Seven days until the gala. I wake to the hiss of the radiator, the hush of snow deciding us, and a text already waiting like a glass of water I’m afraid to drink.
Unknown:Don’t let anyone touch your wrist today.
My breath catches on nothing. It would be easy—healthy, even—to reply with a boundary.Stop.It would be saner to say,You don’t own me.But he didn’t tell me what to wear. He didn’t bark an order. He placed a velvet rope in my path and asked if I wanted to feel it.
Me:Why?
Unknown:Because I will think about it all day.
Unknown:And you’ll think about me thinking about it.
I cross the room and lift last night’s ribbon from the dresser. It’s cool; it always is at first. I loop it twice, gently—not a knot, more like a promise—and let the tails trail into my cuff. My pulse taps it like Morse code only I can read.
At the rink, the day springs open like an overstuffed closet—everything tumbling at me at once. Two volunteers called out sick. The auctioneer wants assurance that the microphone won’t squeal this year. The florist texts a picture of asymmetrical wreaths and asks,like this?A local reporter wants a “human angle” for the gala brief and leans forward too eagerly when I mention kids who skate on scholarship.
By eleven, I’ve saidwe’re so gratefulsix times andlet me check on thattwelve, and I haven’t thought about him in almost twenty minutes. It feels like cheating on myself.
“Breathe,” I tell my reflection in the office window. She looks like a woman who is doing her job and absolutely nothing else. She looks like a liar.
“Bethany?” the team manager calls, then corrects, “Samantha?” She slips into the office with a clipboard and a hurried grin. “Donor walk-through at noon. Pierce Langley asked if you could show him the silent auction layout yourself. He’s ‘a visual person.’”
Langley. I know the name—tech money, always smiling like he’s about to apologize for being rich and might tip you instead. He gave big last year; Dad likes him because he doesn’t pretend to know hockey when he doesn’t.Safe, my brain supplies, as if safety were a flavor I’ve ever learned to stay hungry for.
“I’ll take him,” I say, and I hear how brave I sound when the task is a hallway and a man who is not the one who texts me instructions that feel like mercy and knives.
Pierce arrives ten minutes early with snow still kissing the shoulders of his coat and enthusiasm that might be real. He has that charming tactic down—the eye contact that lingers, the soft laugh, the hands he keeps open at his sides like he’s proving he’s not holding a weapon.
“This is impressive,” he says, as we walk through the lobby. “You run this?”
“I do,” I say, unsure whether to put pride in it or humility. I split the difference. “With a lot of help.”
We pause at the table where the player baskets will be. Last year’s chaos flashes through me: wives bidding each other up with the fever of women who know exactly what they want in a man’s hoodie and are willing to pay for it. Pierce laughs when I tell him the story, then sobers a beat too late.
“Will the captain’s basket be here?” he asks lightly, as if it’s nothing. As if sayingcaptainaround me doesn’t turn my vein into a wire.
“It will,” I say, voice steady, pulse not. “Signed stick, practice jersey, a private skate.”
“Nice.” He leans closer; the ribbon on my wrist warms like a brand under the cuff. “You’re good at this, you know. Making people want to give.”
“I’m good at lining up tables,” I deflect, less coy than cowardly. “The giving is theirs.”
He grins. “You’re good at not taking credit.”
He means it kindly. It lands like a trick question.
We move through the space while I talk floor plans and flow and how to keep the check-in line from feeling like purgatory. He listens like the right kind of donor—attentive, curious, ready to say yes if you make the choice easy. He reaches out once, to squeeze my elbow when I joke about the sound system that likes to die at exactly the wrong moment, and every muscle I own bolts upright under my sweater.
“Sorry,” he says instantly, hands up. “I touch when I’m excited. I’ll keep them to myself.”
“It’s okay,” I lie; it is not. It wasn’t his fault. It was the wrong man’s hands in the right place, and my body didn’t know how to forgive either of us.
When Pierce leaves—promising an extra auction item, a getaway package in a “ridiculously cozy” mountain cabin I can already see making the wives feral—I sit on the edge of the check-in table and stare at my wrist, hot under a ribbon we both know belongs to someone who didn’t earn it with a smile.
My phone buzzes. I don’t look right away. I let it vibrate once more, like an animal pawing the door.
Unknown:Thank you.
Me:For what?
