“Walk me to my car.” I said, and made it sound like a challenge by accident.
He fell in step half a pace to my right so that his shoulder shielded me from the wind. We didn’t speak. The lot makes its own music. Every step was a negotiation between wanting and wisdom. I didn’t trust either alone; together they form a rope I can use to cross from this moment to the next without falling.
At my car I fumble with the keys. He takes them gently, turns them in the lock, and puts them back in my open hand with a brush of fingers that was more instruction than touch.
“You shouldn’t have kissed me like that.” I said, because honesty was the only way to keep from drowning in the undertow.
His eyes warmed and sharpened at once. “There isn’t a version where I don’t.”
“I’m trying to…do this right.” The words were small and earnest and made of the girl who still believed rules could save her if she wrote them in neat lines. “Daylight. Lines.”
“We’re in a parking lot under six lamps.” He said. “If I wanted shadows, I’d have kept you in the room and swallowed the key.”
The image sends a shock through me, half terror, half longing so strong it makes my throat ache. “Don’t.” I said, and I hoped he heard the two meanings:don’t say things like that when I’m already undone,anddon’t you dare let go of the part that can say it with a straight face.
He tilted, considering, and the seriousness that lives behind his control surfaces. “Okay.” The word is an agreement with himself as much as with me. “Daylight. Lines.”
“I don’t want to be your secret.” I said, because I need to say it somewhere the night could hear and hold me to it later. “My father—”
“—knows enough to know.” He finishes, with a grimness that wasn’t aimed at me. “He set his boundary. I won’t cross it with a smile and pretend it isn’t a lie.” He touched the hem of the jersey peeking from my coat. “You wore this in front of him.”
My face heated. “I wore it in front of everyone.”
He breathed out, slow, like the answer satisfied a hunger I hadn’t intended to feed. “Good.”
A door banged open at the far side of the lot. We both turn. Assistant coaches spill out, laughing, keys flashing in their hands. The regular end of a night anyone else would call a win. Triston steps back half a foot, not away from me but into a posture that broadcastsdistancefrom fifty yards. It was a magician’s trick: the illusion of space with no change in gravity. The coaches wave. He nods and I lift my hand and hope my smile looks likecongratulationsand notI’m wearing his name over my heart and can still taste him.
“Go home.” He says under his breath when the crowd thins, and the directive wasn’t dismissal but care smuggled through a single syllable.
“You, too.”
He reaches past me and presses the edge of the door so it swings wide enough for me to slip in. Then he leans, not touching, close enough that his voice could be quieter than the wind. “You’re going to feel me while you sleep.” He growls “Don’t fight it.”
“I won’t sleep.” I admit.
“Then keep the light on.” The restraint in him was a visible thing, muscles leashed, jaw careful. “Text me when you’re in your room.”
“I can’t—”
“That’s enough for now.”
He closes the door with a care that makes the latch sound obscene. For a second we look at each other through the glass—me in a borrowed world, him in the one he’s built out of steel and discipline and the kind of want that doesn’t apologize. He taps two fingers against the roof once, then steps back so I can pull away.
I drive with both hands until my knuckles whiten. The car’s heater blows an uneven warmth at my shins. The radio stays off because music would be more voice in my head that's already full. All the way home I replay the kiss like a stone. The first press, the part where I stopped thinking, the small sound he made when I pulled him closer, the moment whenyoursfelt less like surrender and more like a shape I would choose again.
At the house, the porch light washes the steps in soft gold. The front door was unlocked—on purpose, a policy, a promise. I step into the smell of coffee and old wood and laundry soap, the smell of my entire life. Dad sits at the table with his shoulders hunched, staring at nothing in particular in the way that means he’s thinking about everything at once.
“You okay?” He asked, which was our way of saying,say the part I can stand to hear.
“Yes.” I hung my coat. The jersey showed. His eyes catch it and his jaw clicks; then he inhales slowly and lets the air go, steadying the world with his hands where they lay on the table. “I came home through the front.” I added, because he needed markers for the map.
“Good.” His gaze flicked to my face, searching for harm like a medic. “Hungry?”
“No.” My pulse said yes, but not for food.
He nods anyway and stands to rinse his mug, the noise of the faucet filling a space words can’t. “Upstairs by midnight.” He says, not an order, a rope he tosses me so I can pretend we were still playing our old game.
“It’s already past.” I giggle, glancing at the microwave display.
