. Right here?”

“No! I mean, not unless you want frostbite.”

“Good point,” he replied. “That was so good,” Dan murmured, dropping his voice low even though they were standing alone in the middle of a field.

“Really?” she asked, suddenly feeling self-conscious.

“Definitely.”

Her mouth was a flat line of uncertainty. She’d been so worried all morning he’d only been humoring her. She felt like she’d gone too far and made it weird. Without Unity, she couldn’t know for sure.

“I’m so lucky to have you,” Dan said. The words have you rang in her ears, rising as tall as the trees around her. She searched for some jokey reply, but she abandoned it. She pulled up her goggles, and he did the same. They stared into each other’s eyes until the wind made them water.

They made it back to the beginning, and it wasn’t until they were halfway through the Indian River loop they could finally move faster than a walking pace. The clouds broke up overhead, and shafts of sunlight swept across the field. Through them, the sky was a brilliant blue.

Mount Lafayette and South Twin Mountain sat to the south. North of them, the farm sloped up, and the trails ran through wooded hills. By the end of the loop, they kept enough of a pace Freya couldn’t dwell in her thoughts. She started to enjoy herself.

“I’m getting it!” Dan exclaimed, and she grinned at him, remembering how he’d been ready to hurl his skis half an hour ago. She wondered if they should return, but there was something restless in the air, a tension that needed to be run out of them.

“Want to split up for a few loops?” Freya offered, worried his feelings would be hurt. But Dan was a runner, he understood.

“Yeah, this must be driving you nuts.”

“Not at all,” Freya said, and he gave her a dubious look. She held up her gloved palms and nodded. Why was she bothering to sugarcoat anything? He’d feel it all later.

“Catch me if you can,” Freya teased, and Dan smiled. He couldn’t.

Without him, Freya could finally open up and really move. She lapped Dan before he’d even finished the first loop, resisting the urge to heckle as she shot past. As hopeless as he looked now, when he got decent, she would be the one left behind. Dan was much taller and stronger.

The thought made her push harder, and she built into a smooth, gliding rhythm, climbing the ladder through the stages of pain until there was nothing but the sound of the snow underfoot and the air whipping past, clear and resonant.

She passed Dan again, his stride improving, and he didn’t wave to her. She glanced back, thinking he must be lost in his own world. But she saw the flicker of a smile through his exertion and grinned in response. The feeling lingered as she skied forward, a slow awareness that they were sharing more than the smile, their heartbeats had linked. It was the prelude to Unity. In her pocket, she felt the warmth of the Starball at work.

Everything else was synchronizing, but the feeling was fainter than normal, like an echo on her perception. Each of them felt a pang of fear that Unity was weakening, but then they remembered the fragile link they’d felt the night they were in separate houses and the watery quality of the link when Dan was at the diner.

They were just too far from each other, almost perfectly opposite on the trail. It felt very wrong to be apart, and she should never have split from him. Freya turned around and skied back in the other direction as fast as she could. With every stride, Unity bloomed.

They met in the center of the trail, like two waves crashing into each other, driving themselves to a height neither could reach on their own. Together, they were a tower that rose above the bramble of uncertainty, far above their fears. Freya and Dan clung to each other as the world fled and time grew narrow. There was nothing but them, no time but now.

I missed you, they thought independently, and there was a pang of inadequacy. Those words had been enough before but no longer. There was a thread of desynchronization in the thought, and they bounced the idea back and forth between them in glissando, trying to reconcile what they meant to what they said. I missed you melted into I missed us, into We missed us, into just US.

On the cold trail, they felt a deeper Unity than ever before. The fumbling connection they’d made before had just been a rehearsal for this performance, all their thoughts and feelings emerging simultaneously.

Their bodies slid apart, but they were still joined. Information flowed from Freya to Dan. They were like a jar of honey tilted to one side, slowly finding equilibrium as it was righted. Freya taught him how to ski as easily as if she were handing him a glass of water.

Now, they could move, racing together as easily as if they were two legs of the same body. Freya felt a selfish pang of theft. It had taken her years to get to this level, and he gained it effortlessly.

But that was a low thought. It could not survive at this altitude. There was no competition between their us, no thieving from oneself. One foot could not outrun the other.

They soared around the loop, lap after lap until their lungs burned and their hearts thundered, and they found the place they’d sought. One brilliant note of joy, sung from two mouths, a single mind. Dancing ahead of them was the glimmering promise they would be even closer.

At the end of the loop came the cadence. The sun broke free of the clouds and bathed them in blinding light as their heavy breathing began its diminuendo. They shut their eyes and soared together. They didn’t need to see, didn’t need anything but each other.

They were alive.