“Well, your loss.” She let out a dramatic sigh.
“Probably.”
She straightened, then laughed before walking away.
The second she disappeared, the entire table exploded.
“No way,” Noah shouted. “No actualway.”
Dean groaned. “Please shut up.”
“You turned down a hot Swiss skier,” Nathan said, his eyes wide. “Do you not understand how heterosexual men aresupposedto behave in the Olympic Village?”
Keisha raised one hand. “If he doesn’t want her room number, I absolutely do.”
“Excuse me?” Ingrid’s voice sliced through the laughter.
Everyone around the table went still.
Keisha blinked at her. “Whoa.”
Ingrid looked as though she wanted the floor to open beneath her chair, and all of a sudden I saw what was going on.
A second later, Keisha appeared to get the memo. “Oh.”
Color rose in Ingrid’s cheeks as she stared down at her coffee.
Noah’s eyes widened, his lips parted, and Ethan kicked him hard under the table before he could say anything.
Sitting there watching all of it unfold—the embarrassment, the attraction, the teasing, the complete absence of fear—I felt something twist painfully inside me again.
Keisha flirted openly because she could. Ingrid reacted instinctively because she did not have to calculate survival before emotion.
And Dean?—
He’d smiled, declined politely, and gone back to his coffee, as though the decision had never required thought.
Beside me, Dean’s knee brushed against mine again beneath the table, lingering this time. One hand rested beside his coffee cup, but the other was on his thigh, palm upward where no one else could see.
An offering. A choice.
My pulse jumped, and I pressed my palm to his. Dean’s hand closed around mine, warm and steady.
Sitting among athletes who flirted, laughed, made mistakes, and reached for each other without fear, I realized something terrifying.
I wanted that.
And the prospect of spending the rest of my life without it suddenly felt unbearable.
Dean
I was still thinkingabout my dad.
It wasn’t the same sharp, suffocating panic that had hit me in the corridor after my skate, but the thought sat underneath everything now, steady and heavy.
Every few minutes my brain circled back to it automatically.
Hospital. Tests. Chest pain.
