I want to run to him and get there first and start speaking before he can put words on me I’ll have to carry. I want to run from him because the half that still feels eight years old is terrified of a whistle blown in public. I do neither. I do the third thing—the woman thing. I stay put. I pick my weather.
“Okay?” Triston asks, and it isn’t a test. It’s a hand extended over new ice.
“Okay,” I say. My voice isn’t steady, exactly, but it’s not the shaking thing I thought it would be. “Don’t—”
“Apologize?” he says, mouth tilting. “No. Not tonight.”
“Don’t talk over me,” I finish, and that earns me the soft heat in his eyes I fell for before I admitted I was falling. “Let me talk.”
“I’m here to listen and stand where you put me,” he says, and there’s a whole constellation of vows tucked under the easy words.
Dad arrives with a smile that is all teeth and public relations. It softens his eyes to anyone who doesn’t know him; to me, it reads like a barricade.
“Congratulations,” he says, and the voice he uses for broadcasters is so smooth I could skate on it. “The dance floor appreciates a show.”
“Thanks, Coach,” Triston says, polite enough to be called courageous.
Dad’s gazesnaps to me. The smile doesn’t crack, but grief moves under it. “Samantha.”
I swallow. I don’t look at my feet. “Dad.”
“Walk with me?” It’s phrased as a request. It isn’t.
“No,” I say, because there are some doors you don’t follow a man through if you’d like to come back with your dignity. “Say what you need to here.”
A circle opens around us, the kind that forms around accidents and proposals. The band pretends to be in another city. Somewhere at the edges someone whispers he kissed her and someone else says but the coach and a third voice says I love it and all of them are true and none of them help.
Wayne studies me the way he studies film: no angle unexamined, no mercy for sloppy execution. “You want me to put my temper down in front of donors?”
“I want you to keep your respect for me where you put it when you hired me to run your most public night,” I say, and I’m proud that the sentence comes out shaped like a plank I can stand on.
He breathes in, slow. “Respect and permission aren’t the same thing.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m not asking.”
His eyes flit to Triston, and there it is, the crackle—two wolves recognizing the other as a creature with teeth. “You,” he says. Careful.
“Me,” Triston answers. Calm.
“This is my house,” Dad says, and I feel something in me lower to the ground, ready.
Triston nods, all deference but not a drop of surrender. “Yes, sir.”
“You don’t make messes in my house,” Dad continues, voice pitched for privacy that doesn’t exist.
“With respect,” Triston says, and his hand at my waist doesn’t change pressure by even a breath, “your daughter is not a mess.”
I feel the tremor, right under Dad’s left eye. I know that twitch; it’s the one that means he believes a thing is true and wishes like hell it weren’t because then he could bulldoze it. “She is my family,” he says.
“She is,” Triston agrees immediately, and the speed of his agreement disarms all of us. “And she’s mine, because she chose me.” The words are steady and bare. No theater. No heat. “I’m not hiding it.”
The room hears that. I can feel it register, like a video scoreboard flashing a stat no one can argue. Chosen. Present tense. Past tense. All of it.
“You’ll tank your career,” someone hisses behind a hand six feet away. Someone else says he’s an idiot and a third voice says he’s a man, which is rarer.
Dad’s gaze returns to me. He is doing math darker than any I’ll see on a spreadsheet. “You’re certain,” he says, and it’s not a question so much as a dare to stop pretending if I’m going to.
“Yes,” I say, and say it the way I said it in a hotel room where no one could grade me. “I’m not a girl sneaking kisses. I’m a woman making a choice.”
