“You okay?” I ask, and hear the stupidity of the question in the cloud of my own breath.
“I’m walking,” she says. It’s not a yes, but it’s not a no. Her ponytail swings once and corrects, like she refuses even her hair the drama.
We pass a shuttered deli. The open sign tries to glow and fails. In the glass I catch our reflections—two figures wrapped in too many layers and not enough armor. The last twenty-four hours are stacked on my back like an extra set of pads. Rage. Fever. That kiss. The way she said not here like it was a wound and a rule all at once.
“Block more,” I say, and we keep moving, the crunch of salt grains under our soles a metronome. I angle us away from the front entrance to avoid whatever podcast detective is still camping by the planters. Riley doesn’t ask where we’re going. She doesn’t need to. I’m not sure I know either. Away is the point.
At the end of the block a streetlight throws a quiet pool over a bench that isn’t a story yet. We stop there because both our bodies agree before our mouths do. My lungs burn in the pleasant way; hers still count. Four. Six.
“I shouldn’t have kissed you back there,” I say. The words fog out and hang between us like a confession looking for a place to land.
Her mouth tightens and then softens. “You shouldn’t have,” she says. It doesn’t sound like victory. It sounds like triage.
“I told you, I’m trying to learn boring,” I add, because promises feel like lies unless I put skin on them. “Starting now. No headlines. One block at a time.”
She huffs a breath that might be a laugh if we were different people in a different life. “One block at a time I can do,” she says, and we start walking again, slower, like we might actually survive this street.
We cross at a dead corner, the walk signal flashing its little white man like he’s got somewhere to be. My somewhere is here. The quiet gets bigger around us until my head has room to think without yelling.
“Do you know what I hate most about the money?” I say, and it sounds like I’m starting a bit. I’m not. “It solves every problem but the ones I have.”
Riley’s breath ghosts sideways. “Which ones are those?”
“The kind where a win feels like a promise I can’t keep. The kind where I walk off the ice and everybody’s hands are out—sponsors, media, kids who want me to be their future, men who want me to be their proof—and none of them want the version of me who shuts up and makes soup when he’s sick.” I rub my thumb against my palm inside the glove until the urge to fidget finds a home. “The kind where I go back to a place with too many rooms and can hear the fridge hum from the bedroom because there’s nothing else making noise.”
We pass a mural of an orca leaping out of a painted ocean. Its eye follows us with that whale sadness artists know how to trap. Riley’s pace doesn’t change, but she tips her head enough to let me keep going.
“When I was a kid,” I say, “loneliness looked like a microwave dinner and a note on the counter. In the league it looks like a penthouse and a calendar full of people who know my stats better than my voice. The money buys silence. The pressure buys more of it. And then I’m standing in a hallway with you and I can’t shut up because it’s the first time all day I’m not a mascot.”
She’s quiet for a half block. The snow that isn’t snow starts to fall—salt dust shaken from a rooftop. It dots her hair and melts.“You could tell other people that,” she says, gentle, not pushing. “You don’t have to bleed on me to prove you’re human.”
I shake my head. “I don’t trust most people with the parts of me I’ve got left. I trust you.” Saying it isn’t a grand gesture; it feels like finally putting a box down. “I trust you more than I trust me in rooms with cameras.”
A bus hisses past, heaters blowing hot breath into the cold. The wind lifts the edges of her scarf and I fight the impulse to tuck it back because learning boring means learning restraint. “Pressure’s not the villain,” I add. “It’s the gravity. It keeps me on the ice. It also pulls everything else out of orbit unless I’m careful. I haven’t been careful.”
“That’s honest,” she says. The words don’t fix anything. They give me something to stand on.
I huff out a laugh that fogs quick and disappears. “The part no one tells you,” I say, “is that loneliness eats wins. You hit the tunnel high, and by the time you get home the goal’s just… gone. The only thing left is the echo. I don’t want to live with echoes.”
We reach the next corner and stop because the light tells us to. Her shoulder is inches from my arm. The city throws our shadows long and thin across a shuttered bodega. “So yeah,” I say, softer. “I’m good at contracts and cameras. I’m bad at normal. I’d like to not be. I’d like to go home after a game and have it be a place. Even if it’s just a couch that sucks and a blanket you keep stealing.”
Riley’s mouth curves the smallest amount, like the image gets past her defenses before logic does. She looks at the walk signal, not me. “You can learn normal,” she says. “It’s boring on purpose.”
“I’m here for boring,” I say. “I’m begging for it.” The light flips; we cross. “And I know begging isn’t attractive.”
“Depends on the ask,” she says, and the corner of her voice smiles even if her face doesn’t. The street opens ahead of us,hushed and possible. The things I didn’t say on camera sit between us like they finally have air.
We walk past a laundromat with its lights on for no one. A row of empty machines stares back like open mouths. Riley slows in front of the glass, and I feel something in her cadence change—less counting, more choosing.
“I didn’t leave because I didn’t love you,” she says, still watching our ghost-selves in the window. “I left because loving you felt like disappearing on purpose.”
The sentence lands under my ribs and sits there, heavy. I deserve the weight. “Disappearing how?” I ask, even though I can guess every exhibit in that museum.
She tips her chin, the motion small and decisive. “Silence,” she answers. “At first it was romantic, you know? The secret. The ‘ours.’ The way your hand would find mine in a hallway and the world would, for thirty seconds, shut up.” She lifts a shoulder. “But then the world stayed loud and you stayed quiet. You missed dinners and I told myself it was the schedule. You skipped calls and I told myself it was time zones. You didn’t correct rumors and I told myself it was strategy. And every story I told to make the shape of you fit my life carved out a piece of me.”
My mouth is dry. I swallow and get glass for my trouble. “I thought?—”
“I know what you thought,” she says, not unkind. “You thought quiet was safe. That if we weren’t on the record, no one could use me as a weapon against you. But it made me the weapon anyway. It made me the thing you hid instead of the person you chose.”
