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REO WAS GLAD some courses started early at university. That gave him a distraction he couldn't quite escape from, not if he wanted to keep the perfect grades that characterized him. But even if college was consuming as much of his time as he hoped it would, it hadn't pushed all his interest in skating to the side.
Instead of moving to the university dorms, he stayed at the place Anri had gotten for him and he stopped by the rink every few days. Reo wasn't sure what was the point of all that if not to torture himself, but it felt wrong not to be there, to at least see others skating like he used to. He couldn't help but look longingly at the building from the outside whenever he walked past it. It's been more than a month since the last time he skated, and he still heard Anri's voice saying 'I would have returned sooner'.
His talk with her had cut him deep. Reo could recognize that he felt a need to go back, but he was disguising his fear of doing so as caution. Even in moments of clarity, when he also acknowledged that he was afraid of falling back into the hole he had barely managed to crawl out of, he tried to rationalize that it was a natural reaction and he would go back when he felt like he could finally deal with it.
But he was an experienced skater, and he knew if he kept postponing it, his body would eventually forget the jumps and spins he had forced into his muscle memory. It gave him anxiety, too, to be taking so long to come up with a decision. Weirdly enough, it felt like the type of guilt that polluted his mind back when he first got into skating and struggled with balancing both school work and practice; he felt guilty for resting and not doing his work as soon as possible.
Similarly, no amount of reading could fully stop the noise in the back of his head now, the reminder. Did he want to give skating a second chance or not?
It was where he belonged, after all. It had given him a place to be and it left a mark on his identity. One that he mistakenly made the center of his entire existence instead of an aspect and nothing more.
Reo tried to refocus on his reading when the creak of a chair caught his attention.
"Hey, uhm, I'm Mei-Ling Wu, I train with Anri. I think I've seen you in the rink a few times before..."
The girl's voice caught him off guard, and he looked up from his notebook to find dark almond eyes staring at him. He recognized the skater who had, at some point, sat across from him. Luckily, they were at a café inside campus, and talking wasn't prohibited unlike in the library.
"Right, I'm Reo. I've seen you practice. You're great."
"Thanks," she beamed at him. Reo was under the impression that Mei-Ling had wanted to introduce herself from the moment she recognized him. "How come we haven't been introduced yet? Do you perhaps skate in a different category?"
