Fear. Shame. Loss.
Love so sharp it feels like it bruised something inside me.
Yeah. Love. I can’t outrun the word anymore. Not after today.
The second she laughed for that reporter—that soft, polished sound she uses when she’s selling a narrative instead of telling the truth—something in me shifted. Like the floor under me tilted six degrees and never leveled out again.
It hurt in a way I didn’t know was possible.
Not because she lied. But because I could hear the crack in it.
She’s breaking, and I can’t reach her.
I know she thinks distance is the safest choice. I know she thinks letting go is what protects us from fallout. But watching her stand there, pretending she doesn’t care, pretending I don’t matter, pretending the last few months haven’t rewritten every part of me…
Fuck. It gutted me.
By the time I got to the locker room, my chest was already splintering. Everything I’vebeen holding back since the gala, since the statement, since the world tried to turn her into a villain and me into a headline all hit at once.
Cole and Michele found me when the pieces were already on the floor. I don’t even remember what she said, just her hands anchoring my shoulders, her voice telling me I was safe.
I haven’t felt safe in months. Not since Alycia walked away.
Maybe that’s why the breakdown felt so terrifying. Because I wasn’t just losing control. I was losing the only person who’s ever made me feel like myself in a way I didn’t have to earn.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if she’s ever going to let me close again. I don’t know if she’ll forgive me for being the reason she’s hurting or if she’ll decide the cost of loving me is too high.
But I do know this: I love her. I love her enough that this numbness feels like grief. I love her enough that pretending we’re nothing today felt like standing inside my own wreckage. I love her enough that the distance between us feels like a wound I can’t bind on my own.
And the truth that scares me most—the one I don’t want to say out loud but can feel inevery part of my chest—is this: If she looked at me again the way she looked at me before all of this… I’d break all over again just to be near her.
~Kyle
Chapter Thirty-Two
Kyle
The rink is dark when I slip inside. The overhead lights are off, and the stands are nothing, but shadows stacked on shadows, but the faint blue light from the scoreboard is enough to stretch across the ice in a cold wash that settles straight into my bones.
I stand there for a moment, letting the quiet press in around me, letting the emptiness swallow whatever pieces of me are still trying to hold it together. I don’t know why I came here. Maybe it was muscle memory or some leftover instinct to escape, but as the silence settles deeper, I feel the truth rising through the cracks in my soul. I came here because this is the only place I can fall apart without anyone expecting me to explain it.
I glance down at the phone clutched in my hand, the brightness of the screen lit against the dark. The paused frame burns into me. My eyes raw, jaw tight, and Alycia beside me, pretending nothing inside either of us had just shifted. I tell myself that I’m watching itfor the optics, to understand how bad the damage is, and try to come up with a plan to fix it. I pretend I’m dissecting it like I’m watching game film, a problem to study instead of a moment that gutted me. But even here in the rink's darkness, that lie tastes thin. It’s impossible to outrun the truth. I’m not watching because I want to fix anything. I’m watching because I don’t know how to let her go.
I hit play for the fifth time in the last ten minutes.
The video jumps back to the beginning. Alycia’s practiced laugh falls into the mic with perfect ease, the same polished ease she wears every day like armor. She handles the reporter’s joke with control, the way she handles everything else. And then it cuts to me, and the shift is so stark it feels like a physical blow. I can see the fractures I couldn’t hide all over my face. The hurt I couldn’t swallow and the exact moment when the truth slipped through the cracks because I couldn’t pretend for one more goddamn second.
“Longevity,” I hear myself mutter, and it sounds worse on the recording than it did in my head. I watch myself mutter the word as if I had to force it through clenched teeth. Then I watch myself walk away from her, away from the cameras, away from the version of me who still thought pretending was possible. Even though I’ve watched this moment so many times the edges should be dull by now, it cuts every time.
A sharp breath drags out of me as I wipe at my face with the back of my hand, but it does nothing to steady the pounding underneath my ribs. I don’t know if I’mtrying to make sense of what happened or if some part of me believes that if I watch it enough, I’ll find a version where I didn’t walk away, or worse, where she didn’t laugh.
The truth of the matter is that I can’t stand the way I look in that clip. Like a man who wanted something real and didn’t know how to hold on when it cracked in his hands. I look like I’m still standing there, begging her to choose me in a room full of cameras, even though I knew she wouldn’t allow herself to. And underneath it all, I look like someone who is deeply and irrevocably in love with her.
The realization hits so quietly it almost sneaks past me, but once it surfaces, there’s no backing away from it. The feeling coils in the pit of my stomach, stealing the strength from my knees. I sink into the nearest row of seats, bracing one arm across the backrest as if I need it to keep myself upright. The phone stays lit in my other hand, the paused frame glowing like something that won’t stop haunting me.
I don’t know how long I sit like that, breathing around the ache, listening to the low hum of the rink settling in the dark. At some point, staring becomes unbearable. I need to move. I need to bleed out these emotions I don’t know how to keep contained anymore.
My skates are on before I even realize it. The first step onto the ice feels like slipping into the only language I still speak fluently. I start to skate, not fast at first, just enough to feel the cold thread up through the whisper of motion tugging everything tightly woundinside me. But the calm doesn’t come. The ache doesn’t loosen. The thoughts don’t quiet. And I push harder.
