I don’t give myself time to translate it. I lower my mouth to hers like an apology and a dare.
The kiss is not careful. It is years of shut doors and swallowed sentences and every time I chose quiet over her thrown against cinderblock. She gasps—shock or anger or both—and I take that too. Gentle for half a breath, then wrecked, then gentler again because I can learn in real time with her hands fisted in my jersey.
She tastes like mint and fight. Her fingers spread, then push, then curl, as if her body is running the same calculus as mine—consequences, cameras, cost. The corridor hums. Somewhere a compressor kicks on. My brain should be screaming aboutoptics; it only knows the shape of her mouth and the way she answers like she’s been starving and hates that I know it.
For a heartbeat we remember exactly how to do this—the angle we never had to think about, the sound she makes when I breathe her name into the kiss, the way she rises on her toes like she’s closing distance in a race she swore she’d never run again.
Then she inhales sharp and that sound is not memory—it’s self-rescue. Her hands flatten hard against my chest and shove. I stumble back a half step, heel skidding on tile. The break in contact is a slap and a blessing. Air finds my lungs like it’s been shut out for months.
Her eyes are wide, furious, bright with something that might be fear and might be grief and might be the exact line between them. “No,” she says, voice shredded. “Not like this. Not here.” Her fingers shake once before she curls them into fists. “I told you—camera lane.”
I drag a hand over my mouth, breath ragged, every nerve buzzing like the scoreboard just lit me up. “Riley?—”
“Don’t.” She steps around me, clean as a deke, putting cinderblock between us like it was built for this. “You don’t get to make me the story because you can’t hold your own feelings for thirty seconds.” Each word lands precise, a stitch set with steady hands. “You don’t get to fix a year with a hallway.”
I deserve that. I deserve worse. “I’m—” Sorry is a small word for a big mess. It dies on my tongue.
She shakes her head like she can dislodge whatever part of the kiss is still clinging. “You want to prove something? Prove boring. Prove consistent. Prove you can walk away when the right choice is walking away.” The last sentence fractures; she swallows it whole.
Down the corridor, a door opens on a burst of voices. The echo reminds us both where we are. She glances at the red EXITglow, at the CCTV bubble in the ceiling, at my mouth like it betrayed her.
“Don’t follow me,” she says, and it’s not punishment. It’s triage.
She turns and bolts—ponytail snapping, sneakers hitting tile, clipboard tight to her side like a shield. The hallway swallows her in three strides and a blind corner.
I stand with my pulse in my teeth and the taste of her in my mouth and the very specific understanding that I just crossed a line I promised not to even look at.
From the locker room, someone whoops at something else entirely. A compressor rattles. The CCTV eye stares. I plant my palm against the cool cinderblock where her shoulder just was and make the only smart move left: I force my feet to stay.
Chapter 11
Under the Spotlight
Riley
Gossip moveslike a weather system in the tunnel—low pressure, rising heat, a front of whispers sweeping ahead of me in hissed syllables that tangle in the cinderblock. Camera lenses hang off necks like extra eyes. I keep my head down and do math: four steps inhale, six steps exhale. Four—six. Four—six. If I count I don’t look up, and if I don’t look up maybe I’m invisible.
The concrete smells like wet rubber and victory dried into fabric. A boom mic ghosts over my shoulder and then aborts when I angle my clipboard to make myself boring. Be a hallway. Be a door. Be anything but a story.
“Riley! Over here—Riley!” a voice singsongs from the mouth of the tunnel where security has set up a human dam. I don’t turn. I catalog instead: left hand tight on the clipboard (white knuckles—loosen), shoulders down (don’t square, it looks combative), chin neutral (not defiant, not ashamed). I’m a trainer walking to the room. That’s all.
A cluster of players barrels past, damp and loud and oblivious in the way only men covered in ice shavings can be.One of them notices me and softens the shoulder he’s about to slam into me with, which is generosity on a good day and grace on a bad one. “’Scuse me, Lane,” he mutters. The courtesy steadies me more than I want it to.
The rumors ride the air anyway. “—bench photo—” “—compliance—” “—ship name—” Ship name. I would laugh if my lungs weren’t busy pretending to be normal.
Four—six. Four—six. I pass the media scrum and feel their attention like a sunburn. A lens tips, recalculates: no badge lanyard? no comment. Good. Let them eat someone else’s moment.
My phone pings in my pocket, a little electric bite through the fabric. PR. I don’t look yet; I will not give a camera the satisfaction of catching me mid-flinch. I keep moving, sneakers squeaking at a seam in the floor where one expansion joint meets another. I catalog the squeak and not the way my heart climbs my throat because the next forty feet of tunnel is a documented “camera zone,” and the feeds love nothing more than b-roll of staff in flight.
A reporter steps out with a smile like a hook. “Riley, quick one?—”
Before she finishes, Sophie appears at my flank like she’s been launched. She hip-checks the mic holder back a clean step, smiling sweetly enough to rot teeth. “Medical staff don’t comment during active recovery,” she chirps, which is departmental policy and also code for back off before I staple your lanyard to your blouse.
The mic hovers, then retreats. Gratitude flashes hot behind my sternum, so fast it turns into guilt before it finishes forming. I keep lying to my best friend by omission; she keeps building me walls anyway.
“Left,” Sophie murmurs, steering me around a camera tripod I didn’t clock. Her hand is firm at my elbow, then gone. We movelike a practiced drill: she takes the impact, I take the opening. The tunnel widens; the noise doesn’t.
My phone pings again. I risk a glance. PR: No contact with Maddox on premises. The words glare up at me like hazard tape. Four—six. I lock the screen and slide the phone away. The directive lives in my bones and I still feel the pull like gravity in the wrong direction.
