“And I won’t let you ruin yourself to prove you can protect me,” she says, softer but not gentler. “Pick a different win.”
I lean in without meaning to. “Say you don’t want me there,” I tell her, raw. “Say you don’t want me to try.”
Her throat works. For a second the fight drops and I see the night, the cool cloth, the way she said I didn’t hate you. Then the walls come back. “I want you healthy,” she repeats. “And I want me employed.”
“Not an answer,” I say. The edge in my voice is a cut I almost aim at myself.
We’re close enough that I can count the flecks in her eyes. Her breath lifts a piece of hair at my cheek. The world narrows to the inches of air I’m not allowed to cross and the words we keep choosing instead of the ones we mean.
“Get out of the camera lane,” she whispers. “If you want to talk, find me where we won’t both pay for it.”
“Where’s that?” I ask, because it feels like there isn’t a square foot of this city that won’t charge us admission.
She glances at the red EXIT sign buzzing like a halo. “Nowhere I can say out loud,” she answers, and tries to step around me.
I don’t move. Not yet. The need to make her hear me is taller than the rules for exactly one more heartbeat.
“Move,” she says, and I should. I don’t. The part of me that knows better is on break.
“You want truths?” I hear myself say. “Here’s one: I didn’t call because I didn’t know how to be the thing you needed and the thing the world kept paying me to be. And every time I tried to pick, the noise won.” The words feel like I’m pulling stitches with my teeth. “I thought if I stayed quiet, I’d protect you from the blast radius. Turns out silence is just a different bomb.”
Her eyes flash and then do something worse—they soften with recognition. “You ghosted me,” she says, not yelling, which somehow hurts more. “You told me you cared and then you disappeared into flights and cameras and the story of yourself, and you let me feel crazy for wanting more than being a secret in your hallway.”
“I know,” I say, throat raw. “I left you to do the damage control I caused. I let strangers write the parts of us that had my name on them.” I swallow the acid of it. “I was a coward.”
She blinks hard, chin tipping like she’s keeping water from spilling. “And you want a medal for noticing?”
“No,” I say, fast. “I want—” Not a second chance; that sounds like a coupon I don’t deserve. “I want to make it right in the only currency I’ve got: action. Boundaries with media. With teammates. With myself.” I gesture at my taped wrist, at the corridor we’re hiding in. “I choose you over noise. I choose smart over spectacle. I choose the bench when you say bench. I should’ve said it then; I’m saying it now.”
She waits for the catch, because there’s always been one with me. “Words are easy,” she says, a whisper with teeth. “You talklike the headline you think I want. Then you go do the other thing.”
“I did,” I admit. “Until last night.” Fever. Cool cloth. Her voice threading me back into my body. “You said you didn’t hate me. You said you were protecting yourself.” My mouth twists. “I kept thinking that if I loved you quiet enough, the world wouldn’t hear it and eat you for it.”
“Loving me quiet erased me,” she says, and there it is—the core I’ve been circling too scared to look at. “I want loud. I want deliberate. I want to be chosen in the daylight, not because you’re drowning but because you can swim.”
I let it land. “Okay,” I say, because there isn’t a counter-argument that isn’t a lie. “Then watch me do it. Not today on the ice where it turns into a circus. Not on a feed where someone will slice it into content. Here. In the choices.”
“Choices like not trying to fight a child because he learned a new insult?” she says, one brow up.
“Yeah,” I say. “Like that. And choices like not touching your face on a bench even if all I can think about is how you looked when you said my name in the dark.” The admission scrapes and calms at once. “I’m not good at this. I want to be.”
Her shoulders loosen a fraction. “I don’t want you to be good at grand gestures,” she says, and the relief in my chest is ridiculous. “I want you to be good at boring. At consistent. At the non-headlines.”
“I can do boring,” I say, meaning it so hard it sounds strange in my mouth. “I can do consistent. I can do you not being collateral.”
She studies me like she’s testing a stitch. “Then start by walking away right now,” she says. “We’re in camera range for another ten feet, and I can’t afford another angle.”
There’s the door she holds open for me—the responsible one, the smart one, the one I promised to choose. I nod. I stepsideways so she can pass. She does, brushing my jersey with her shoulder, looking straight ahead like she can make a path with her eyes.
We get two steps. Maybe three.
Then the quiet between us roars with everything we just pulled into the light and everything we didn’t, and the gravity I’ve been white-knuckling since the minute I saw her in the damn training room snaps the line.
It happens in the space after the nod, in the gravity that lives between two people who have run out of places to stash the truth. I don’t decide. I break.
One step and she’s in my hands—forearms, then shoulders—heat through cotton, heartbeat under my palms punching a rhythm I already know.
“Jason,” she says, a warning, a lifeline, a no that remembers yes.
