Me:Good looks beautiful on you.
Me:I’ll tell you when to be worse.
The dots appear and vanish once, twice, three times. I can feel, across the building, the way he’s pacing and not pacing, the way he learns patience like he learned skating—by falling a thousand times and calling it practice.
Unknown:Copy.
Unknown:Your father just told a rookie to “hydrate like you love yourself.” I’m stealing it.
I laugh, the unguarded kind that makes my shoulders drop. I typedo itand drop the phone into my drawer like a superstition.
By early afternoon, the building is a throat clearing itself. The practice squad tromps past my door in that post-ice swagger that is half exhaustion and half relief. A junior staffer asks where we keep extra tape; I send him to the cupboard above the microwave where all good intentions go to die. The PR lead knocks and stands just inside the doorway like she’s afraid to bring the outside world into my sanctum. “Photo placements?” she asks.
“Tree, entry columns, team wall,” I say, pointing. “No step-and-repeat by the concession stand; we’re not a prom.”
She grins like I fed her something hot and spicy. “God, I love when you’re ruthless.”
“Tell that to my father,” I mutter.
“He already knows,” she says, and is gone in a flash of ponytail and competence.
The equipment room is my last stop before I let myself sit. I promised the manager I’d count the extra cords and label the surge protectors because his wife is eight months pregnant and he hasn’t slept a full night in weeks. The room smells like rubber and oil and clean sweat; it’s always been a comfort, a place where functionwins over flourish. I kneel among plastic bins and sharpies and the residue of lives spent hitting walls on purpose, and the thought arrives that I am happiest in rooms like this—backstage, practical, hands busy with things that become invisible once the show starts.
“Don’t sneak up on me,” I say without looking up, because the skin between my shoulder blades just taught me a new language.
“I tried not to,” Triston replies softly. “You still felt me.”
“Because you’re a weather pattern,” I say, straightening. “Not a person.”
He closes the door with a touch that doesn’t announce itself. Today he’s in practice fleece and charcoal pants, the kind of outfit that makes the part of my brain that cares about silhouette sigh into a pillow. His hair is damp at the edges, his jaw a little rough. He looks like a man who did something he promised me he’d do: be good in public and ruin me in private.
“You said later,” he says, careful to make it a timeline and not an indictment.
“Later is now,” I concede, and my voice does that thing I hate—that thinness that makes me sound younger than I am. I clear it. “Five minutes.”
“Thirty seconds,” he counters. “Long enough to say three things and let you leave me again.”
My mouth curves involuntarily. “You rehearsed?”
“Only the important lines,” he says, stepping closer and stopping, a choreography I know now by heart. He lifts his hand to my shoulder and lets it hover a respectful inch above fabric. “One: I’m not sorry. Two: I’ll apologize to your father anyway, when he needs me to. Three: I’m coming to the gala to do my job, and my job is to make you feel like the most competent person in that building without making you more visible than you need to be.”
“Some men buy jewelry,” I say, breathless. “You bring me sentences.”
“They’re more useful,” he says, amused. “And they don’t break.”
“Some of them do,” I say. “Promises. Under weight.”
“Then we swap them for better ones,” he says simply, as if vows are tools and we are mechanics.
I don’t reach for him. He doesn’t touch me. The ache that line of restraint draws down my spine is a pleasure all its own. “How are you, Triston?” I ask, because if he gets to check on me, I get to turn the light back on him.
He takes a breath that sounds like roadwork. “Hungry,” he says honestly. “Calm. Afraid of messing this up. Less afraid than yesterday.”
“You were afraid?” The thought warms me in places you don’t talk about on benches.
“Of myself,” he says, and the ownership softens me to the marrow. “You asked me to be careful. I took it like a blessing.”
Footsteps in the hall turn our honesty into contraband. He steps backward into shadow. My heart slams itself quiet against my ribs.
