This time she breaks free, and her whole face lights up. “I did it!”
“Again.”
Each successful break makes her grin wider, and something in my chest tightens at the sight. A distant siren wails somewhere in the city, reminding me there’s a whole world beyond this room where we’re touching under the pretense of training.
She tries, manages to slip free on the second attempt. We’re both breathing harder than the exercise warrants.
“Again,” I say, because I’m a masochist who can’t stop torturing himself with her proximity.
The third time, when she presses back against me before twisting free, I know it’s deliberate. The fourth time, when she takes an extra second before attempting escape, I almost call her on it. The fifth time, when her hands cover mine where they clasp at her, I stop breathing entirely.
“I think I’ve got it,” she says, still pressed against me.
I release her and step back. “Good. Water break.”
She drops onto the floor, cross-legged like a child, chugging water while I try to remember how to be professional. Her hair is escaping its ponytail. There’s a flush across her chest that has nothing to do with exertion. When she looks up at me, something unreadable in her honey eyes, my hands start to tremble slightly. Just a tremor, but noticeable.
“Yesterday wasn’t about him being dangerous,” she says suddenly. Not accusing. Just quiet. “Was it.”
I go still.
She watches my hands. The tremor I can’t quite hide. “You do that thing. The counting. The breathing. Like you’re holding something back.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No?” She picks at the label on her water bottle, the tell she has when she’s nervous. “Every pull-up. Every five AM wake-up. The way you measure everything in numbers.” She pauses. “I’ve seen that before. Different version, but…”
She doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to. We both know what she’s not saying—that she measures everything in drinks, in pills, in how fast she can drown out the silence.
“It’s not the same.”
“Isn’t it?”
The silence stretches. I can hear tropical birds outside, the hum of the AC, her uneven breathing. She’s not pushing. Just sitting there, water bottle in hand, giving me space to say nothing.
That’s worse, somehow. The patience. The understanding.
“The rocks,” I finally say. My voice sounds wrong. “Yesterday. That was…”
“Controlled.” She says it simply. “You chose the rocks instead of your hands. I noticed.”
My jaw locks. That familiar taste of copper floods my mouth, like I’m back in Afghanistan, like the dust never really cleared.
She draws her knees up to her chest, suddenly looking younger than twenty-six. “Gabriel used to get this look sometimes. Right before he did something terrible. Like he’d already decided, and the rest was just… going through the motions.”
I wait.
“You get a different look.” She tucks that escaped hair behind her ear. “Like you’re deciding not to. Every single time.”
The words land somewhere I don’t let people reach. She’s not comparing me to Gabriel. She’s pointing at the space between us—the choice I make that he doesn’t.
“I helped him hide something,” she says, quieter now. “That night. I don’t even know all of what it was, but I know it was bad. And I just…” She shrugs, the gesture too casual for what she’s saying. “Poured another drink. Looked the other way.”
I should say something. Offer comfort, or distance, or anything other than standing here like a statue.
Instead: “Why are you telling me this?”
She looks up. Those honey eyes, too knowing.
