"I'm not hosting. I'm being polite. My mother would kill me if I did otherwise."
I hung his jacket on the hook behind the door, next to mine.
He smelled like leather from the car seats and something briny underneath. Saltwater, maybe. Tank water. My dad used to come home smelling like that. Before.
"Water? I've got—" I opened the fridge and confronted the evidence: protein shakes in various stages of expiration, a bag of shredded cheese, and a lime that had given up. "Water."
"Water's fine."
I handed him a glass.
He drank half of it standing in my kitchen. Then he set it on the counter, and his fingertips trembled.
"So," he said.
"So."
He leaned against the counter. I leaned against the kitchen table. Four feet of linoleum between us.
"The elevator was contextual. We were tired. Emotional. Post-loss adrenaline, confined space—mitigating factors."
"Mitigating," I repeated.
"Circumstances that explain why something happened without necessarily implying—"
"I know what mitigating means."
His jaw tightened. I watched the muscle work, a small knot just below his ear.
The refrigerator kicked on behind him. A low, rattling hum that made the silence between sentences louder.
"The team comes first. Both our situations, your contract and my timeline. If anyone suspected—"
"It could end us. Both of us."
He stopped. I'd taken his sentence and stripped it to the studs.
"Yeah," he said, quieter. "It could."
I looked at him. Arms crossed and collarbones visible at the neck of his shirt. He'd rehearsed this speech in his car. Built his argument like a legal brief. Climbed my stairs and then knocked.
"So why'd you come?"
Kieran uncrossed his arms. Without the posture, he looked younger. Unfinished.
"Because you asked me to."
"That's not why."
His breath hitched. I saw it the way I saw a lane open up in front of the net. It was a sudden absence of something that had been blocking the view.
"No," he said. "That's not why."
My kitchen was too small for what was happening.
"What do you want?" I asked.
I needed him to say it.
