My mind can’t help but drift to the first time Kyle and I met in the elevator. How he’d stepped in like a spark dropped into dry kindling, all confidence and heat, with a grin that made the air feel too thin. I’d pretended he was nothing but a cocky rookie with a pleasant smile and worse lines, but something in me had reacted before I could build a wall around it. A pull I didn’t want. A curiosity I had no business feeling. A shiver of awareness I tried to bury under irritation and professionalism, but he’d seen me in a way no one had in years, and it rattled something loose inside me that night, something I’ve been trying to hold steady ever since. I’d been so careful not to let that show. Now I’m not sure how much I’m hiding and how much I’ve already dropped on the ground between us like broken glass.
The light above the elevator ticks down a floor before the doors slide open with a tired little sigh of hydraulics. Kyle stands at the back of the car like a ghost I haven’t earned the right to see again. His shoulders sag against the mirrored wall, the set of his spine exhausted in a way he can’t disguise. His hands are shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, knuckles tense, jaw locked tight, as if the muscle there has forgotten how to unclench. The shadows beneath his eyes are darker than I remember, and the sight of him hits me square in the chest, sharp enough to steal breath. After all this time, it shouldn’t still be an ache I’ve been trying to pretend isn’t hollowing me out.
For one wild, cowardly second, I think about stepping back and letting the doors close. I can easily spin around and take the stairs, pretending I’m someone who can walk away cleanly instead of someone who doesn’t trust her own heartbeat around him. My feet hurt, sure, but they hurt less than the idea of being trapped with him in eight square feet of recycled air where every unspoken thing between us will have nowhere to hide.
His gaze flicks up, and I see a flicker of surprise carving the smallest widening at the edges of his eyes before he schools it away. But I see it, and something in my chest twists hard, because he looks just as unprepared for this moment as I am.
The doors drift shut, and my hand moves before my fear can make the choice for me. Instinct, longing, stupidity—whatever it is, it pushes me forward. I crossthe threshold, and the doors whisper closed behind me with a soft, decisive click that feels nothing like machinery and everything like inevitability.
The elevator is smaller than I remember, or maybe it’s just that the air feels crowded by everything we haven’t said. I press the button for the parking level, and the car gives a faint lurch as it begins its descent. A slow slide downward that feels dangerously out of sync with the way my pulse climbs, sharp and staggering, beneath my skin.
We stand side by side yet not quite aligned, my shoulder angled ever so slightly away, his weight pressed back into the wall like he’s trying to keep a measured distance. Our reflections peer back at us from the mirrored panel, double versions of our stiffness and strain.
He fixes his gaze on the floor, his relaxed posture replaced with layers of hurt that don’t fade, no matter how many hours of sleep or pretending you stack on top of it. He’s still carrying the wound I gave him. I grip the strap of my bag a little harder, trying to anchor myself, because seeing him like this makes something inside me tilt dangerously. For long seconds, neither of us speaks.
I try to steady myself with logic—the thing I always reach for when emotion threatens to swallow me—but logic has nothing to offer right now. Not with his presence pulling every raw, unguarded part of me to the surface. The moment he lifts his eyes, the world narrows to the space between us. His expression isguarded at first glance, but there’s something beneath it that looks like he’s been trying not to break in front of anyone. It looks like he’s exhausted from holding himself together.
His voice, when it comes, is rough around the edges. “I guess avoiding me was easier when I wasn’t standing two feet from you.”
The words slice clean through whatever flimsy composure I thought I had left. They aren’t cruel, but they’re honest, and honesty from him has always been the thing that unsettles me most.
I swallow, throat tight, and manage, “I wasn’t avoiding you.”
“We haven’t spoken in weeks.” His gaze drifts over my face, painfully unconvinced. “That feels like avoidance.”
“You didn’t reach out either.”
“I didn’t want to make things harder for you,” he says, the words slipping out before he can temper them. “I didn’t want to show up where I wasn’t wanted.”
That last part hits harder than I’m ready for. It cracks something jagged open inside me because he truly believes that. And the knowledge that I put that thought in his head makes the guilt coil sharper under my ribs.
“Kyle…” My voice breaks on his name, the single word barely holding together. “I never?—”
“You did,” he says, softer than before, his voice catching in a way that makes the small space around us feel unbearably fragile. “You told me it couldn’t bereal. And I… I listened. I tried to respect the line you drew.”
He drags in a breath that sounds uneven, like the simple act of taking in oxygen requires effort he no longer has. It’s a breath someone takes when holding themselves together has stopped being possible. It hits me with a clarity so sharp it feels like a shard folding into my chest.
“Every time I tried to leave you alone,” he continues, voice thinning with something he probably hasn’t admitted to anyone else, “it felt like cutting away something I didn’t know how to live without.”
Something in me buckles enough that I feel my balance shift. I close my eyes for a moment because the pressure behind them threatens to spill over, and I know if I let even one tear fall in this tiny elevator, I won’t be able to stop the rest. My fingers curl around the strap of my bag so tightly my knuckles ache, the leather biting into my palm like a reminder to keep my feet on the ground. When I open my eyes again, he’s watching me with an expression I don’t have the strength to decipher.
“Why are you still here?” he asks, shaped around bruised hope he’s trying to hide, a plea wrapped in fear as if he is asking something else entirely.
Why now?
Why, after you walked away?
Why, after a week of silence?
Are you here because you want something from me or because you’re about to break me again?
I hear every version of that question inside the single breath he uses to speak it. It slices straight through the walls I’ve spent a week reinforcing.
“I don’t know,” I admit, the truth sliding out before I can cage it with logic. “I just… couldn’t go home yet.”
His eyes soften with understanding, and he nods, as if he recognizes the place I’m speaking from because he’s been standing in that same place for days. He studies me for a moment that stretches too long to be comfortable and too honest to be denied.
“You look like you’re barely holding it together,” he says, his voice gentle in a way that breaks my composure more cleanly than sharpness ever could.
