“I’m fine,” I whisper, the lie tasting like something brittle and overused.
“You don’t have to lie to me.”
The elevator hums around us, descending floor by floor, but the walls feel like they’ve created a pocket of suspended time. One where every emotion we tried to bury has followed us inside, waiting in the air between us, refusing to be ignored.
His chest rises on a slow breath, and he leans back against the railing, his eyes locked on mine, seeing far too much. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m tired,” I say, though the word feels too small to hold everything inside me.
“You’re hurting.”
The simplicity of it—his certainty, his quiet acknowledgment—hits with the weight of truth I don’t want to name.
“Kyle,” I say, my voice breaking at the edges, “please don’t?—”
“Don’t what? Don’t notice you? Don’t care?”
“Don’t make this harder.”
His laugh isn’t a laugh at all. It’s a quiet, broken exhale that carries no humor, only exhaustion. “Alycia, I don’t know how to make anything about you easier.”
The soft hum of the machinery is the only sound, a low vibration beneath my shoes, but even that feels like it's holding its breath, waiting for one of us to move, to speak, to break first. My pulse knocks painfully against my ribs, each beat loud enough that it feels like it’s echoing in the tight metal box with us. And every time I try to breathe around it, the breath shudders, catching on the sharp edges of regret I’ve been swallowing for weeks. My hands stay clenched at my sides, nails biting half-moon shapes into my palms, and I can’t decide if I’m grounding myself or punishing myself.
“Kyle…” I manage, but the rest dissolves under the weight of everything I can’t say.
He steps near enough for the space between us to thicken with the ache neither of us is pretending away anymore. His breath brushes the air between us, warm and uneven, and it draws me in like gravity.
“No more pretending?” he asks softly, but there’s nothing soft about the emotion threaded through it. It’s raw. It’s wrecked. It’s hope and fear and longing all pressed into one trembling question.
“I’m not pretending,” I say, voice cracking in themiddle. “I just… I don’t know how to do this without breaking something else.”
Something flickers across his face—pain, understanding, devastation—and it guts me completely. He’s been breaking alone while I’ve been hiding behind caution and fear.
“Alycia…” he murmurs, and the way he says my name makes the tears spill before I can blink them back. “Look at me.”
I do, and the truth hits all at once, leveling everything I’ve been holding together with sheer willpower. I’m suddenly trembling in a way I can’t conceal, and he sees every bit of it.
“Let it break,” he says, voice breaking with it. “Stop holding everything together just because you’re afraid it will hurt. It already hurts.”
A soft, wrecked sound slips out of me. “Kyle…”
“Alycia… tell me what this is.”
I look up at this man who has given me patience and every quiet truth I wasn’t brave enough to name, and something inside me tears open. I inhale, finally ready to stop running from the thing that’s been clawing its way out of me for weeks, but the elevator shudders and eases to a stop. The motion is so slight it feels cruel as the doors slide open. It feels like I’m stepping out of a dream I wasn’t ready to wake up from as Kyle takes a single step back.
“Goodnight, Alycia.” His voice is soft in a way that guts me, threaded with resignation and a tendernessthat feels like a hand smoothing over a bruise. “Get home safe.”
He walks out without a backward glance. The moment he crosses that threshold, his absence hits the air like something physical and pitches me forward. It’s not a choice, but a truth I’ve been running from, grabbing hold of me with both hands. Before the elevator doors close and I lose the fragile, shaking thread of courage I finally found, I step forward, too.
The hallway outside is colder than the elevator, a chill that seeps straight through silk and bone. His footsteps echo ahead of me, laced with a finality that makes my chest clamp down. I follow anyway, my heels tapping a shaky rhythm against polished concrete that sounds too loud in the empty corridor.
“Kyle.”
My voice comes out thinner than I intend, but it reaches him. His shoulders tense, not with the sharp defensiveness I’ve seen in other men when they feel cornered, and he turns slowly.
“Kyle—”
“What do you want me to say, Alycia?” he asks, and his voice is quiet enough that it shouldn’t hurt, but it does. “Because I feel like I’ve said everything I can.”
