Kyle
You look beautiful in blue.
I can feel the way my face reacts without needing a mirror—the heat rising under my skin, the small tug at my mouth I learned not to show strangers. Compliments from him are dangerous. They sound too real, even when they’re meant as jokes.
This is business.
Kyle
Then consider it a brand request.
My heartbeat picks up because he is teasing me,but also not at the same time. He’s being the version of himself who knows when I need him to be other people’s version. I don’t know how to respond without sharpening the ache I’ll feel Saturday when we put all of this on for the cameras.
Smart casual for the part before we walk in. Hands where cameras can see them.
A pause.
Kyle
I can do that.
Another pause.
Kyle
Are you okay?
The word eats a small hole in the air between me and the phone. I could say yes, and it wouldn’t be a lie because I am upright and typing. I could say no, and it wouldn’t be a lie either, because my heart is a small animal that keeps trying to escape through my ribs. I choose the version of the truth that lets us both sleep.
I’m prepared.
The three dots pulse for a long time. I think he is going to push, but he doesn’t.
Kyle
I’ll be there at 5:45.
I’ll be ready.
I set the phone face down and walk to the kitchen. The water from the tap runs too cold, but I drink anyway, half the glass disappearing before I can stop myself. I turn and head back into my room, leaving the half empty glass on the nightstand and catch my reflection in the mirror on the closet door.
The girl looking back knows how to sell a story, how to make the world believe whatever version she needs them to. But behind her eyes is the one who kissed someone in her doorway until she’d forgotten how to breathe until he reminded her.
The sheets are cold when I crawl into bed. I pull them to my chin and stare at the ceiling until the dark blurs. I count the way the therapist taught me—five things I can see, four I can touch, three I can hear, two I can smell, one I can taste.
I try to focus, but the only thing I can think about is the crisis notes on my tablet, the ones meant to fix everyone else’s mistakes. I think about the way he said my name this afternoon, and how only I knew what it meant. I think about my mother and how easy it would be to give her the fairy-tale version, let her believe it until the world moves on.
My job is not to want him. My job is to make everyone believe the story that keeps us both safe. I’m good at my job and can do it in my sleep. I keeprepeating it like a line from a press release, hoping that if I say it enough, it’ll sound true.
The dress hangs in the dark like a warning, not a promise. When I put it on, it will become armor, something to wear between us and the world. I picture the flashes, the smiles, the space I told him to keep. The space I don’t trust myself to want.
“If I keep it professional, I can survive it,” I whisper out loud, because saying it makes it feel like the truth.
Chapter Twenty
Kyle
The rink is quietest just before the team arrives for practice. The only sound is from the compressors humming under the ice and the vents pushing out cold air that burns when I breathe too deeply. The sound settles something in me in a way silence never does. I push through the tunnel, stick slung over my shoulder, and the air hits like a cold baptism, faintly sweet with the smell of ice and the burnt coffee someone left in the coach’s office. It smells like mornings where you rebuild yourself from the outside in.
