“We’re almost there,” I say, keeping my voice level so the choice doesn’t sound like a dare. “One minute.”
She nods once, a small, grateful motion that shouldn’t make my chest feel like it just cracked and reset, better. The wind shifts and finds my collar. I don’t move closer. My hands stay put. Boring. Steady. Present.
The building breathes around us—vents exhale, a pipe ticks, the hum of the hotel drops a half step like a song changing keys. Somewhere deeper in the service alley a door latch chatters, then clicks. The night has ears.
“Jason,” she says, soft warning and soft something else braided. Her gaze drops to my mouth and I feel gravity lunge. The inch between us pulses like a vein. I could step into it and call it fate. I could step back and call it discipline. I do neither. I stand there and hold the inch like it’s a coin on the bridge of my nose I’m determined not to drop.
The radio crackle gets to us before the footsteps do—static, then a voice flattened by frequency: “Copy, we’ve got fans at the east lot. Moving to side entrance.”
Riley’s breath catches. Not a panic sound. A math sound. She recalculates us in real time and finds fewer exits than she wants. “Back door,” she murmurs. “Now.”
We pivot toward the service entrance in sync. The motion is nothing and everything. The door’s crash bar gleams in the loading bay spill like a finish line. Halfway there, the footsteps hit the concrete—two sets, quick and purposeful, the cadence ofmen whose job it is to get bodies where schedules say they go. The walkie pops again. “Eyes on Maddox. Trainer with him.”
Trainer with him lands like a stamp on her forehead. I taste metal.
“Don’t engage,” she says without looking at me, and the ghost of a smile almost lifts her mouth because she knows she’s quoting Julia at me like a bedtime story.
“I won’t,” I say, and the surprising part is I mean it.
We reach the door. I put my palm on the bar and don’t push yet. On the other side: cameras, managers, the next fight. On this side: ten more seconds of air that belongs to us.
“Riley—” I start, and stop because the name does too much work in my mouth.
“Don’t make it a speech,” she says, but it’s kind, not cutting. The footsteps round the far corner of the alley—dark shapes, radio glow. We are about to be observed again.
Her shoulder brushes mine. The electric jolt is idiotically comforting. The inch thins to a hair. The world shrinks to breath and the sound of rubber soles approaching and the knowledge that if I move wrong now, I make her pay in a currency I refuse to spend again.
The radio pops close: “On them.”
I look at her. She looks at me. The door waits. The guards’ shadows stretch long across wet concrete like sundials in bad weather.
“Okay,” I say, making a promise in two syllables. “Still.”
I hold the bar. I hold the inch. The footsteps close the last yards, and the near-kiss becomes the kind you store for later because now would be a crime scene.
The guards turn the corner—two silhouettes in stadium jackets, radios bright in their fists. The glow paints their faces the color of hospital waiting rooms. We’re framed in the loading-bay light like a scene that needs a narrator.
“Mr. Maddox,” one calls, polite in the way policy is. “We’re escorting you in.” His eyes flick to Riley, away, back—calculating how many emails he’s signing up for if he misreads this picture.
Riley’s chin tips a degree toward professional. “We’re heading there,” she says, calm enough to lower heart rates. Her shoulder is still touching mine. The contact is infinitesimal and catastrophic.
I lean the smallest amount—enough that my mouth is closer to her ear than to anyone else’s story. The words are quiet and heavy and exactly the right size for the space between us. “If you want me to stop,” I murmur, “say it.”
She doesn’t. Not with sound. Not with a flinch. For one suspended heartbeat, the inch collapses to a breath and I can hear the soft catch in hers like a permission she hates and wants and will not cash here.
Then she moves the only direction that hurts and helps at once: away. Not a jerk. A step. Deliberate. She breaks the contact like a surgeon snapping a sterile seal—clean, necessary, final. Cold rushes into the place her shoulder was and my skin reads the absence like a sentence.
“Understood,” she says—to me, to the guards, to the rulebook, to the part of her that keeps choosing oxygen over fire. The word lands on my sternum and sits there, heavy and right.
The nearer guard nods, relieved. “This way.” He falls back a half pace to give us room he thinks is kindness and we know is surveillance. The second guard pretends to check the alley mouth. His radio mutters: “Owner confirms. Inside, now.”
Riley turns toward the door and her face becomes her badge—neutral, competent, unreadable to anyone who hasn’t memorized the tiny shift in her mouth that means her heart just sprinted and stopped. She doesn’t look at me. That’s mercy. That’s murder.
I keep my hand on the crash bar because I said still and I’m going to die on that word tonight. The metal is cold enough to bite. Behind us, somewhere, a camera finds focus at the end of a long lens, hungry for motion. We give it none.
The guard clears his throat like he’s narrating. “Sir?”
“Yeah,” I say, and push the door open on warm air and fluorescent hum and the thousand consequences waiting with name tags.
