Jason’s eyes catch the glow, then flick to my face. The cab rocks through standing water; wiper blades do their anxious metronome. I picture Nolan in his glass office, city lights knifing up around him, looking at a spreadsheet with our names under a column labeledRisk.
I should answer. I always answer. That’s the job: show up, even when the storm is inside the car and has my pulse.
“Take it,” Jason says, low—he can read the name upside down and knows exactly how many zeroes come with it.
The driver brakes to avoid a hydroplaning sedan, and my body leans—toward the screen, toward Jason, toward a decision I’ll have to live with when the heater isn’t fogging my judgment. For one suspended second, I choose not to be a chess piece on someone else’s board.
I hitSilence. The call vanishes, leaving the echo of its importance behind. A red missed-call badge blooms like a wound.
“Riley,” Jason says—warning and worry tangled.
“I know.” I shove the phone back into my pocket where it burns and pretend I’m proud of myself for choosing the moment over the man who signs my checks. “He can wait five minutes.”
“Blackwood doesn’t wait,” Jason says. It isn’t criticism; it’s weather. “He starts counting.”
I stare at the blurred smear of taillights and ask myself who I’m protecting—my job, my heart, Jason’s reputation. If I answer in front of him, I’m the trainer who can’t draw boundaries. If I ignore it, I’m the employee who goes rogue. There’s no clean square to stand on, so I do what I always do: plant my feet on the least slippery one and pray friction shows up.
“Look at me,” Jason says, and I almost don’t because that used to be step one toward losing an hour and my good sense. I do anyway. His eyes are steady—the blue of cold water that still knows how to hold. “You don’t have to prove anything to me. Answer him next time.”
“Next time,” I echo, tasting guilt like pennies. The phone starts vibrating again. Same name. Same gravity. My thumb hovers. I feel Jason go still beside me, a heat I can measure without touching. I pressSilencea second time.
He exhales, a sound between acceptance andyou’re going to hate that later. He isn’t wrong. I’m already writing the email in my head:Apologies, Mr. Blackwood. We were in transit during inclement weather; safety first.I will not add:I didn’t want him to hear me say your name.
“Why does it feel like I just chose you over my career?” I ask, mostly to the fogged window. The question hangs ugly in the cab’s hot breath.
Jason flinches like I hit him. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make me the excuse.” He swallows. “If you pick me—” A humorless breath. “—pick me. If you pick the job, pick it. I can take losing to work. I can’t take being your alibi.”
The words land right where Sophie warned me they would. I tuck them away, not because I don’t feel them, but because I can’t address them without setting something on fire in a moving vehicle. “We’re not picking anything,” I say, too bright. “We’re surviving a rainstorm.”
The driver chuckles at something on the radio and mutters, “Welcome to married life,” to the windshield. I let the joke pass through me and out again, like weather.
My phone goes silent, then dings—a voicemail. The weight of it shifts in my pocket like a small stone I’m choosing to carry instead of throw.
I tell myself I’ll call back from the lobby. I tell myself I’ll call back the second we hit carpet and I can see straight. I tell myself a lot of things that sound like plans and feel like hope.
“Hotel’s up in two blocks,” the driver announces. “Hold on, love birds.”
“We’re not—” I start, and bite it off. The cab’s tires hiss. The wipers climb the glass. The decision I made stares back at me from the black screen like a reflection I don’t recognize.
The driver downshifts into a pond masquerading as an intersection. The tires skim, catch, then let go entirely. The cab slews sideways like a fish trying to jump its own stream.
“Hold on,” the driver barks.
There’s nothing to hold onto. The world yawns—the wet street, the smear of brake lights, the stupid bobblehead on the dash that nods like it knew this was coming. My stomach drops hard enough to make space for fear to step in wearing cleats.
The rear end swings and suddenly a row of horn-blaring cars is where empty road used to be. Metal screams somewhere close; a truck’s grill looms. Time stutters, stretching thin and mean.
Jason’s hand finds my waist on instinct, a clamp of heat and command. He hauls me toward him as the cab fishtails the other way, and I crash into his chest with a sound I don’t recognize asmine. He is brick and breath and the fast drum under my ear that says he’s not scared; he’s furious at physics.
“Riley,” he says, like a swear and a promise.
“Don’t—” I start, but I’m already gripping his T-shirt with both hands because the belt bites and the window rushes close and his body is an answer my nerves choose without consulting policy.
The driver saws the wheel; the taxi shudders. Horns bay. Light skids across wet glass, bleaching the world to a single frantic white. We slide—right, left—then snap straight so abruptly my teeth click. My vision fuzzes, then sharpens too much: raindrops needle the streetlights into starbursts; the mirror shakes; Jason’s thumb digs into the notch of my hip like he’s trying to anchor us to the planet.
