We stand there with the spin cycles stopped and the detergent smell sneaking under the door. I look at her reflection because it’s easier than looking at her. “I kept thinking if I just won enough, the noise would back off,” I say. “That if I stackedthe right trophies the cameras would look somewhere else and I could have you and the game without paying twice.”
“And?” she asks, turning so I have to meet her eyes.
“And I learned trophies are cameras,” I say. The truth isn’t new to me; saying it to her is. “They make everything louder.”
She nods, the smallest approval for the smallest growth. “I needed you to say I pick you,” she says, voice steady, not soft. “Not just when it was easy or when you were lonely, but when saying it cost you something. I needed you to call me back. I needed you to tell your agent no when she said I was bad optics. I needed you to stop letting other people write me into your footnotes.”
Julia would say she never called her bad optics; she’d say she was protecting the brand. I don’t defend a history that left Riley alone with the fallout. “I hear you,” I say, and mean the gerund—hearing as an action, not a trophy. “I hate that I made you write caseloads of stories to make us make sense.”
She exhales, a ribbon of white that unspools and vanishes. “I hate that I learned how good I am at it,” she admits. “I hate that I’m still doing it.”
Wind slides down the block and finds the gap at my collar. I don’t step closer, even though that’s the instinct I’m built from. “If I say it now,” I ask, careful, “does it help? Or does it just sound like I’m begging the ref for a call I didn’t earn?”
Her mouth thinks about a smile and chooses honesty instead. “Both,” she says. “And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the first hundred times are clumsy.” She looks at the ground, then back up. “But they have to be out loud.”
“Out loud,” I repeat. The words taste strange and right. “Okay.”
We start walking again because stopping too long makes us targets and because motion feels like the only thing that might turn promises into muscle memory. Our sleeves brush once, andmy fingers twitch with the urge to hook hers. I don’t. Learning boring means letting the almosts sit without wrecking them.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say into the cold. “For not letting me pretend I didn’t know.”
She nods, a simple acceptance that feels bigger than applause. “You flinched,” she says, not quite a tease.
“I should,” I answer. “I did it.” The admission is a bruise I press on, a reminder to skate smarter. Up ahead, the hotel’s side entrance glows like a low moon. The quiet between us is different now—less echo, more room.
The hotel’s side entrance glows ahead like a low moon. We slow without planning it, like our feet know the conversation isn’t finished and the door would make it pretend it is. A wind curl slides down the block and nudges her into me a fraction. Our sleeves rasp. My knuckles skim hers at the hinge of our hands—accident, gravity, prayer. Heat jumps skin to skin through two layers and a lifetime. I don’t pull away. I don’t grip. I let the contact sit there, a coin balanced on its edge.
Riley looks straight ahead. The set of her mouth is resolve; the tremor in her breath is not. I can feel the question rising in me and I give it a shape that doesn’t bulldoze.
“If you want me to stop,” I say, voice low, “say it.”
We keep walking. Our fingers stay where the air thins between them, not touching now, not separate either. The quiet is a judge I don’t try to charm. Her eyes flick down—not to my hand, to my mouth—and I feel the old, stupid lightning try to strike. I wait where I am. Boring. Steady. The opposite of the hallway.
She doesn’t answer. Not with words. She doesn’t move away, either. The not-no sits on my tongue like a held breath.
The street narrows between two parked cars and we take it together, our shoulders turning at the same angle like a drill we learned young. Her scarf brushes my jaw; the smell of her—lemon soap, winter, something only her—knifes clean through the cold. Every cell votes for closing the inch. I count to six like she counts to six and keep my hands selfishly in my pockets.
“You always did make silence loud,” I say, trying on the truth like a new stick. “I can hear you when you don’t say it.”
“Then listen,” she says, barely above the wind. It’s not sharp. It’s permission and warning braided tight.
We stop at the mouth of the service alley that will take us back inside the way adults go places: through doors, not headlines. A halo of light from a loading bay paints the wet concrete; the puddles look like metal. Our shadows puddle too, long and close.
I turn so I’m half facing her, not trapping, just there. “Riley.” Her name holds all the versions of what I want to put on the table and none of the rush. “I can be quiet. I can be loud. I can be whatever keeps you safe. Right now I’m trying to be still.”
Her throat works. She edges a fraction closer—as close as you can get without breaking the rules we set on ourselves five minutes ago. Her lashes lift and I’m the moth and she’s the bulb and we both know exactly what happens if I fly stupid.
“Don’t make me the story,” she says, and it lands as a plea she hates needing. “Make me the choice. Later. Where it counts.”
“Okay,” I say, and feel the shape of okay settle into my bones like weight I can carry.
For a beat we just breathe in the same cold, our fog mingling and dissolving, two ghosts that don’t have to haunt the same mistake twice. Then, against my thigh, my phone starts to buzz—long, insistent, the pattern of a message I already know won’t help.
The phone vibrates so hard it feels like it’s trying to crawl out of my pocket and go deliver the message itself. I don’t need to look to know who it is, but I do anyway because old habits die loud.
PR (Julia): INSIDE NOW. No contact on premises. Cameras outside. Owner watching feeds.
Three sentences. No oxygen. I thumb the screen dark and slide the phone back where it came from like I’m putting a live wire down. Riley watches my hands, not my face. Her eyes flick to my pocket, then back to the service door. The decision is a cliff. I pick us.
