“Yeah, you will, it’s tech week. You’re about to be sick of me.”
“Not a chance,” she said as he fisted her hands into my shirt and pulled me in for a kiss.
“Be safe picking up Ava,” I murmured.
We walked to the door, locked up the rink, and stepped into the outside world, both of us pretending our worlds hadn’t just shifted again.
But they had.
God, they had.
28
ELEANOR
Tech week was chaos. Beautiful, loud, joyful chaos.
Costume racks lined one side of the backstage hallway, the prop tables on the other, and kids swirled between them like a very excited, very off-key tornado. Fabric scraps, safety pins, glitter, lost shoes. It was a symphony of barely controlled madness.
And somewhere in the middle of it all . . . was Alex.
Unfortunately for my ability to concentrate, his prop table was directly across from my rolling costume rack.
We hadn’t planned it that way. But now that we were stuck staring at each other every time we looked up?
Yeah. It was a problem.
A delicious, ridiculous problem.
I knelt next to one of the little actors, hemming her dress while she explained earnestly why penguins should absolutely get to wear tiaras. Across the way, I could hear Alex explaining to another kid why wedo notjuggle the papier-mache “glass slippers,” even if you “totally could.”
Every time I glanced up, he was already looking at me. Every. Single. Time.
Not in a creepy way. In a way that made something warm unfurl low in my belly.
He’d smile, and I’d try to pretend like my face didn’t instantly heat up.
We were trying to keep things subtle. Invisible to the room full of excitable children and eagle-eyed volunteers.
But we were doing a terrible job.
I passed out a freshly adjusted vest to a kid who immediately ran off toward the stage. When I straightened, I found Alex walking toward me with a prop crown in one hand and a smug little smile on his face.
“You lost?” I asked softly.
“No,” he whispered back. “Just delivering royalty.”
He handed the crown to a kid, gave them a gentle pat on the shoulder, and then, when no one was looking, his fingers brushed mine.
Just a graze. Barely a second. But it short-circuited my brain all the same.
I turned back to my rack, pretending desperately that I was a professional adult who had not just been undone by a man touching me in public like he had a secret. A secret that felt sweet and bright and intoxicating.
I pinned a label onto a costume bag, humming to myself to stay grounded. It lasted maybe eight seconds before I felt his gaze again. I looked up. He was leaning on his prop table, arms folded, eyes warm like he was memorizing me.
The newness of it all made me feel . . . light and excited.
It was like I was nineteen again, sneaking into Columbus for a concert with Ethan, before life had been heavy and complicated.
