He stiffened slightly, only for a second. His gaze sharpened, scanning my face.
“About flying?” he asked.
“About everything,” I muttered, looking away. “It keeps my mind occupied.”
He studied me. There was a quiet intensity in the way he looked at me with those bright hazel eyes, like he was trying to solve a puzzle.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I don’t tell anyone,” I said, leaving out the irrational conclusion my brain had drawn over the fact my stress coffee drinking was running a thin line between being someone with undiagnosed anxiety and being a stress drinker like my dad. It was a terrifying parallel I refused to look at too closely.
He nodded once, like he was filing it away somewhere private. Then, he dropped into the seat next to me, his shoulder brushing mine. The contact sent a jolt through me that had nothing to do with the caffeine.
I was halfway through pretending to scroll on my phone, doing anything to keep my mind off the fact it felt like we’d been waiting an eternity for our flight to board. I was texting Evan, checking in on his first week atDemolition, desperate for a distraction.
I wasn’t trying to look. I swear I wasn’t.
But the icon burned in my peripheral vision from Cal’s screen next to me. A little black flame inside of a blue circle.
Orbit.
Distance radius. Green online dot. Profile grid.
A gay dating app?
My stomach dropped so fast, I felt like a kid seeing something they knew they weren’t supposed to. It was a physical sensation, a hollow swoop in my gut that left me breathless. It was sheer, unadulterated panic.
Heat crawled up my neck, and I felt it beginning to burn in my face even. My brain short-circuited.Orbit. Cal. Gay. The words tumbled around in my head, crashing into each other.
I stared straight ahead like airport security might arrest me for thinking too loudly.
This doesn’t matter,I told myself fiercely. People can do whatever they want. I didn’t care if Cal was gay. It didn’t make any difference to me. We are partners. Rivals. Coworkers.
I don’t care.
Except my palms were damp and my heartbeat was suddenly the loudest thing in this damn place. Why was my heart racing? Why did the air suddenly feel too thin?
I swallowed, and then risked a glance at Cal.
He was already looking at me.
Not smirking. Not surprised. Just… watching.
His eyes were unreadable, dark pools that seemed to absorb the frantic energy radiating off me. He didn’t look ashamed. He didn’t try to hide the screen. He just held my gaze, challenging me to say something. To ask.
He locked his phone, slid it into his jacket pocket, and didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need to.
I felt it then, a shift. Not in an uncomfortable way. It was simply just there, lingering around us. A door that had been locked was suddenly slightly ajar, and I was terrified of what it meant that I wanted to peek inside.
We flew to Cincinnati in silence, our arms pressing against each other on the shared armrest. Every time the plane banked, I was hyperaware of his heat, of theOrbiticon sitting in his pocket just inches from my leg.
The dark match the next night was a blur of lights and noise. The arena was three times the size of the PC, cavernous and loud. Even though it was a “dark” match, the crowd was huge.
We were tagged up against a veteran team, two guys who had been on the main roster for a decade. They were big, slow, and hit like trucks.
We wrestled like nothing was wrong. We hit our spots. We held our own. Since we were partners, we weren’t fighting each other, so there were no grapples between us, no skin-on-skin contact. But that almost made it worse.
