Unplanned
Riley
The rain needlesmy window like it has a grudge. It turns the city into white noise and my pulse into a metronome I can’t ignore. I pace a rut in the living room rug—three strides to the bookshelf, pivot, three strides back. My palms won’t stop fussing: straightening a coaster, smoothing a throw pillow that never did anything wrong, aligning two remotes like order might save me.
Three hard knocks. A pause. One more. Jason’s knock—confident, a little impatient, like the door owes him money.
I stop moving but I don’t stop vibrating. The radiator clicks its old bones. The lamp hums. Somewhere down on the street a horn bleats and someone swears, water-slick and distant. I stare at the door handle until the brass goes out of focus.
“Riley,” he says through the wood, voice low and roughened by cold. “Let me in.”
I should say no. I should text PR-approved lines and lawyer-approved silence. Instead I undo the chain with fingers that won’t behave and tug the door open.
He fills the frame. Rain clings to his hair, darkening it to near black, beads on the line of his jaw, soaks the shoulders of a jacket that probably costs more than my couch. Cold air comes with him—wet asphalt, winter, and the ghost of the rink still clinging to his hoodie. His eyes are searching. They always are when he looks at me, like he’s trying to memorize the map and always missing a turn.
“I’ve been calling.” He steps inside when I back up, careful like he’s trying not to spook me. Water patters soft from his cuffs to my floor.
“I turned my phone off.” I shut the door, flip the deadbolt, wish it worked on my chest.
He drapes the jacket over a chair. The room shrinks by half with him in it, all height and heat and bad decisions I can still taste on a memory. He looks at my hands, the way I’m white-knuckling the blanket on the couch. His voice gentles. “Are you okay?”
That question is a scalpel. It cuts too close. I breathe in for four, hold for two, out for six like I tell players who can’t get their heads to stop buzzing after a hit.
“No.” The truth comes out clean. “But also yes. Depends on the minute.”
Something in his shoulders eases—like honesty is a rope he can grab. “We’ll make it a better minute.” His mouth twitches like he almost smiled and thought better of it. “Start with this: I’m sorry about today. The leak, the noise. You shouldn’t have to carry my mess.”
A laugh breaks out of me, sharp and humorless. “Your mess? Jason, I work for the team that pays you. The optics are my mess by default.” I hear myself go clinical, the way I do when a player tries to skate on a torn muscle—calm, factual, a scalpel of my own. “PR wants distance. Compliance wants my phone at sevena.m. The owner wants me off your rehab because the internet thinks my hands on your wrist is foreplay.”
His jaw ticks. “Then fire the internet.”
“Tell me how.” I cross my arms because otherwise I might reach for him, and I can’t be that girl again. Not with cameras in the bushes and a clause in my contract that reads like a tripwire. “This is my career. My name. I built it brick by brick while you were being photographed with bottle service and bad decisions.”
His inhale is a scrape. “I know what I was.” He takes a small step closer—enough I can see the darker spokes around his irises. “I’m not asking you to pay for it.”
“Then why are you here?” The words snap before I can soften them. “If you came to soothe, I don’t need soothing. I need—” The sentence breaks because finishing it feels like stepping off a roof.
His voice lowers. “Tell me what you need and I’ll do it.”
I look at him, at the rain needling the window behind him, at the grooves we’ve cut into each other and pretended were character. My heartbeat is loud enough to count. The words crowd my throat, panicked birds.
“I need—” I start, and the truth claws at the back of my tongue, demanding air.
“I need my job,” I manage finally. “I need my name not dragged through a comment section because I happen to be good with tape and better with boundaries. I need the league not pawing through my phone like I’m a criminal for standing too close to you.”
“Then I’ll fix it,” he says, immediate, instinctive, like a goalie throwing himself at a shot. “I’ll talk to Blackwood. I’ll talk to sponsors. I’ll sit if I have to?—”
“You can’t fix this with a sound bite,” I snap. “You can’t skate harder and make the internet forget. This isn’t a third-period deficit. This is my entire career teetering because you—you blowinto rooms like a weather system and everyone else has to nail down the furniture.”
His mouth pulls, hurt visible before he shutters it. “You think I don’t know I do that?” A beat. Softer: “You think I don’t hate that I do that to you?”
The fight in me sputters, then flares hotter because the alternative is crying. “Then stop being the storm.”
“I’m trying.” He spreads his hands like he wants to show me they’re empty. Rain has dried on his knuckles in pale lines. “Tell me where to stand. Tell me what to say. I’ll follow your lead.”
“That’s the problem,” I say, and my voice shakes with the truth of it. “I don’t want to choreograph us. I don’t want to manage you like a player who thinks he’s invincible. I want?—”
“What?” he asks, gentle, and the gentleness makes the words break free.
