Unknown:It’s about permission.
Unknown:Yours.
The snow decides for me. Or I decide for myself. I don’t know which story I’ll tell later. I text one word.
Me:Ten.
I drive home in a silence so thick I could cut it with one of his plain white cards. I shower, I change into clothes that feel like no story, not yet. And then I go back.
The north exit is the quietest part of the building—no cameras, just a heavy door the staff uses when the need for a smoke or a scream hits too hard. The metal is cold under my palm. The door opens like it didn’t need a key because some doors respect certainty.
Inside, the hallway is dim and close and private. My breath makes a pale cloud in the air. He steps out of the shadow like he’s been listening to my footsteps since forever.
Helmetless. Barehanded. No hoodie this time—just a dark long-sleeve, sleeves pushed to his forearms like he’s about to do work he cares about. His eyes do the sweep they always do—mymouth, my throat, the wrist under my cuff—and then they come back to where they live: my face.
“Hi,” he says. Just that. Like he came to visit my name and everything else was extra.
I should be the one to speak, but my voice got tangled up in my rib cage. He takes one step closer and stops, like the floor between us is a weight-sensor trap only patience can disarm.
“You have ten minutes,” I say, even though I want to lie and tell him I brought an hour.
“I have as long as you give me,” he corrects. “Always.”
He holds out his hand. He doesn’t take mine. He offers. I look at it, at the calluses earned the hard way and the carefulness learned the harder. The ribbon edge grazes my pulse like a reminder:Only if you want it. Only if you ask.
I lay my palm in his.
Heat, immediate and not at all polite, climbs up through bone. He closes around my hand like a man memorizing a relic. His thumb moves once, a slow stroke over the inside of my wrist—the exact place he told me not to let anyone touch. I hear how my breath fails. He hears it, too.
“Say stop and I will,” he says. “Say nothing and I’ll take your nothing as a no.”
“Say go,” I whisper, surprising us both.
He inhales hard enough I feel it in our joined hands. “Go,” he says, and he lifts my hand to his mouth and lays a kiss over the ribbon’s shadow like he’s sealing a letter he intends to mail to December.
Ten minutes isn’t long enough to be stupid. It’s exactly long enough to be honest. We stand there with our hands between us, the heat of his mouth cooling against my skin, my heart reciting every rule I’m breaking in a language that sounds suspiciously like prayer. He doesn’t rush. He doesn’t push. He lets me feel the way wanting can be simple if you don’t try to make it saintly.
When he lowers our hands, he slips something into my palm—I don’t look—and closes my fingers around it with a care that lives in the same family as hunger.
“For the party,” he says. “If you want it.”
“What is it?”
“A line,” he says. “To cross or not.”
He lets go first. It feels like mercy and discipline and a door held open instead of a door held against. He steps back. I stay exactly where I am because if I move I will ask and if I ask he will answer and if he answers we will be the thing we both already are.
“Go,” I tell myself, because sometimes you have to be your own coach. I leave him in the dim and the cold and the space between minutes, and when I reach my car I open my hand.
A keycard. A hotel logo I recognize. No room number. Just a thin strip of paper tucked into the sleeve with a single word printed in that same no-nonsense font:Strawberries.
I drop my head to the steering wheel and laugh once, sharp, a sound that isn’t joy and isn’t fear and is probably the sound a woman makes when she reaches the edge of the map and keeps walking.
Triston
There are drills that tame boys and drills that sharpen men; the trick is knowing when to put which blade on the ice. I run wind sprints until lungs are currency and the room in my head that sayscall herhas to wait for change.
Wayne watches me like I’m a weather system he didn’t order. He doesn’t have to say it out loud: I know your history, son. I know what you look like when you’re hunting things that can kill you. He won’t say Andrew’s name, not to me, not when his mouth might make the grief real again in a way that costs him more than he’s ready to spend. So he says other things. He saystighten the forecheck.He saysagain.He sayscaptain,and packs a threat into the last consonant like he wants to see if I bite.
