I turn and face him, hair messy, mouth unguarded. He looks at me like he’s counting things other people missed. It should make me squirm. It doesn’t. It steadies me, the way hands on my hips did last night when restraint and desire shook hands and agreed not to embarrass us.
“How do you feel?” he asks. It isn’t a formality; it’s a check-in. He waits for the real answer.
“Like I finally exhaled and now I have to learn how to breathe like a person again,” I say. “Hungry. Scared. Better.”
His mouth tilts. “We can handle that range.”
I reach up and touch the rough at his jaw with my fingers, the places a razor pretends to smooth and fails. “You kept your promise.”
“I always will,” he says. “Especially when you make it hard.”
“I know,” I say, and the relief that unfurls in my chest is both embarrassing and holy. “I—” The word stalls because too many follow it. I try again. “Thank you.”
“You don’t owe me gratitude for choosing what you wanted,” he says, so gentle it almost hurts. “If you want to thank me, drink that water and let me order you something with actual calories.”
I glance at the clock. Too early for a woman who was supposed to go home hours ago. Too late for pretending none of this happened.The calendar ticks under my skin: three days until the gala; forever to deal with the fallout.
“What time do you have to be at the rink?” I ask.
He brushes hair from my temple with the back of a knuckle, like touching me with the softest part of himself means something he can’t say out loud. “Morning skate’s late today. Twelve. I’ll leave when you tell me to.”
“You’ll leave?” It comes out sharper than I intend, like the word itself is a bruise.
He hears it and softens his mouth. “Only to make it easier. Not because I want to.”
“I don’t want to make it easy,” I say. “I want to make it honest.”
“Honest is harder,” he says, amused and approving. “Best kind of hard.”
I groan at the choice of words and bury my face in his chest, mortified. He laughs, both hands lifting in a no-hands gesture that still somehow counts as holding me. “Breakfast?” He offers, a peace treaty disguised as room service.
“Coffee,” I bargain. “Then food. Then…”
“Then you decide if you want to shower here or go home and pretend it was an early morning errand.”
I look up. “You always narrate the routes?”
“Only when the map matters.”
We order like people who’ve seen other mornings and failed to make them stick: coffee, eggs, toast, fruit. While we wait, he kisses my forehead, my nose, the corner of my mouth, as if the slow path needs to be re-learned in sunlight. We do not make it messy again. It’s not about self-control, not exactly. It’s about honoring the version of last night that deserves to stand separately from morning’s logistics.
When the knock finally comes, he goes to the door in pajama pants that do not belong to him and a T-shirt that might. The tray rolls in; the server pretends not to see me pulling the duvet higher. Triston tips like a man who knows labor when he sees it, and when the door clicks shut, the room exhales with us again.
We sit cross-legged on top of the covers, his knee knocking mine, my hair refusing to behave. Coffee scalds my tongue and I forgive it. Toast crunches; butter finds its way to my knuckle and he catches it with a napkin like he’s afraid of being caught doing the thing he actually wants to do, which is lean over and lick it away.
“You’re thinking about my father,” I say, because the silence has that shape.
“I’m thinking about how I don’t want to turn you into a problem he has to solve,” he admits. “And how that might be impossible no matter how careful we are.”
“He was born looking for fires,” I say. “I keep handing him matches.”
He studies me. “Do you feel guilty?”
“For what? Wanting you?” I stab a piece of melon to keep from wringing my hands. “Yes and no. Not for wanting. For lying by omission. For forcing him to play the villain in a story where he’s actually the man who taught me to say no.”
“He didn’t fail,” Triston says. “You didn’t, either.”
“Then why do I feel like I’m slipping?” My voice betrays me at the end, that thin high note grief likes to wear when it wants to be mistaken for hysteria.
