“Accurate.”
If anyone walked down this hallway, we would look like two people discussing a calendar change. There’s no touch. No explicit threat. There is a distance you could stretch a ribbon across and knot without trying. I rock once on my heels, and his eyes track the movement like it’s the only play worth watching.
“Youleft something in my office.” I say.
“Did I?”
“Don’t play coy.” I snap, because anger is a safer heat than whatever else is working its fingers under my collar. “You want credit and blame. You always have.”
The unsmiling part of his mouth curves by one degree. “Credit.” He says. “I don’t need blame. You’ll handle that for both of us.”
The accuracy is a sting. I don’t deny it. “Why a ribbon?”
“Because it’s soft and it holds.” He says, as if he’s describing a coaching drill and not the velocity at which my body says yes in an empty hallway. “Because it reminds you how it felt to be chased in something that wasn’t meant to catch you. Because you can put it on and take it off and still feel you’re marked.”
I should be offended. I should be thrilled. The truth is, I am both, which is a ridiculous way to stand and still call yourself upright. “You sound very sure you know me.” I say.
“I know the version of you that stopped running.” He says. “The rest I’m learning.”
A door bangs open on the far end of the hallway, and laughter spills out like coins. We don’t move. We could. We should. We don’t.
“Your father hates me for you.” He says, low, almost to himself. It doesn’t feel like a complaint. It feels like he was handed a diagnosis and added it to the list of things he can survive. “He’ll think the ribbon is a weapon.”
“What is it?”
A beat. “A reminder that you can tell me no and I’ll hear it.”
The words settle me so abruptly I sway. The finding at the center of the maze wasn’t that I wanted a monster; it was that I wanted the kind who put his teeth away when I blinked. Consent woven into the chase like a safety line you only feel when you need it. Peoplewill say that ruin is inevitable if you let yourself be wanted this hard. Maybe. But there are ruins you kneel inside and ruins you rebuild on, and sometimes the difference is a voice sayingtell me to stopand meaning it.
“I’m not telling you to stop.” I say. “I’m telling you to be careful.”
His eyes flash—a brief, helpless pleasure, like he’s been starving and I handed him a warm piece of truth and didn’t slap his hand when he reached. He nods once. “Thirty seconds.” He says. “From the lobby, after the skate drive. I’ll walk by. You won’t talk to me. You won’t look at me. You’ll hand me something that doesn’t matter and take something that does. If you don’t want it, keep your hands at your sides and I’ll pass you like you’re air. If your father is near, I won’t be.”
“What do I hand you?”
He smiles with his mouth this time and my bones remember the maze. “A flyer.”
“And what do I take?”
“Instructions.” He says. “Or a knife. Depends on what you call it when a thing cuts you free.”
He steps back. The distance between us grows into a polite suggestion instead of a charge. Footsteps echo at the end of the hall, a staffer hauling a box full of folded T-shirts, eyes glued to the weight, mouth open in a stubborn exhale. Triston tucks his chin like he’s simply a man in a hoodie moving through a workday. As he passes me, he doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t even graze my sleeve. But the air pulls, the way air does when a bigger body moves through it, and the ribbon against my wrist tightens like it heard its name.
After he’s gone, I stand there for long enough to hate myself for all the things I didn’t say and love myself for the one I did. Be careful is a command and a confession. I give myself four seconds topress my back to the wall and breathe, and then I return to the office that has my name on the door and our war inside it.
The day obeys the clock out of habit. The skate drive brings a tide of winter clothes and generous faces; the kids who outgrew last year’s sizes beam at new ones like the world just apologized for the cold. I tape flyers to a table and answer questions and say thank you so many times it loses consonants. The warmth of it all moves through me like heat you earn, not the thermostat kind. And then it happens.
Coach Michael—my father—gets pinned by the Zamboni driver’s wife, who has opinions about the best route to the mall when there’s snow predicted. Dad nods with the patience of a man who has put out a thousand fires and will put out a thousand more, but still looks like a person who doesn’t trust fire to be fire and not a liar.
I step around the check-in table toward the lobby. My pulse has found a metronome; my mouth found a smile it can deploy without input from my brain. The flyer in my right hand looks like paper. It feels like a door. I wonder if anyone has ever drowned in a room with good lighting.
He enters like nothing and becomes the architect. Black coat, gloves in one hand, hair still damp at the edges of his baseball cap like he can’t stay dry or doesn’t want to. He talks to our equipment manager for three seconds, the kind of light nod-and-smile that could be taught in a class calledHow to Be Both Human and a Myth at Work. Then he turns, and the lobby shifts to accommodate where he intends to stand.
I fix my gaze on a point just left of his shoulder like the doctor told me to during stitches when I was eight and was learning to be brave by looking at anything but the needle. He walks past the table with the easy prowl of a man who knows he’s being watched, choosingwhat he gives to the watchers. When he reaches me, his hand lifts to the exact height of a flyer and stops, empty, patient. The ribbon under my sleeve presses a tiny brand into my skin. I lift the paper. I don’t look at him. I don’t breathe like a woman. I breathe like a trick.
Something hard and thin slips into my palm. Not his fingers. Never that, not here. Paper, the size of a place card, cheap stock like it was cut from a hundred others. He closes his hand around the flyer and it looks like nothing and my entire body understands everything. He moves on. I’m left holding a piece of air disguised as an object.
I slide the card into the pocket of my skirt, under the table line, like I’m smoothing fabric. I tell an older man where to drop off used gloves and he thanks me like I’m the kind of girl you thank. I smile because I’m not. I’m the kind of girl who holds a knife and calls it a key.
