“Well . . .” What can I say that won’t make me sound like I’m in love with him? Because, though I know I’m not, I feel elements of it when we’re dancing: the closeness, the opening, the freedom of it, without all of the doubt and comedown. “At first, I was thinking about the steps, but then I wasn’t, it just . . . we were moving together and it felt, not like we were one body exactly, but like we were in this perfect tandem. It felt freeing, it took me out of my head, like suddenly I had no past and no future. Just here and now with you and the music connecting us at a thousand tiny points.”

“Liz,” he says, a departure from my nickname, but still not, of course, my name, “that’s beautiful.”

“I’ve never felt anything quite like that.” I’m breathless now, it’s been so long since I spoke to anyone like this. I say the words before I can get self-conscious about how it all sounds. “Not with another person, anyway. Only on the mountain.”

I let it hang there for a moment, as though it might explain itself, deciding he might just take it as some sort of metaphor. His hand moves from my knee, his fingers trace the inside of my thigh.

“What mountain?” he finally asks.

“Before I came here. In my old life, that is, I was really into skiing,” I say, telling him, not telling him.

“Yeah? I’ve never been skiing. I bet you were great at it.”

“Pretty much.” I nod, and he laughs.

Before I came here, I didn’t exist outside of skiing, and not talking about it is more difficult than I’d imagined. And if I could in this moment, I’d fold myself into G. He feels safe. He’s stroking my thigh, but it feels more affectionate than sexual, or it feels both. It feels intimate. He’s my coach, and coaches are our confessors, the holders of safe spaces and secrets.

“Tiger, that explains a lot about you,” he says. “I should have known I was in the presence of greatness.” I feel something that’s been deadened in my chest come back to life a little. I do want him to know I’m great, or at least that I was. “Why’d you quit?”

“I got injured.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. So when you say dancing reminds you of the mountain, I’m curious, what does that mean?”

I shrug. The panacea of dancing with him is wearing off and I am suddenly aware that I have made myself vulnerable by telling him so much already. My sweat has turned cold on my skin. I refill my whiskey glass without asking and take a long sip. He smiles.

“Back in the vault, huh?”

“What?”