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And that’s the part that does something to me. Not the fix. The fact that he took the pom-pom girl’s problem apart like it was a real problem, worth the taking apart. Nobody does that. I’ve built a whole life on being the girl whose problems don’t count because she makes it look easy, and he just — didn’t get the memo. Or got it and threw it out.

Huh, I type, because I need a second, and huh is what I’ve got.

Theo

huh what

Huh, you might not be entirely useless.

Theo

high praise. going. dont be late.

I’m never late. You’re late. We’ve been over this.

The dots come back one more time. I wait for the standard four-word sign-off.

Theo

and stop calling me Mercer. we’ve slept together twice. it’s weird.

I stare at that one longer than I stared at the debug. Three months of Mercer-this and Ashby-that — our entire suit of armor — and he picks a random Tuesday at a water break to take his half of it off. And the worst part, the part I’m not ready for, is how much I want to take mine off too. I don’t type anything. For once in my entire life I do not have the line.

“Ashby!” Ethan, across the gym, and I nearly launch my phone into orbit. “You texting or stunting?”

“Multitasking!” I sing back, bright, and drop the phone in my bag facedown like it’s evidence, which it is. But I’m already up, already crossing the mat, already turning to Kara. “Hey. What if the load count comes a half-beat after the cradle instead of on it? Give my body the second to finish the full before we go.”

Kara narrows her eyes. Thinks. “...Ethan’ll hate it.”

“Ethan wants to win. Let’s hit it your way once and show him the tape.”

We hit it her way once. I finish the full. The count waits the half-beat. My feet find the load, and the pyramid goes up clean and holds. Delaney makes a different face — the good one. Kara says “huh” in the exact tone I just texted. And I do not tell a single one of them that the fix came in over text from a hockey player who’s supposed to think my whole personality is a tax he resents paying.

I just go up, and hold, and trust the catch, and try not to think about the fact that the catch, today, came from him.

“Again,” Kara says. “Full-out. Top of the routine, all the way through, like it’s the mat in Daytona and there are judges deciding your whole spring.” She claps twice. “Bring it.”

And we bring it. Two minutes and thirty seconds of everything at once — the opening tumbling pass, Avery and Nia throwing fulls across the diagonal, the stunt sequence loading clean, my toss and my full and the cradle and now the load, on the new count, landing exactly where he said it would — up into the pyramid, holding, the whole structure breathing like one thing. The dance break, sixteen bodies hitting the same line on the same beat. The jumps. The crowd section. The dismount cascade, Ethan calling it from the back like a man landing a plane in weather. And when we hit the final pose, chests heaving, the gym ringing with the silence right after, nobody says a word for a second, because we all felt it — the thing you chase the whole season, the routine stops being sixteen people and turns into one animal.

“That’s it,” Ethan says, quiet, reverent, the closest he comes to joy. “That’s the one. Do that in April and we win it.”

Priya grabs my hand and squeezes, both of us wrecked and grinning, and for one clean second there’s nothing in my chest but this — the mat, the girls, the animal we turn into when it works. No mother. No law school. No boy.

And then, quiet and unwelcome, right underneath the win: the person who handed me the fix is the one variable in my entire life I can’t schedule, can’t sort, can’t put anywhere it’ll stay.

I’m going to have to do something about that.

Here’s what I know about myself, clinically, the way my therapist taught me to look at it: I don’t fear the sex. I fear the unscheduled.

I’ve been running the tape all evening while I do practice problems I don’t absorb. Twice now — the party, the library — I’ve done the one thing I don’t do, which is lose the thread, let something happen to me instead of running it. And I’ve proven, with a rigor that would make a scientist weep, that I can’t just stop. I’ve tried. Eight days of avoidance produced a seminar ambush and a study-room chair I can’t look at the same way. Whatever this is, willpower isn’t touching it.

Which leaves me one tool, because it’s the only one I’ve ever had. I was raised in a house where love came with a rubric — where the daughter who kept her surface immaculate was the daughter who got kept. Somewhere in there I learned the trick: you stay safe by controlling the variables. All of them. Always. Before they get the chance to control you. It is not healthy — my therapist and I have a whole recurring segment on exactly how not healthy it is. But it’s mine, and it works, and right now it’s the only thing standing between me and the specific free-fall of wanting something I didn’t schedule and can’t predict.

So I do the only thing I’ve ever trusted. If I can’t stop the thing, I’ll govern it. You don’t fear the fire you built the box around.

By the time I get to the library at eleven, I have terms.

He’s in the study room first, which is new, which I notice and don’t mention. Laptop open, that graveyard of stickers, the tool already up. And a coffee he got me sitting at my place across the table. Black — which is how I take it. Which he sorted at some point without asking. I’m not going to mention that one either, because if I flag every small thing this man does that lands sideways in my chest, we’ll be here till graduation, and I’ve got a framework to install.