Stories:

Alysa Liu, the Shot Shooter: pt 1 of request where alysa skates to reader's song and they end up meeting Alysa Liu, the Shot Maker: pt 2 of request and alysa and reader finally meet Misjudged Skating Date: request where alysa thinks she’s going to teach her celebrity crush how to skate but reader’s already good. ITS A GIRL!: Alysa and reader go out on a date and become parents Elevator-gate: reader cannot stand the idea of her amazing cool perfect gf sitting in a hot metal box Chinese for Dummies: reader spends months planning a surprise for alysa just for alysa to accuse her of cheating... lesbians amirite? Drop Dead: popstar!reader is inspired to write the song drop dead bc of a rlly good first date she has w alysa Drop Dead Unofficial Music Video: pt 2 of drop dead alysa rlly likes the idea of everyone knowing shes someone's muse

Series Masterlists:

Local Idiot and Olympian: reader feels silly because she didnt know how cool her new friend is (4 parts) Loser in Love: emotionally constipated alysa has to figure out what she did wrong before reader leaves her (6 parts) My Own Worst Enemy: reader doesnt know shes dating spiderman and the headache that causes everyone involved (on going) Kiss it Better: maybe alysa can save reader from the evil coaches w kisses???

Blurbs:

At first she refused in the only way she could manage in that moment: flatly, repeatedly, with the kind of stubbornness that came from panic rather than attitude. She was in the locker room half out of her warm-ups, hair sticking to the damp back of her neck, still feeling the phantom weight of your hand in hers, when the first round of people tried reasoning with her.

Team USA leadership was gentle about it, but firm in the way people get when they have already decided what the sensible option is and are just waiting for you to catch up. Her own coaches were worse only because they were the ones she trusted enough to hear.

“Alysa,” Philip said, crouched in front of her while she sat hunched over on the bench with both hands locked together so tightly her knuckles had gone pale, “there is nothing you can do for her this second.”

Alysa shook her head immediately, eyes fixed on the floor because if she looked at anyone she might start yelling again. “I’m not going out there,” she said. Her voice came out hoarse, scraped raw from the corridor. “I’m not skating while she’s—” She couldn’t even finish it. The image of you on the ice kept cutting through every sentence before it could land.

Massimo, standing off to the side with his arms crossed, softened his voice in a way that only made the whole thing feel more unbearable. “They’ve already confirmed the concussion,” he told her carefully. “They’re taking her to the hospital because they need to rule out internal bleeding from the fall and get fluids into her. You cannot go in the ambulance. You cannot sit in on the scans. You will only be waiting somewhere else.”

It was rational. Cruelly rational. Alysa hated that everyone around her was making sense because she knew they were right, technically. She knew that if she tore out of the venue now she would still just be standing in another hallway, barred from another room, useless in another building. But none of that touched the actual feeling in her chest, which was simple and devastating and impossible to argue with. You were hurt, you were scared, you had gone down hard enough to need a hospital, and she was supposed to go lace up and do her own run-through like the world had not just split open.

What made her cave wasn’t acceptance so much as logistics. Once it was confirmed that you were being transferred out, once it was made unavoidably clear that you were gone from the grounds and she would not be allowed near you until the worst of the testing was over, something in Alysa’s resistance flattened into a kind of numb, unwilling practicality. She still didn’t want to do it. She wanted to be furious, to keep pacing, to somehow break the day apart until it rearranged itself into something normal again. She wanted to walk out into the hall and find you upright and annoyed and intact, rubbing at a sore shoulder maybe, but alive in the easy ordinary way that would make all this panic retroactively ridiculous. She wanted you off the ice and waiting for her, tucked into one of those stiff venue chairs with your bag at your feet and your jacket half zipped, ready to roll your eyes fondly when she came over and ask if she was done so you two could just go back to the dorm together. She wanted normal with a desperation that almost embarrassed her.

Instead she had a confirmed concussion, the phrase internal bleeding hanging in the air like a threat, and people gently corralling her toward her own session because the schedule would not stop for heartbreak. So Alysa nodded once without really meaning to, stared at the wall a second longer, then pushed herself up.

“Fine,” she said, though nothing about her sounded fine. “I’ll do the practice.”

Philip touched the back of her neck briefly, that quiet reassuring gesture he used when he knew there was nothing useful left to say. “Then the second you’re done,” he said, “we go.”

———

The rink felt different when she stepped back into it, as if the whole building had shifted in her absence and was now pretending not to stare too obviously at the damage left behind. Everyone knew, word traveled fast in skating, and this was the Olympics and you were not just another skater and Alysa was not just another skater and the two of you were enough of a known fact within the circuit that people did not have to ask outright to understand what this meant. Her friends on the ice didn’t crowd her. That, more than anything, told her how bad she looked. Amber glanced at her once from across the boards with something open and aching in her face before carefully turning away. Ilia, who dropped by, gave her one of those stiff nods people do when they are trying to offer support without turning you into a spectacle. The foreign skaters were nearby at one point and all looked like they wanted to say something, decided against it, and let their concern stay in their eyes instead. Alysa was grateful for that. She could not have handled words right then. Words would have made it real in a way she was barely surviving already. So she skated. Or at least she moved across the ice in the shape of skating.

The whole session passed in fragments. Her body knew the drills with her legs pushing when they were supposed to push. She circled the rink, did the bare minimum asked of her, let the muscle memory built over years and years drag her through each required motion while her brain stayed somewhere else entirely. She wasn’t practicing in any meaningful sense. She was occupying space on the ice until she was allowed to leave it.

The thoughts in her head were now loud and disorganized and merciless.

Is she awake right now. Did she hit hard enough to damage something deeper. Were they still lying to the doctors. What exactly had the medics written down. Why didn’t I make a bigger scene sooner. Why did I let their excuses and your pleading and all those nights you fell asleep in my arms turn this into something I thought I still had time to fix slowly.

Every answer she came up with only turned back into guilt. She blamed your coaches first, correctly, viciously, but under that there was still blame for herself too, irrational and relentless. She had known enough. She didn’t know all of it, not the pills or the exact mechanics, but enough. Enough to be afraid. Enough to feel that something had been off for weeks. And still you had collapsed before she managed to drag real authority into it. She knew, rationally, that the fault was not hers but it didn’t matter. Guilt rarely cared about rationality.

When her music finally came on for the run-through, the first notes almost made her flinch. It was jarring, hearing the program start as if this were a normal training moment, as if she were not walking straight into a set of motions with the image of you collapsing still fresh enough to turn her stomach. She pushed off anyway. There was no grace in the decision. No brave inner speech. Just movement because everyone was waiting and because stopping completely would have meant thinking too clearly. The run-through was technically fine. Better than fine, probably, to anyone judging from the outside. Alysa hit jumps here and there, not with full conviction but with enough precision that her body could execute them without much help from her mind. She moved through the choreography with the strange detached quality of someone sleepwalking through something they had done too many times to need active thought. Everything came from muscle memory, from old pathways carved so deep they would function even while the rest of her was splintered.

And maybe that was what made it worse—that this was Promise of all programs. The one she had built out of leaving, out of loss. Out of the strange, painful love she still felt for skating even after it had nearly swallowed her whole. This program had always been about return, about finding her way back to the ice on her own terms, about choosing it again only once it stopped feeling like something that was being done to her. Usually that gave Alysa comfort when she skated it. Usually it reminded her how far she had come. But now, moving through it with you in the hospital and your collapse still living at the front of her mind, all it did was make your situation feel sharper, crueler. Alysa had gotten out in time. She had left, healed and come back when skating felt like hers again. You had never been given that chance. You were still being ground down by people who treated your body and your talent like things they owned and now Alysa was out here skating a program about survival and return while you had been pulled from the ice entirely. The irony of it sat bitter in her chest. Even the music, which usually steadied her, seemed to press on the bruise of it. This program was supposed to be proof that love could survive harm. All Alysa could think, as she moved through it half numb, was that you deserved the chance to find that out too.

She reached the last section of the program and suddenly all she could see was the shape of a skater standing in the middle afterward, unfinished in some spiritual sense even if the choreography had technically ended. And then she was the one in the middle. Standing where you should have been standing if the day had gone the way it was supposed to. The thought came uninvited and stupid and painful: you were not going to be allowed to compete now. The Olympics, which had been narrowing your life into one brutal line for months, were over for you in the emptiest possible way. For one second Alysa thought of your face when that reality landed, of the disappointment that would probably cut through the confusion once you were fully conscious and alert enough to understand. That thought lasted only a moment before something in her rejected it outright. She did not care about the competition. Let the programs burn. Let the placements vanish. Let every result disappear. She only cared about you being okay.

The crying came without permission. She ended the routine in the center and just stood there, chest heaving, staring at nothing. Then the tears were suddenly there, hot and humiliating and impossible to stop. Alysa covered her face with both hands almost immediately, wiping hard at her eyes because there were too many cameras, too many officials, too many people who could turn this into a moment and she could not bear the thought of that. Her shoulders shook once despite her best effort to hold still. The rink around her blurred. All she could feel was the old fear returning full force now that her body had stopped moving long enough for it to catch up. The memory of you dropping to the ice hit again with violent clarity, and with it the same sharp need to get to you, to run, to be by your side. Her chest tightened so badly it almost felt like she couldn’t get enough air in. She swiped at her face again and finally pushed herself toward the boards, blinking furiously and trying to make herself look less wrecked than she felt. Philip and Massimo were already there waiting for her, their expressions arranged into something calm enough not to make a scene and concerned enough that she nearly started crying harder just from seeing them.

“Come off,” Philip said quietly. There wasn’t even the pretense of more work to do. Alysa nodded once and gladly obeyed. She stepped off the ice with the miserable obedience of someone who had been holding herself together only because she was forced to and now no longer could.

She changed fast because urgency had returned now that there was something actionable again. Every second spent peeling off damp practice layers and yanking on clean clothes felt stolen from the place she actually wanted to be. Her fingers fumbled twice on a zipper because they were still shaking. Massimo fielded whatever needed fielding outside the immediate bubble of the locker room, and Philip stayed close enough that Alysa could feel, without looking, that he was keeping the path clear for her. Nobody tried to stop her this time. The second she was dressed and had her bag over one shoulder, she was gone and headed for the hospital. And even as she moved, that same awful mixture of dread and longing kept pressing against her ribs: the hope that you’d be awake, the fear that you wouldn’t, the guilt that she had not gotten you out sooner, the desperate childish wish that the whole thing might somehow undo itself if she just got to you fast enough. But beneath all of it was the simplest truth, the one that had cut through every other concern since the second you fell. She needed to see you. Needed to know you were still here, still reachable, still yours and hers and alive beyond the terrible machinery of the sport that had tried so hard to turn you into something breakable.

———

The hospital room was dim in a way that made everything feel quieter than it really was. One bedside lamp had been left on, casting a warm little pool of light across the sheets and the plastic rail and the clear line of the IV running into your arm. The curtain over the window wasn’t fully drawn, just parted enough for a sliver of cold evening light to leak through from outside, but it wasn’t strong enough to compete with the soft yellow glow near the bed. The rest of the room fell away into shadowed corners and low mechanical sounds.

Alysa stopped in the doorway for half a second after the nurse led her there, one hand still on the strap of her bag like she’d forgotten to let it go. She had gotten to you, finally, and somehow that didn’t make her chest unclench the way she’d hoped. It just made everything more real. You were awake, propped up slightly against the pillows, a little too pale under the dim light, your face stripped of makeup and sharp with exhaustion in a way that made Alysa’s whole body ache. There was a bandage near your temple, and the sight of it made something in her stomach turn over. She moved carefully at first, almost cautiously, because the last time you had really spoken you’d been furious and depleted and throwing your coaches’ words at her like stones you didn’t even have the energy to aim properly. Alysa didn’t know what version of you she was walking into now. She only knew that all the fear she had been carrying was suddenly trying to become tears the second she saw you upright and looking back at her.

Then you recognized her fully and lifted one weak hand toward her, and that was it. Whatever careful distance Alysa had been trying to maintain disappeared instantly. She crossed the room like something pulled on a string, fast and helpless and completely sure. “Hey,” she breathed, the word coming out thinner than she wanted. She took your hand in both of hers and bent over it immediately, pressing one kiss after another to your knuckles, your fingers, the back of your hand, because she was terrified of hurting your head and because this was the only place she could pour all that pent-up love and fear without caution. “I’m here,” she kept murmuring against your skin. “It’s okay. I’m here now.” Your hand was warmer than it had been in the corridor.

You gave her the best smile you could manage, small and tired and so painfully familiar that Alysa had to lock her jaw for a second to keep her own face from breaking apart. The urge to cry hit her hard enough to feel physical. It crowded up behind her eyes and sat heavy in her throat, because you looked sad and worn and fragile in a way she had never wanted to see on you, and because relief and grief were doing awful things to each other inside her chest. But she would not cry in front of you, not when you were the one in the hospital bed, the one with a concussion and bruises and a body that had finally given out under too much pressure. So Alysa swallowed it down and stayed anchored to your hand instead, kissing it once more before straightening just enough to look at you properly.

For a moment neither of you said much. Alysa stood close beside the bed, still holding your hand, and felt strangely unsure of what shape to take. She wanted to ask a hundred things at once. How bad is the headache. Did they tell you everything yet. Are you scared. Do you want me closer. Are you mad at me still. But all of those questions seemed too loud for the room, too demanding for the state you were in. So she just watched you, trying to read what hurt and what didn’t, how alert you really were, whether your eyes were focusing cleanly or still drifting with that awful dazed lag from earlier. You were the one who broke the quiet.

Your voice came out scratchy and soft, smaller than usual in a way that made Alysa’s chest tighten all over again. “I’m sorry,” you said. Alysa’s brows pulled together immediately.

“No,” she said, almost before you’d finished the first syllable, but you kept going in that same tired, careful tone.

“I know I must’ve worried you. And everyone else.” You swallowed and your gaze moved somewhere near your lap instead of to her face. “I’m not really sure what happened. I just felt so sluggish after the run-through and my legs were, like… really heavy. And then everything just kind of stopped for a bit.” The apology in it nearly killed Alysa. Even now, even after collapsing, after being taken off the ice on a stretcher, after ending up here. You were still apologizing for being the one something happened to. Alysa tightened her grip on your hand and shook her head hard enough that a few loose strands of hair slipped out around her face.

“Don’t apologize,” she said quietly, urgently. “Please don’t apologize. This isn’t your fault.” She leaned a little closer, making sure you were looking at her for this next part. “You did what you were told to do. You trusted people who should’ve been trustworthy. That’s not your fault.” You looked at her for a second, and she could tell you were holding onto every word, not fully believing them yet but wanting to.

Your mouth moved in a tired little line before you said, softer still, “I should’ve listened to you.” That would have been the easiest opening in the world for an uglier kind of person, for a pettier kind of love. Alysa didn’t even feel the temptation.

“No,” she said immediately. “That doesn’t matter. I swear, it doesn’t matter.” And because she couldn’t quite bear where her own mind wanted to go next—to all the ways she blamed herself too—she added, with a gentleness that cost her something, “I should’ve done more. But I’m here now, and you’re okay, and right now you just need to rest your head.”

You seemed to understand what she was doing for you there, even if neither of you said it aloud. Alysa wasn’t rubbing your face in anything. She wasn’t making this into proof that she had been right and she wasn’t touching the awful little landmine of I told you so because she would rather cut her own tongue out than make you feel smaller in this bed than you already must have. So instead she sat down in the chair beside you, still close enough to keep your hand, and let the room settle again.

After a little while you asked, almost shyly, “How did your run-through go?”

Alysa let out a breath that might have become a laugh in a less wrecked universe. “Didn’t really think about it,” she admitted. “I just wanted to get to you.”

You hummed at that, eyes dropping to where your fingers were threaded with hers, and the quiet that followed felt less uncertain now, more tired. Alysa didn’t push conversation because she could see the signs of the headache all over you. So she just stayed there, thumb brushing slowly over your knuckles, trying to offer steadiness rather than questions. She listened to your breathing and counted the rise and fall of it without meaning to.

And in the silence her own feelings kept moving under her skin in ugly currents. She felt sadness so deep it sat almost like nausea, fear still not gone even now that you were awake and under both of those, the anger. Her anger had not left. It had just gone quieter for the moment, settling into a simmer so hot and constant it felt fused to her bones.

When you spoke again, you still weren’t looking at her. Your eyes stayed on your joined hands, your voice low enough that it almost blended into the hum of the room. “I’m out of the competition.” It wasn’t a question but rather a fact laid between you. Alysa closed her eyes for half a second because she hated it so much what it meant. The sentence itself sounded in your voice subdued, like you’d already started turning it over in your head and were trying to make yourself accept it before anyone else could confirm it for you. She remembered California suddenly, so vividly it hurt—both of you up too late in bed talking about Milan like little kids planning a trip, tossing around schedules and outfits and silly things you wanted to trade in the Village, the actual excitement in your voice back when this had still been joy and not survival. She remembered how happy you’d been when the Olympic countdown got close enough to feel real. That memory pressed so hard against the sight of you here now that it only made the anger in her rise again, this grief sharpened immediately by blame.

Still, when she answered you, her voice was quiet and careful. “Yeah,” she said. “With the concussion… they’re not going to clear you.” She braced herself then, expecting the obvious next wave of tears, disappointment, some cracking open around the loss of it.

Instead you smiled. Or something close enough to a smile that most people would have missed it entirely. It was tiny, faint, crooked around exhaustion and if Alysa hadn’t known every shift of your face by heart she might have thought she imagined it. “It’s kind of a relief,” you admitted.

Alysa stared at you. “Relief?” she echoed, because the word felt so backward in this setting she needed to hear it twice.

You made that small humming sound, your neck too stiff to nod properly, and after a moment you said, “I’m too tired.” The honesty of it was brutal. “I’d just go out there and embarrass myself.” Alysa’s face tightened immediately at that, but before she could object you kept going, still in that low, almost thoughtful voice. “And now I’ll be able to watch and root for you without feeling guilty.” That got the briefest flicker of a smile out of her despite everything. The idea of you watching her, all your attention and love pointed in one direction without any of the usual twisted competition logic around it, tugged at something soft in her. But then you added, “Plus it’ll keep them off my back at least until Worlds.” And just like that the softness was gone.

Alysa went still, but not in the stunned way she had before. This was different because it was harder and sharper. Because even now—even after the hospital, after the collapse, after the concussion and the IV and the unmistakable proof that your body had been pushed far past its limit—you were still speaking about your coaches as though they belonged in your future. As if this had only bought you a brief pause from them, a few weeks of relief, before everything slid right back into place: next goal, next deadline, next competition. You’re talking about them as if of course you would return to them and of course they would still be allowed near you. The thought hit Alysa so hard it almost felt physical, like a clean strike right across everything raw and protective in her chest. You had already admitted it had gone too far. You had already ended up here, in this bed, because of them. So hearing you talk like there was still a way back to them felt almost unbearable, a slap in the face not because Alysa wanted to be right, but because she could not understand how the people who had done this to you could still feel normal to you. Could still sound, in your mouth, like something inevitable.

“No,” she said.

The word came out plain and calm, which somehow made it more serious. You finally turned your head a little toward her, brows pulling together in tired confusion. “What?”

Alysa didn’t raise her voice. That was the part she held onto with real effort. She would not argue with you in this room. She would not push you into another sobbing collapse. But she also would not pretend. “You’re not working with them anymore,” she said. “You can’t.”

You blinked at her like the sentence had arrived in the wrong language. “Yes, I can. I will,” you said after a beat, brows furrowing deeper. “What are you talking about?”

Alysa’s mouth tightened. The anger was there now, not at you exactly, but at the whole structure of this, at the fact that even in a hospital bed you still sounded half prepared to hand yourself back to them once the monitors came off. “No, you won’t,” she repeated, still quiet, still deliberate. “Not after what they did to you.” You opened your mouth, probably to argue and to say something practical and frightening like that you needed them or that Worlds was soon or that this wasn’t the time. Alysa saw it coming and cut in before you could get there, desperately. There was no pride left in her posture now, only fear. “Please,” she said, and the nakedness of the word hung in the room between you. “Please don’t do Worlds. Not with them. Just… take a break. Please. Until you feel like you again.” That was what she wanted most and maybe what she had wanted for longer than she’d admitted even to herself. Not just for you to leave them, but for you to return to yourself; for you to return to the version of you before the sport and those coaches and the last several months had wrung you dry. To the girl who laughed too much in California and got excited over stupid Olympic pins and fell asleep halfway through talking because she was content, not because she was collapsing. Your eyes softened at the edge then, not because you agreed fully but because you heard how scared she was.

You sighed, and it was such a tired sound that Alysa immediately regretted making you use even that much energy. “We’ll talk about it later,” you said. “When I’m out of here. When you’re done with the Olympics.” You were clearly trying not to argue too, trying to defer instead of fight. It should have comforted her. Instead it just brushed up against the next panic waiting in her.

“I’m not competing,” Alysa said. The sentence came out before she had fully checked it against reason. “I can’t. Not with you like this in the hospital.”

Your eyes widened, just a little. “What?” You sounded almost more awake for that than anything else. “Yes, you are.”

Alysa shook her head. “I’m really not. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do.” Her voice had gone stubborn again, that particular edge she got when emotion outran logic and she stopped caring whether the practical world agreed with her. “I just want you.” It was not a sensible conversation. Neither of you were in shape for sensible. You with a concussion and a headache and your whole Olympic dream abruptly cut off. Alysa with guilt and fear and fury making every thought come out too absolute. After a second, maybe you both realized that at the same time, because the tension in the room shifted from argument into something more exhausted and sad.

“We’ll table it,” you murmured finally. “Okay? Can we just be together? ” Alysa hated not resolving anything and leaving these huge things dangling. But what you wanted in that moment was simple and immediate and she could actually give it. You wanted her close. There was no argument in the world that would make Alysa deny you that.

So she did the only thing that felt right. She stood up, lowered the railing on the side of the bed as carefully as she could, and got as close as the bed allowed without jostling anything. Then she draped one arm gently across your waist, light enough not to bother the IV or tug at any wires, and rested her head on the mattress beside where you were propped up. It was not the most comfortable angle in the world, but the second she settled there and felt your warmth through the blanket, some small frantic part of her finally eased. You were close and alive and doing okay. Alysa kept one hand over yours and listened to every breath as if it mattered, because right then it did.

The sadness was still there, huge and aching. The anger too, simmering hot the second she thought of Elena and Martin and the fact that you had still mentioned them like an open future. But laid under all of it now was the oldest instinct she had with you, the one that survived every fight and every fear which was to stay and to give you whatever steadiness she could. The room stayed dim and quiet around you. Outside, the Olympics kept moving without permission. Inside, for a little while, there was only your body finally still for a reason other than collapse, Alysa anchored at your side and both of you too tired and too emotional to solve the rest of your lives tonight. So she didn’t try. She just stayed there with her arm across your waist and her cheek against the bed, close enough that if you shifted even slightly toward her, she’d feel it immediately.

The room had barely settled again before it started filling with officials.

It happened gradually at first, a quiet knock, then another, the sort of careful hospital-room choreography where everyone entering seems to lower their voice a notch out of respect. Alysa straightened from where she’d been folded against the side of the bed, her arm still draped lightly across your waist until the last second, and stepped back just enough to give them room without really leaving your orbit. The Team USA Chief Medical Officer came in first, calm and measured, followed by the U.S. Figure Skating Team Leader with a thin folder tucked under one arm and the kind of face people wear when they’re trying to keep something procedural from feeling cruel.

The bedside lamp still cast the room in that low amber light, making all their official seriousness look almost too sharp against the softness of the bed and the blanket and your pale face on the pillow. Alysa felt herself go taut the second she saw the folder because she already knew what it meant. Withdrawal official paperwork. The formal end of something you were supposed to still have in front of you. Even after you had called it a relief, even after you had admitted you were too tired to keep going, some part of her still braced for the sight of it to break you open because this was not just any competition being signed away with a borrowed pen in a hospital room. This was the Olympics. The very thing every skater grows up reaching toward, whether they admit it out loud or not. Alysa knew what it had meant to you because she had heard it in your voice before, in those rare softer moments when the future still looked bright and untouched. She had seen the hopeful look in your eyes when you talked about getting there one day, about what it would feel like to step onto Olympic ice, to finally have all those years of work culminate in something that big, that impossible, that sacred to people like you. And now here it was, not as a dream realized, but as paperwork at the edge of your hospital bed. All because the very people who were supposed to get you there safely had pushed you so far past your limits that your body had given out before you ever really got your chance.

That was the part that hurt Alysa most as she stood there watching. It wasn’t just that the Olympics were being taken from you, but that it made everything you had suffered through feel suddenly, cruelly pointless. All those brutal mornings and the hunger and the pain and all the ways you had made yourself smaller and harder and emptier in service of one shining goal. You had let so much be done to you because there was always the Olympics to justify it, a next milestone, a next thing to survive for. But now there was no next skate here. No short program tomorrow. And no chance to step out and prove that all the years and all the damage had led somewhere worthy of what they cost. It’s now just a form with a signature and a hospital room quiet enough for Alysa to feel the grief of it pressing in from every side. So yes, when the team leader explained gently that your name needed to be officially withdrawn before the start order for the singles short program was locked, Alysa felt the loss of it like a bruise being pushed on. She really didn’t care more about the event than your health, but she knew exactly what was being buried here with a few strokes of your hand. The version of this that you had once looked at with hopeful eyes and believed would be yours.

And still, you surprised her. You did not shatter or go quiet in that wounded, inward way she had half expected, as if the papers themselves might cut something out of you. You went strangely still, yes, and your mouth flattened a little, but when the team leader explained what had to happen, you only listened. You asked one or two small questions in that scratchy voice of yours, mostly practical ones, then took the pen they handed you and signed where they indicated with hands that shook only a little. Alysa watched your name appear on the line and had the unbearable thought that this should have been attached to accreditation, to starting orders, to the kind of Olympic paperwork people keep forever because it means they made it. Instead it was attached to your exit. Then you handed the papers back and apologized, because of course you did.

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” you murmured, and the whole room reacted to that at once.

The chief medical officer immediately shook his head. The team leader’s expression softened. “No,” he said, firm and kind. “Don’t apologize. None of this is your fault.” Alysa felt a brief, fierce burst of gratitude toward every adult in the room who answered you that way, because if she had heard one ounce of blame aimed at you after all this, she genuinely might have lost her mind again.

But it was when the USOPC Safeguarding Officer arrived that the air changed.

She came in with that particular calm that didn’t read as softness so much as training, someone who knew exactly how to enter a room where the wrong tone could send everything sideways. She introduced herself clearly, quietly, then explained in careful language that there had been allegations raised regarding medical neglect and athlete safety, and that certain protocols would now follow while those concerns were investigated. Alysa had a brief, ugly flicker of hope hearing it spoken so plainly. She wished it wasn't happening like this with you in a hospital bed, but she was glad that finally someone with authority was naming the thing for what it was. This was neglect and harm. This was going against safety. It was something damaging enough to require intervention. For a second she thought maybe this would be a relief to you too, maybe some part of you, buried under all the exhaustion and fear and conditioning, would feel the shape of a door opening. Maybe you'd hear it and understand that this was what safety looked like even if it showed up late and in an ugly form.

Then the officer explained, in the same measured voice, that because of the investigation your coaches would not be permitted access to you while this was ongoing. And Alysa watched your face shift in real time.

It wasn’t anger first. And it wasn’t confusion either. It was deep, immediate, involuntary fear. The kind that bypasses logic entirely and lands straight in the body. You looked up too fast, the movement making pain pinch visibly through your expression, and the fragile composure you had kept through the withdrawal paperwork vanished all at once.

“What?” you said, and the word came out sharper than anything you’d said since Alysa had gotten there. The safeguarding officer repeated herself, slower this time, grounding every sentence in safety and temporary measures and alternate support staff who would be assigned to you in the meantime. But you were already spiraling in a way Alysa knew, and knew too well. This was trauma, plain and simple. Years of it, probably. Years of being shaped by Elena and Martin, measured by them, hurt by them and then taught to call that hurt necessary. They had been there from the start of your career. They had attached themselves to every success, every milestone, every piece of progress until your nervous system no longer knew how to separate them from skating itself. To you, in this moment, they were not just two people being taken away. They were structure and routine. They were the system your body had learned to equate with survival, achievement, longevity, worth. Losing them did not feel, to the part of you that was panicking, like being rescued. It felt like freefall.

Alysa knew that feeling. She knew it well enough that watching it happen in you felt almost unbearable. She had lived inside her own version of it before she retired, had once defended the very things that were eating her alive because she did not know who she would be without them. It had taken her far too long to understand that the way she was training, the way she was being treated, was not sustainable and was never love. It had taken leaving, grieving, breaking her own heart a little, before she could accept that care had to mean more than what someone could get out of her on the ice. So she recognized exactly what was happening now as your panic sharpened and took on the frantic, cornered quality of someone trying to claw back toward the only system they knew, even as that system had nearly broken them.

You pushed yourself a little more upright despite the obvious discomfort and looked from the officer to then finally Alysa, your eyes wide and bright with that brittle kind of alarm that made Alysa’s stomach drop. “What?” you repeated, more breathless now. “No. They’re my coaches. I want to work with them still.” The officer didn’t challenge you directly. She stayed in that grounded tone and tried to explain again that the investigation had to proceed and that support would be arranged. But you were slipping faster now, words tripping over each other as your brain tried desperately to grab onto what felt familiar before it was taken away. “No, no, I—” You stopped and looked straight at Alysa then, and she knew before you even said it where it was going. “You did this, didn’t you?” Your voice cracked around the accusation. “You said something?”

Alysa opened her mouth, but you were already going, panic talking faster than thought. Panic was doing the talking now, but panic in the shape your coaches had helped build. All those weeks of telling you Alysa was making you weak. That she was softening you on purpose. That she got in the way because you were her competition and every bit of energy you gave her was energy taken from your skating. That she wanted you distracted, tired, emotional, off balance. In a healthier state you might have heard those things and rejected them. But trauma has a way of making the worst narrative feel suddenly plausible the second your foundation is threatened. And now here was Alysa, tied directly to the moment your coaches were being removed from your reach. So of course the fear turned toward her. Of course it made horrible sense to you, in that fractured second, that she was not protecting you but taking something from you. “Really?” you said, and now there was anger in it too, but helpless anger, the kind that belongs to panic more than conviction. “Why? Why would you do this? I need them.”

Alysa took one step closer to the bed and made herself keep her voice low, because the instinct to argue hard was there and she knew it would only make you panic worse. “You don’t need them,” she said carefully. “At all. Please, this is for your own good.” She meant every word, but even as she said it she could see how unreachable you were in that second. You weren’t hearing reassurance. You were hearing loss. This was control being stripped from a situation where you already felt out of control. What Alysa wanted for you was real safety and real love, the kind that cared about you beyond skating, beyond output, beyond usefulness. But abuse does something vicious to a person’s sense of safety. It teaches you to fear the wrong thing and blinds you to gentleness because gentleness feels unstable, unfamiliar, too unstructured to trust. So when Alysa stood there offering you the truth, you couldn’t reach for it while your whole nervous system was screaming that survival was being stripped from your hands.

You let out a weak, disbelieving scoff and looked away from her as if the sight of her hurt too much to process right then. “Can everyone just leave me alone?” you muttered, then louder, more frayed, “Please. Just leave me alone.”

The officer glanced at the others and gave a small nod. It wasn’t a refusal of what was happening, only a recognition that pushing further in this moment would do more harm than good. One by one, people started filing out. Alysa hesitated, rooted there by the bed for an extra beat because every instinct in her screamed not to leave you while you looked like that—pale, frightened, angry in the helpless way fear often looks angry. She knew, better than almost anyone else in that room, that your meanness right now was not cruelty but rather it was a trauma response. Your eyes stayed averted, your whole body drawn inward now, and she knew enough to understand when closeness was no longer comfort for the moment. So she backed away too, slower than everyone else, and left with that awful feeling of abandoning you even while knowing you had asked for space.

-------

The hallway outside was louder, harsher, all fluorescent glare and tension with nowhere to soften it.

Alysa had barely cleared the doorway when she saw them. Philip and Massimo were several yards down, squared off with Elena and Martin in a formation so tense it looked like it had snapped into place mid-conflict. Elena was furious already, her posture pitched forward, one hand cutting through the air as she talked in that clipped, poisonous way she got when her self-control was fraying. Martin was trying for composed but failing; there was a tightness in his jaw and shoulders that made it obvious he was just as desperate to get past as Elena was. Philip and Massimo were holding the line physically without making it look like a brawl, bodies placed just so, shoulders broad and still, not touching unless they had to but making it impossible to advance.

Alysa felt the temperature in her body change immediately. All the care she had just been trying to channel toward you, all the restraint she had used in that room, curdled back into something hard and dangerous.

Then the safeguarding officer stepped out behind Alysa and said, in a cool, formal tone, “Excuse me. You cannot be here.” Elena spun toward the voice, already halfway through an objection, and the officer kept going before she could build momentum. She explained the immediate restriction, the investigation, the fact that they should already have been notified of the no-contact order. That was when Elena exploded.

Her whole face twisted, all the polished professionalism finally splitting open to show the ugly underneath. She pointed one shaking finger straight at Alysa. “You,” she snapped, the word almost spat. “You did this.” And then she moved. She launched herself forward in that hot, impulsive way of someone who has lost all sense of optics. Massimo was on her in a second, one arm out to block, another staff member catching from the other side before she could get close enough to actually touch Alysa. Martin stepped in too, but whether to restrain Elena or keep control of the scene was impossible to tell. Alysa, for her part, didn’t shrink back, didn’t freeze. She didn’t even really think. The fury that had been simmering under her skin all evening rose so fast it almost felt cathartic to have the people it was aimed at standing in front of her finally. She stepped forward too, stopped only because Philip’s arm shot out across her middle.

“Alysa,” he warned, but it was already too late for warning. Everything she had been carrying—every bruise she’d seen on you, every late-night collapse into her arms, every meal missed, every cruel word thrown at you and then echoed back at her this morning, the sight of you on the ice, the hospital bed, the panic in your face when they were taken away—came tearing out of her in one blistering wave.

“You don’t get to act like this is my fault,” she shouted, her voice ringing down the corridor so sharply that people farther down actually stopped moving. “You did this to her. You did every single part of this.” Elena tried to talk over her, but Alysa was beyond letting anyone interrupt now. Her whole body shook with the force of it, hands open and flexing uselessly at her sides because if Philip let go she would absolutely lunge. “You starved her, overworked her, you kept pushing her when she was exhausted, and then when she collapsed you stood there and lied about it all like she did this to herself.” The last sentence came out ragged with disbelief, because even now that part enraged her fresh each time she thought of it. Elena’s face had gone mottled with anger, but Alysa didn’t stop. “You made her afraid of everything good,” she yelled. “You made her feel guilty for eating, for resting, guilty for loving me, guilty for needing anything at all. You kept feeding her this disgusting bullshit until she didn’t even know what was real anymore. I'm not the problem when all I was trying to do was keep her alive long enough to get out from under you.” Martin tried then, in that maddeningly controlled voice, to say something about Alysa being emotional and inappropriate and not understanding the demands of elite sport, and that was almost enough to send her physically over the edge. She twisted against Philip’s hold so hard his grip had to tighten. “Don’t you dare,” she snapped, face contorted with hatred. “Don’t you dare stand there and make this about skating. This is abuse. It’s cruelty.” Her voice broke and then sharpened again. “I hate you. I hate both of you so much. I wish you would just leave her alone. Just leave her the hell alone.”

By then her rant had become less clean, less organized, the accumulation of weeks and months spilling out in whatever order the pain handed it to her. “You took everything she was excited about and turned it into punishment,” she said, shaking all over now, tears stinging again because anger and grief were inseparable at this point. “She was happy to be here. She was supposed to be happy. But you turned it into this. You turned her into somebody who's sorry for collapsing because that’s what you’ve taught her to do, and you still think you’re the victims? You still think you get to stand here and be offended?” Elena was shouting back now too, something about Alysa meddling, about distraction, about how she had derailed your focus and poisoned your season, but Alysa barely heard the content because all she could really process was the sound of Elena’s voice existing at all this close to your room. “Shut up,” Alysa screamed over her. “Shut the fuck up. She is in there because of you.” And then, because fury had tipped fully into something feral and her body needed an outlet for it, she surged again. Philip caught her around the middle before she got more than half a step, Massimo and another official working at the same time to force Elena backward.

In the chaos of it, before the distance between them widened enough to make it impossible, Alysa did the ugliest, most impulsive thing she’d probably ever done in her life: she spat. It hit Elena square enough to land. The silence that followed was split-second and shocked. Then everyone moved at once.

Elena recoiled with a strangled sound of disgust and disbelief, wiping at her face furiously while shouting something incoherent. Martin lunged toward her, or maybe toward the officials, and was blocked. Philip hauled Alysa back hard against him, one hand hooked across her ribs and the other at her shoulder, while Massimo put himself physically between the groups with startling ease for someone not especially large. Hospital security, already alerted by the noise, arrived almost immediately and that finally shifted the balance from chaos into forced separation. Elena and Martin were dragged farther down one end of the corridor, still protesting, still insisting this was some kind of outrageous misunderstanding, trying to salvage authority even while being removed from the floor entirely.

Alysa was pulled the opposite direction, breathing like she’d run miles, still straining for one more second to get at them. She stopped only when the physical distance made it truly pointless. By then the anger was still roaring through her, but underneath it there was also the same unshakable truth that had driven all of it. This wasn’t about winning some hallway confrontation. It was about you. It always comes back to you. You in the room nearby, confused and hurting and still half-defending the people who’d broken you because that’s what survival had trained into your nervous system. You, who Alysa cared about enough that watching you unravel had turned her from one of the most carefree people in the building into someone who genuinely wanted blood for a second. That was the thing no one but a few people close enough to love you both would ever really understand. Alysa wasn’t yelling because she wanted drama. She wasn’t even yelling because she needed to vent. She was fighting with the only language left in her body because love had nowhere else to go when it got cornered by this much harm.

As the corridor finally settled into the aftermath, Alysa stood there shaking and breathless, hair a mess, face hot with the remnants of screaming, and felt the last ugly waves of hatred still breaking under her skin. She knew she had crossed lines. Knew spitting on someone was insane and childish and probably indefensible in any neat moral framework. But she didn’t care, like, at all. What she cared about in that moment was that they were gone, at least from this building, at least from your door. And even as Philip’s hand stayed steady on the back of her neck and Massimo muttered something low about her needing to breathe, Alysa’s focus was already turning back toward the room you were in, toward what shape your panic might be taking now, toward how to get back to you in whatever way you’d allow. Because beneath all the rage and all the destruction, that was still the center of her. She just wanted you safe. She just wanted you free of them long enough to remember what safety even felt like.

So she waited.

She waited because that was what you had asked for and because loving you had taught her by now that sometimes the hardest thing was not fighting for closeness but staying still enough to let you come back on your own. An hour passed strangely in the hospital, all stretched and blurred at once. Alysa stayed nearby. Phillip and Massimo stayed with her for part of it, then drifted just far enough away to give her the illusion of space without leaving her alone. Alysa hardly noticed much of any of it. She kept her eyes trained on the door, every now and then hearing movement inside and feeling her chest tighten.

She replayed everything while she waited. She saw your face when the officer told you your coaches would be kept away. She heard the fear in your voice when you turned on her. She remembered the way panic had made her look like the threat instead of the person trying most desperately to protect you. Alysa didn't hold that against you because she understood where it all came from. Still, understanding it did not make waiting easier. It only made her heart ache in a quieter, more helpless way.

When the nurse finally came to tell her you were asking for her, Alysa was out of the chair before the sentence had fully landed. She stopped herself at the doorway, though, suddenly careful again, aware that the last time you had looked at her you were panicked and accusing and terrified of what she had taken from you. But the second you saw her, your face changed so that the tightness in your mouth eased and your eyes softened with something closer to recognition than fear. Alysa crossed the room slower this time, and you reached for her before she could overthink anything. She sat down immediately, close enough to touch, and for a moment the two of you just looked at each other in the low hospital light like you were both trying to recalibrate after the violence of the day.

When you finally spoke, your voice was quiet and tired and stripped of all that frantic edge from earlier. “I know you weren’t doing anything with bad intentions,” you said. The words came haltingly, as if you had to feel your way through each one. “I know that.” Alysa’s whole face shifted at that. Some guarded part of her loosened. She tightened her fingers around yours and nodded once, unable to trust herself with too much speech right away. You swallowed, looked down at your joined hands, and then said the thing that mattered even more. “Just… be patient with me, okay? While I get better.” It was such a small ask compared to everything else, and yet Alysa heard all the weight under it. Be patient while I untangle this. Be patient while I grieve what I thought those people were to me. Be patient while I relearn what safety looks like.

Alysa’s eyes burned immediately, but she kept her voice steady. “I don’t care how long it takes,” she said. “I’m here. I’m always gonna be here.”

And for the moment, that was enough. It did not erase the trauma or snap anything neatly into place. It would take weeks before you could really name what your coaches had done as abuse instead of strictness, coercion instead of care. Weeks before the reflexive defending stopped. But right then your world had narrowed in the same way Alysa’s had. Down to pain, exhaustion, and the one person who still felt safe enough to reach for. You were focused on Alysa now, and almost immediately that focus turned outward. Because even bruised and concussed and reeling, some part of you was still thinking about her. About her competition. About what came next for her.

When Alysa hesitated around the subject of the Olympics, you caught it before she could even shape the words. You asked her what she was going to do, and Alysa was honest because there was no point pretending with you. She told you she didn’t know. That she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back out there. Alysa had become someone who only did things she was fully sure about, and right then she was sure of almost nothing except that she wanted to stay in that room with you. But she was also sure of one other thing, and that certainty sat deeper than all the rest, which was if you asked something of her, she wanted to give it to you. So when you made it clear, gently but insistently, that you needed her to finish this, that you needed her to skate, Alysa listened. Not because medals suddenly mattered more than they had an hour before, and not because she stopped being scared for you. But this was what you wanted and loving you had always made obedience in certain directions feel easy.

Alysa competed for you.

Once she said yes, that became the line she held all the way through the rest of the Olympics. Through the short program. Through the free skate. Through the cameras, the noise, the pressure, the thousand little demands that came with standing at the center of something as huge as the Games. Alysa kept you in her chest the whole time. It made everything simpler. She wasn’t skating for judges or skating for headlines or federation approval or even entirely for herself. She was skating for both of you. This was for the girl in the hospital bed who should have been there doing this too. For the skater who had been robbed of the chance to step onto that ice on her own terms. For the life you had both been trying to claw back from the people who had turned skating into punishment. That was what pushed her more than ambition did. Love pushed her. Love, and the fierce, almost unbearable desire to carry something through to the end for the person she loved most in the world. It changed the feeling of the programs. Alysa did not skate empty. She skated full. Full of you, full of grief, full of the need to make something beautiful out of what had been made cruel. And when she won gold, the feeling that hit her hardest was not triumph. It was relief. Vast, exhausted, almost dizzying relief. Relief that it was over. Relief that she had done the one thing you asked of her. Relief that she could stop splitting herself between performance and panic and turn the full force of her attention back where it had wanted to be all along—toward you, toward home, toward helping you heal.

Later, before the worst of your concussion eased enough that the light from a phone screen no longer made you miserable, you heard secondhand from her family and friends how often Alysa had talked about you during all of the interviews, speeches. She spoke about you in those glossy, triumphant moments when the world wanted to frame her gold as a singular feat belonging only to her, she kept finding ways to bend the story back toward you. She never did it in a way that exposed what you didn’t want exposed. She was careful with your privacy, always. But she still kept threading you into it, kept making it known in every safe way she could that she had not done this alone in spirit, that there was someone at the center of all of it. You found that embarrassingly sweet when people told you. More than sweet, really.

Moving in a way you didn’t quite know what to do with at first, because you were still relearning what it meant to be loved without conditions attached. When you told Alysa as much, told her quietly that it meant something to you, she only smiled in that shy, crooked way she got when praise made her blush and shrugged like it was obvious. And to her, it was obvious. Of course she had done it for you. Of course she had wanted to make you happy. Of course every medal in the world felt smaller than seeing your face soften when you realized how much of her heart she had carried out there. That was the truth underneath all of it. Alysa loved you in a way that made devotion feel less like sacrifice and more like instinct. And once the Olympics finally ended and the two of you flew home to California, that instinct had somewhere quieter to go. No more cameras. No more podiums. No more hospital corridors or Olympic schedules. Just ordinary days. And that, finally, was where the real healing could begin.

-------

Once you were home, healing did not arrive in any clean, inspiring rush. It did not sweep in and make sense of everything all at once. It came in uneven pieces, some so small they might have looked meaningless to anyone not living inside them. Alysa turned almost ridiculously hands-on once you were home. She tracked your headaches like they were weather alerts, lowering lights before you even had to ask, keeping the TV low, catching the moment your eyes went unfocused and steering you gently back toward the couch or bed before the pain spiked too hard. Recovery from the concussion came in increments. First the headaches stopped owning every hour. Then light bothered you less. Then the exhaustion started feeling like normal tiredness again instead of something frightening and bottomless.

She made sure your body was fed and watered with the kind of attentive, practical devotion that would have felt suffocating from anyone else. With Alysa it only took time before it started to feel safe. At first you resisted more than either of you talked about. You accepted water like it was some strange test your body had forgotten how to pass. You accepted food like it was a negotiation, sometimes finishing it, sometimes stopping halfway and insisting you were done even when Alysa could tell you weren’t. A second serving felt excessive and dessert felt illicit. Hunger itself had become so tangled up with guilt that even wanting something could make you tense. Mornings were often the worst. There were days when you woke before dawn and couldn’t fall back asleep, your body too trained to expect demands at impossible hours, so you’d end up pacing the apartment at six in the morning with restless energy you didn’t know where to put. Alysa would wake to the soft sound of your footsteps and find you in the kitchen or near the window, not upset exactly, but unable to settle. She never made a big deal of it, she’d just come up behind you, press a sleepy kiss somewhere easy like your shoulder, the side of your head, the back of your neck, and ask if you wanted tea or if you wanted to go back to bed and just lie there even if sleep never came. Sometimes you said yes. Sometimes you said no and kept pacing. But over time your body began to learn that dawn no longer belonged to somebody else. That no one was waiting to punish you for resting

And still, none of this was Alysa “fixing” you. That was never the full truth of it, and on some level both of you knew that. You were doing the work too, slow and often miserable work, the kind that did not look dramatic from the outside but cost a lot internally. Therapy helped, though even that was not a neat thing. Some sessions left you lighter while others left you raw and quiet for the rest of the day. Sometimes you came home and climbed straight into Alysa’s lap without saying much, and she understood that this was one of the days where talking had already taken too much out of you. Some days you cried out of nowhere because something ordinary had scraped against an old nerve. Sometimes you were angry in a directionless way, not at Alysa, or really at anyone in the room, but at the sheer exhaustion of having to teach yourself a different way to live. There were nights when you admitted, voice shaking with embarrassment, that you felt guilty about the investigation. Guilty that it was happening and that people were asking questions. You felt guilty that Elena and Martin might get in trouble. And then, because trauma is circular, guilty for feeling guilty at all, because some rational part of you knew what they had done and still your body reacted like you were betraying them. Alysa learned not to pounce on those moments with correction, even when she hated what your old coaches had built inside you. She did not say how can you still feel bad for them? even when some exhausted part of her wanted to. She understood that what you were grieving was bigger and stranger than just two awful adults. You were grieving your childhood, your idea of success. The version of your life where all the suffering had a point and all the control was leading somewhere worthy enough to justify it. You were grieving the lore of your own career. So when you said, tired and ashamed, that maybe they hadn’t meant it that way, or that maybe they had only pushed because they cared, Alysa no longer argued every time. She held you, rubbed your back, kissed your temple, your knuckles, the corner of your mouth. She told you softly that it was okay to be confused, okay to miss people who hurt you, okay to mourn a version of your life that was never actually safe. She kissed it better the only way she knew how, not because kisses solved anything, but because tenderness gave your nervous system somewhere else to live while the larger truths caught up.

Overall, the trauma showed up in mundane places more than anywhere else. In the way you’d pause before opening the fridge, as if you needed permission from someone no longer there. In how quickly your body tensed if you slept later than you meant to, even on days with nowhere to be. In how often you apologized for things that did not need apology. Alysa noticed all of it and each time, whether she spoke or not, she was reminded with a renewed, deep hatred of exactly what had been done to you.

The hatred did not burn as hot as it had in the hospital hallway, but it ran deeper now, more constant, because it had seeped into the ordinary fabric of your life. Any time you hesitated over food or water, any time you looked guilty for resting, any time your body reacted to safety like it was something suspicious, Alysa felt that same ugly certainty settle in her. She hated them for this and how they had trained your body against itself. Distance kept them out of the apartment, out of the rink, out of your days, but it did not immediately keep them out of your head, and Alysa hated them most for that. The investigation moving in the background made everything feel even weirder. Ugly and necessary all at once. You had to revisit things you did not want to revisit. There were nights after talking to officials when you cried from pure emotional exhaustion, and Alysa held you through those too. She never asked you to be brave in some glamorous way. But the truth was, you were. You were brave every time you told the truth, even when it made you feel disloyal. Brave every time you woke up beside Alysa and chose, again, not to turn away from the person your coaches had spent months trying to frame as your enemy. You had been trained, in a hundred subtle and not subtle ways, to resent softness, to mistrust love, to view Alysa as a distraction, a threat before your comfort. And still, every morning you went against that. Every morning you let her help. Alysa saw it and felt it every time you stayed in bed beside her a few minutes longer instead of leaping up. Every time you took the glass of water she handed you without flinching first. Every time you leaned into her touch rather than bracing against it.

As your body eased, Alysa began helping you find pieces of yourself that had nothing to do with skating or discipline or pain thresholds. She made your days wider. You went to the movies and sat in the dark with popcorn between you, Alysa glancing over every now and then simply because she genuinely loved seeing you react to things, loved the easy laughs slipping back out of you. You walked in the park slowly at first, then longer, the kind of aimless walks that had no training goal attached, no stopwatch or critique waiting at the end. You stayed up past nine because you wanted to, talking about stupid things, talking about nothing, laughing in that loose breathless way that only happens when nobody is trying to manage you. Alysa got you to eat sweets without commentary attached to them. Now it wasn't some dramatic act of rebellion, but as part of life—half a pastry stolen from her plate, ice cream melting too fast while you sat outside, dessert because it sounded good. At first each of these things felt small and weirdly difficult, little moments where old guilt still flickered. But Alysa met every hesitation with the same steady, unembarrassed reassurance until your body started learning a new pattern.

Then the findings finally came down, and your old coaches were banned officially. Permanently that the world seemed to tilt into a slightly more breathable position. It did not erase what they had done. It did not make your grief disappear or your healing linear. But it mattered to the both of you. It mattered that an institution had finally named them correctly and shut the door behind them. Alysa felt something unclench after that, something she had not fully realized she’d been carrying with her every hour: the fear that they might somehow still get back in. Once the ban was real, the hatred changed again. It did not vanish cleanly. She still hated them. Probably always would, at least a little, for what they had made you feel about yourself. But the hatred no longer ruled the room. And with that absence, the life in front of both of you got bigger. By the time you were six months out from the Olympics, summer had done some of its own work too. It had given you sunlight and time and days not measured by scores. Alysa had watched you return not in one grand transformation but in tiny unmistakable ways. You laughed more easily. Your shoulders stayed back instead of folding in. You moved through rooms like someone allowed to take up space in them. You were back on the ice by then with a new coach and choreographer, and the difference in you there almost hurt Alysa to look at sometimes because it showed so clearly how wrong the old life had been. You knew life outside of skating now in a way you hadn’t before. You had lived a whole summer where your body belonged to you and your joy mattered. You were beginning to understand, deeply, that skating could still be yours without devouring you.

One night months after the Olympics, the two of you were in bed talking yourselves toward sleep in the easy, stupid way couples do when the world is finally quiet enough to let silliness breathe. It was one of those conversations that started nowhere and kept mutating. You were laughing about dreams, but like, actual dreams, the ridiculous kind your brain invents at three in the morning, and you told Alysa about one where you were somehow on the moon and had what you were sure was the best movie idea of your life but were in full panic because there was no pen, no paper, nothing to write it down with before you forgot. Alysa, already half smiling into the pillow, admitted that she sometimes dreamed she was ruler of the entire world and had made you her co-ruler for no reason beyond the fact that it seemed correct. You laughed so hard at that you had to bury your face in her shoulder for a second. Then the laughter softened.

You went quiet in a thoughtful way, not sad exactly, just a little far away for a beat, and finally said, “You kind of already are ruler of the whole world, though. The way everybody loves you post-Olympics.”

Alysa shrugged against the pillow, as if the answer were obvious. “I don’t care about winning gold,” she said.

You looked at her and gave that small knowing hum that meant I know. Then, after another second, you admitted in a voice so soft it almost dissolved into the dark, “I had another dream too. I was competing my short program at the Olympics, but then the rink turned into a beach, so I never got my score.” You huffed a little laugh after saying it, like you were offering it up as something absurd rather than tragic, and you were not self-pitying when you said it.

But the image still hit Alysa somewhere deep and bruised. For a second she could see it too clearly because it did happen in a way. She saw you gliding out ready to begin, only for the whole world beneath you to change shape before you got the chance. It made her quietly, fiercely sad in a way she did not fully show. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at you.

“You’ll get a score one day,” she said softly. “Trust. I believe in that.”

You laughed under your breath and shook your head a little. “You believe in anything.”

Alysa smiled then, small and certain in the dark. “Yeah, I do.” Then, after a beat: “But I mainly just believe in you.” The room went quiet after that, full. It was the kind of silence that belongs to love when it has survived enough to stop needing to prove itself every second. You stayed there together in the dark, close and breathing the same air, both of you still brave enough to love each other after everything. And that was the thing that mattered most in the end—not that the fear had been small, because it hadn’t, and not that healing had been simple, because it wasn’t, but that every day since Milan, in ways tiny and enormous, the two of you had kept choosing each other anyway.

-------

You were back on the ice before the season started, and so was Alysa, but it felt different in a way that went beyond schedules or training plans. You were working with a new coach and a new choreographer, people whose presence didn’t make your body flinch before your mind had even processed them. The first few weeks with them were almost surreal for Alysa to witness because she kept waiting, at some low stupid level, for the old tension to reappear. It didn’t. Your new team was supportive in a way that seemed to keep surprising you too. They asked instead of demanded. They explained instead of demeaned. You set boundaries because Alysa had spent months helping you believe you could, but more and more you found you didn’t need to wield them like armor every second because the people around you were not trying to take pieces of you. More important than that, you had lived enough outside the rink by then to understand something much deeper than any coaching note could teach; skating was not the whole world. Results were not the whole point. You could love the feeling of movement again without attaching your worth to what some panel did with it afterward. Alysa saw that understanding take root in you and it made her feel almost absurdly proud. Proud in the quiet, overwhelming way that sits behind the ribs and makes everything look softened at the edges. Watching you change like that felt, somehow, like falling in love with you all over again while also realizing she had never once stopped.

One afternoon near the start of the new season, Alysa stood by the boards and watched you in the middle of the rink with your new coach. The air had that familiar sharp bite of an indoor rink, cold enough to sting your lungs a little if you breathed too deep, and the overhead lights glinted off the clean ice in long white streaks. Your coach had just stepped back after speaking to you, leaving you alone for a moment in the center while you reset. Alysa’s hands rested on the top of the boards and she found herself staring in that helpless, full-hearted way she still did with you. She had spent months looking at you like this, searching for signs without always meaning to. She would look for hurt, for hesitation, for the old instinct to fold inward and for that terrible hollowed-out look that used to live in your face when being watched felt like being measured. But that was not what she saw now. What she saw was you standing there with your shoulders easy and your chin lifted with a quiet kind of ease that still had the power to stop Alysa cold. You stood tall now. There was life in the way you held yourself again. No hollowness. You looked awake inside your own body. The contrast to February hit Alysa so suddenly it made her chest ache, but not with the old awful grief. This ache was almost lovely. It was the ache of seeing someone you love come back to herself one piece at a time and knowing you got to witness it. Alysa had wanted, for so long, to take everything bad out of your path by force. She wanted to take the fear out of your body, the guilt out of your throat, the shaking out of your hands, the old voices out of your head. She had wanted to absorb every hit for you if that was what it took. Wanted to strip away everything that had been assaulting you until all that was left was a life the two of you could actually share without flinching through it. She had learned, eventually, that love did not work like that. She could not pull every splinter out herself. Could not heal you by sheer will. But she could stay and she could love you in all the quiet practical ways that made safety real. She could help build a life wide enough that you could begin to breathe differently inside it. And now, watching you out there on the ice with no cruelty pressing in at your back, she felt something close to wonder. Healing hadn't made you into someone new, but it was returning you to yourself, and Alysa had always believed in that self with a kind of stubbornness that bordered on faith.

Alysa felt a surge of affection so pure it overrode every other impulse. She didn’t overthink it, didn’t weigh whether the moment needed words. There were no evil coaches to intercept her now, no atmosphere of fear to make your closeness dangerous. There was only the wide simple fact that she loved you and wanted to kiss you because she could. So she pushed off from the boards and skated toward you just as your coach drifted away to speak to the choreographer nearby.

You turned when you heard her coming and smiled immediately. It was not the careful smile you used to wear when you were trying to manage everyone else’s reaction to you. It was yours. Soft and genuine, reaching your eyes without effort. Alysa felt it like warmth. She didn’t waste time trying to invent some clever line because there was no need. She got close enough to touch, one hand settling lightly at your waist, and drew you in.

The kiss she gave you was soft and slow, unhurried in that way only safe love gets to be. Your bodies found each other naturally, skates angled close, breath mingling in the cold air above the ice. It wasn’t a desperate kiss, not like the ones stolen in elevators or tunnels under pressure, none of that old hungry need to take whatever closeness you could get before someone came to rip it away. It was something calmer and deeper than that, it was just love. Real love, the kind that survives the worst things and comes out more tender rather than less. Alysa kissed you like she had all the time in the world. Like the point of the kiss was not escape but presence. You kissed her back with the same easy certainty, and she felt something in herself go soft with gratitude. Because that's what this really was, underneath the sweetness of it is relief and bravery and love.

When you finally pulled back, your face had gone a little pink, and you smiled at her in that shy, pleased way that still got her every single time. Alysa just looked at you for a second, almost overwhelmed by how glad she was to have you like this again. You were alive in yourself, standing steady, smiling because you wanted to. You were not healed in some final permanent sense, because neither of you were naïve enough to think healing worked that way. Healing was still happening in those slow, ordinary ways that only became visible when you looked back and realized how far you’d come. But you were here. Steady in the ways that mattered. Softer without being diminished. Stronger without being hardened. Alysa had spent so much of the past year wanting to protect you from everything, wanting to stand between you and every sharp thing in the world, and maybe she still would forever. But here, now, she could see something even better than protection. She could see your own life returning to you. Your own appetite for the world. Your own willingness to believe there could be more for you than endurance.

And that was enough to make Alysa feel happier than any medal ever had. The old coaches were gone. They couldn’t hurt you anymore, couldn’t hurt anyone else again. What was left instead was the rest of your lives, the rest of your careers, and all the ordinary extraordinary time in between. And standing there on the ice with your mouth still soft from kissing her and your face open in that quiet, real way, Alysa felt the truth of her own heart with complete clarity. She believed in anything when it came to you. Believed in the stubborn way of someone who had seen you dragged through the worst of yourself and still get back up. She believed in your joy, in your future, in your softness. Most of all, she believed in the simple fact that you were still here, still reaching for her, still willing to love and be loved after everything.

———

And tho kisses can’t solve real world problems,,, I think it’s the love behind them that can lead to steps forward :))) the end

———

Tag list :P

———

Control had been challenged in public, however politely. You had chosen something joyful over something they could monitor. Worse, you had chosen Alysa, openly, more than once, and Alysa had been too wrapped up in how good it felt to really grasp what that would cost you after. The shift in the days that followed was so sharp it might have been obvious to anyone looking closely, but the problem was Alysa only got you in pieces now, and the pieces kept arriving after the worst of the day had already happened.

Your coaches tightened everything. The hours at the rink stretched longer and longer until time itself seemed to belong to them. Breaks disappeared—water breaks especially. Alysa didn’t know that directly at first, but she saw the evidence in the way your lips had started looking dry by evening, in the way you reached for water too fast when no one was around, in the faint dizzy lag that sometimes hit you when you stood up after sitting too long. Food also got worse. That part Alysa felt before she fully understood it, because meals together—one of the few ways she had been quietly protecting you—started vanishing. The first time you brushed one off, it was easy enough to explain. Training ran late. You were tired. You’d already eaten, supposedly. The second and third time, it stopped feeling incidental. Alysa would text asking where you were and get back some soft little excuse: with coaches, going over programs, need to stay at the off-site rink longer, don’t wait up. When you did sit with her, your body carried the tension of someone who felt guilty for being there, and the meal itself turned into a fight so subtle it was barely one.

You’d insist you weren’t hungry. Alysa would slide something toward you anyway. You’d pick at it, or stare at it too long, or snap in that worn-thin way people do when they’re too depleted to hide it properly. It started to build something in you that looked from the outside like resentment, but Alysa, even when it hurt, knew that wasn’t really what it was. It wasn’t true resentment of her. It was exhaustion with nowhere safe to go, frustration so constant it had to land somewhere.

Your coaches were isolating you from the one person who kept trying to steady you, and the sick irony was that by the time you got to Alysa, part of you was too wrung out to receive help without feeling cornered by it.

So, they fed you a story while they were doing it. Alysa didn’t hear the whole narrative, but she pieced it together because she knew how manipulation worked and because she could feel its fingerprints all over the way you started reacting to her. They told you this was because they cared about your career. They were only pushing because the Olympics demanded it and Alysa, at the end of the day, was your competition before she was anything else, she was a girl standing in the way of your highest possible finish, of your gold medal, of the version of happiness they wanted to dangle in front of you like a prize. They made Alysa into the problem because it was convenient.

If Alysa kept you fed, rested, calmer, softer, more human, then they could frame that humanity as weakness. If Alysa got between you and their absolute control over your body and schedule, then she became interference.

Under normal conditions you would have rejected all of it. Alysa knew this about you, she knew you never really bought their attempts to pit you against other skaters, never internalized their ugliest messages the way they wanted. But this wasn’t normal you. Lack of sleep had hollowed you out and the hunger had made everything feel far away and effortful. Dehydration put that strange glaze over your eyes by nighttime sometimes, the one Alysa would notice and then try not to let her panic show. Thinking critically took energy, and your body had been starved of energy for days. So instead of arguing with their story, maybe you just stopped fighting it. Maybe part of you let it sit there because pushing back against anything at all had started to feel impossible. Alysa saw the consequence of that, even if she didn’t have every sentence they were putting in your head. You started choosing them over her more often, choosing them in ways that felt unlike you and yet still passed just enough as plausible that Alysa kept second-guessing how hard to push.

More practice sessions. More debriefs. More “I have to stay.” More canceled meals. More evenings where Alysa sat with her phone in her hand staring at a message from you that was sweet on its face and cold in the space it created.

And every time you bent back toward your coaches instead of toward her, they rewarded it. Alysa could see that too. There would be a slight easing in Elena’s voice when you complied, a small approving nod from Martin when you chose the rink over the lounge, a little less tension in the air around you when you acted as though they were your first obligation. They were training you with relief.

The worst part for Alysa was how little she could do in real time. That helplessness had sharp teeth.

During the day, you were almost never truly hers anymore. You were being moved around, worked, corrected, watched. If Alysa saw you at all, it was often from across a hallway or in some passing transition where your smile arrived for her a beat too late because you were already so tired. Once or twice she caught you in the athlete lounge after what had clearly been a brutal day, and those moments were almost worse because they showed her exactly how much damage had accumulated by the time you got to her. You’d fold into her arms the second you were close enough, not graceful about it, just spent. Alysa would be sitting there with her phone in hand and suddenly you were sinking against her chest, your whole body giving up the act because it finally could. She’d wrap both arms around you on instinct and feel how slack your muscles were with fatigue, how overheated or shivery you seemed depending on the day, how badly you needed something she could not provide in one quick stolen moment. Sometimes other skaters would tactfully look away. Sometimes Amber, from nearby, would go very still with concern and then deliberately start talking louder to someone else to give you both privacy without actually leaving. And Alysa would sit there holding you, furious and frightened and trying so hard to keep her voice gentle. “You need to stop letting them do this to you,” she’d murmur into your hair, or, “This isn’t training anymore, baby.” And then inevitably one of your coaches would see you there afterward, soft and collapsed and obviously soothed by Alysa, and the next day would be worse. Alysa figured that out quickly. Every time she managed to catch you when you were breaking, they punished the break. So she got trapped in this disgusting calculus of wanting to comfort you and knowing that visible comfort might cost you later, except of course she wasn’t going to stop comforting you. She couldn’t. She loved you too much to leave you shaking through it alone just because your coaches were cruel enough to escalate when they saw you need someone.

———

By six days after Opening Ceremony, the strain had already turned into arguments. Three of them. All of them variations on the same ache.

Alysa would finally get you alone at night—the only time she really saw you anymore in any meaningful way—and try to talk, really talk, because the evidence was piling up in front of her and she couldn’t keep pretending it was fine. You’d be sitting on the edge of the bed tugging your sweatshirt off with slow, tired hands, or leaning against the bathroom counter while wiping off makeup, or already curled under the blanket with your eyes half closed, and Alysa would start carefully. “You barely drank anything today.” Or, “Why did Martin have you on the scale again?” Or, “You’ve got new bruises all over your legs.” And sometimes you’d try to brush it off, but you were too exhausted now to keep your old neat defenses in place. So the conversation would fray almost immediately.

“Can we not do this?” you’d ask, voice thin with fatigue.

Alysa would kneel in front of you or sit beside you and keep going because she was scared and because stopping felt like abandoning you. “No, because you’re not okay.”

Then your face would crumple in that way she hated most, sudden and defenseless, and tears would come before either of you could redirect. These weren't theatrical tears, but the quiet result of complete overwhelm—the feeling of your body simply giving up. You’d sob like someone whose nervous system had simply run out of room to hold anything else, and the second that happened Alysa’s whole posture changed. The argument ended there every time. It had to. She’d gather you up immediately, pull you against her, one hand at the back of your head, the other firm around your shaking shoulders, and all the righteous anger would collapse into helpless tenderness.

“Hey, hey, okay,” she’d whisper, because what else was there to say when you were crying so hard you could barely catch breath? “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” She still wanted to fix it. God, she wanted to keep talking, wanted a plan, wanted a concrete next step, wanted to force the issue before it killed you by inches. But when you cried like that and then clung to her with the last of your strength, none of that felt possible without becoming another person demanding something from you. So instead she held you while you begged her softly to stop.

“Please just hold me,” you’d murmur between breaths, or, “Lysa, let it go, please, it’s okay, I’m okay.” The last part never sounded believable anymore. You said it like a prayer you were too tired to believe but still too trained not to repeat.

And every time, before Alysa could steer the conversation back toward action, sleep took you. It was frightening how fast it happened. One minute you’d still be sniffling into her shirt, words slurring with exhaustion, and the next your weight would settle more completely against her as your body simply shut down. Alysa would feel it happen and go still, that awful mix of relief and dread washing through her. Relief because at least you were resting and you weren't upset anymore. Dread because you were always this tired now, tired past the point of choice, tired in a way that made real conversation almost impossible. So she let you sleep. She knew how little you were getting. She knew your coaches had you jumping the second they called, that if you missed them you’d pay for it in practice with extra scrutiny or worse. She’d lie there in the dark with you half on top of her, one of her arms going numb under your weight, and stare at the ceiling while anger moved through her in waves too big to do anything with at that hour.

She saw the result of what they were doing mostly at night: the puffy eyes, the trembling hands, the way you’d fall asleep before finishing a sentence, the brittle edge in you that had nothing to do with not loving her and everything to do with being pushed beyond what a person could carry. The thing that looked like resentment when you pulled away from meals or snapped at her was not really resentment at all, and Alysa knew that in her bones even when it stung. Your coaches were isolating you so thoroughly that even Alysa’s attempts to help could start to feel like one more demand. She understood that, though understanding didn't help make the hurt any less sad. So night after night she took the smallest role available to her. She held you. She kissed your forehead when you were already asleep. She whispered things she wasn’t sure you could hear—You don’t deserve this. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll figure something out.—and then stayed awake long after you were gone to the world, listening to your breathing and hating how powerless love could feel when the person hurting you still had more hours of your day than she did.

She could hold you through the aftermath. She could kiss some of it better. She could make the nights gentler than the days. But she could not stop morning from coming, could not stop them from reaching for you again the second the sun was up. And lying there with your weight slack against her, Alysa would feel that helplessness like its own kind of bruise, because she knew she was watching something precious unravel and still had not figured out how to pull you fully back from it.

———

By February 15, the room itself felt tense before either of you even said a word. It was still early enough that the light outside had that thin gray quality of morning in a city that hadn’t fully woken yet, but your day had already started long before Alysa’s had. You were up, dressed in layers for practice, moving around the room with that quiet, mechanical efficiency Alysa had come to dread—the version of you that looked awake only because you had forced yourself there. Alysa was still in bed, half propped against the pillows, watching through sleepy eyes as you packed your bag.

She noticed things automatically now. She saw the way you checked the contents twice, like forgetting something would cost you more than it should. Saw the way your hands paused every now and then as if your brain had to catch up to them and the hollowness under your cheekbones in the low light. She’d gotten so used to tracking your condition that it felt involuntary, like her body started scanning for damage before her mind did. You had already been awake because your coaches wanted you up earlier, earlier than necessary, earlier than kind, and Alysa hated the idea of your day beginning in someone else’s grip before your feet even touched the floor.

She was about to sit up and ask whether you were going to eat first before training, whether you’d slept at all, when one of your alarms went off from the nightstand. You had started setting four of them, all fifteen minutes apart, because if you missed the first one and didn’t get moving quickly enough, there was always fallout. Alysa knew that much. So when the tone cut through the room, sharp and irritating in the dim quiet, she reached over on instinct to turn it off for you.

She wasn’t trying to snoop, she just grabbed your phone with one hand, thumb already moving to dismiss the alarm, and the screen lit fully in her palm. There, right on it, impossible to miss before it disappeared under anything else, was a message from one of your coaches.

We have extra caffeine pills if you ran out of them already.

Alysa stared at it for half a second too long, long enough for the words to lose shape and then snap back into meaning with enough force to make her stomach drop. Something in her went absolutely cold. Up until then, even with everything she had seen, everything she suspected, part of the horror had still lived inside the vague language of overtraining and strictness and cruelty that could be waved away by people invested in pretending this sport didn’t eat girls alive. But this wasn’t vague.

This wasn’t just emotional abuse, just body policing, just controlled meals and withheld water and exhaustion being reframed as discipline. This was direct, tangible, chemical. It was them deliberately keeping you upright with stimulants while your body was obviously failing under the weight of what they were doing to it. Alysa sat up so fast the sheets tangled around her legs.

“What?” The word came out small at first, disbelieving rather than angry. You looked up from your bag immediately. Your eyes flicked to the phone in her hand, and she watched the exact moment you understood what she must have seen. You didn’t even ask who messaged. You just sighed, shoulders dropping with that tired inevitability of someone who already knew the path this conversation would take and no longer had the energy to reroute it.

“Nothing, Alysa,” you said, too quickly, too flatly, turning back to zip your bag. “It’s absolutely nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

That was the worst possible thing to say. Alysa was out of the bed before either of you seemed fully prepared for how fast she moved, the phone still clutched in her hand, her bare feet hitting the floor hard enough to make a sound.

“Do you not see what they’re doing to you?” she demanded. Her voice cracked on the edge of the question because it was no longer even a question. It was panic mixing with fury. Helplessness wound so tight it sounded almost strangled. She shook the phone once, not at you exactly, but at the room, at the evidence, at the fact of it. “Caffeine pills? Are you serious? Are you hearing yourself? Are you looking at this and telling me it’s nothing?”

You didn’t answer right away. You kept moving, which somehow made it worse, slipping your extra skate guards into the side pocket of your bag like the conversation wasn’t detonating the room around you. But Alysa could see it in you too now, the way your jaw had set, the way your face had gone blank in that dangerous, overcontrolled way it did when you were trying to hold too much at once.

She stepped closer, voice breaking softer and then sharper again in the same breath. “Please,” she said, and now there was nothing dignified left in her tone at all, just desperation. “Please, if you can’t stand up for yourself, let me do it for you. I want to talk to them. I need to fix this. I need to set this right.” She meant it completely. She wasn’t posturing anymore, wasn’t just angry in theory. This was a line crossed, destroyed. She had spent weeks trying not to force your hand, trying not to become another person demanding something of you, trying to work around the damage without blowing up your life or your Olympic preparation or your trust in her. But pills? Stimulants because your body could no longer keep up with the damage? Alysa could not stand there and do nothing. Not now. Not when the harm had become this literal.

And that was when you snapped. Not all at once at first, but with the kind of brittle break that had clearly been building for weeks under pressure too relentless to survive intact. You straightened slowly and turned to face her, though not fully. Your eyes skated past her shoulder, down to the floor, anywhere but directly into her face, because if you looked at her too long maybe you’d lose the nerve to say it. Or maybe some part of you knew what you were about to say wasn’t entirely yours.

“I tried, okay?” The words came out clipped and sharp, already trembling with more emotion than anger alone. Alysa froze, the phone still in her hand. “I tried to make boundaries because you wanted me to, and look what happened.” Your voice rose on the last part, not loud enough to be a scream, but loud enough to fill the room with something raw and ugly and undeniable. “They got stricter. They got worse. Everything got worse because I listened to you.” Alysa opened her mouth, but you weren’t done, not even close. The whole thing cracked wide then, every ugly idea your coaches had been feeding you, every exhausted grievance that had nowhere to go, every fear you hadn’t been able to name because naming it would mean admitting how trapped you were. It all came at once, and because Alysa was the person closest to you, because she kept reaching and pushing and trying to pull you back toward something healthier, it all landed on her. “And you keep hovering,” you said, voice shaking harder now, your hands fumbling uselessly with the strap of your bag because you needed something to do with them. “You keep fighting them and getting involved and acting like you know what’s best, and you don’t have to deal with the fallout after. I do.” Alysa stood very still, trying not to flinch, because beneath the sting she also heard the truth buried under the distortion. You were talking about fear and punishment. About being the one left in the room with Elena and Martin after Alysa had walked away. But God, it hurt. “This is my career,” you kept going, and now the rant had momentum, carried along by sleep deprivation and hunger and the kind of fatigue that strips the filter off everything. “Not yours. You don’t get to keep barging in and making things harder for me because you think you’re helping. Every time you push, every time you step in, every time you make some scene or pull me away or act like they’re monsters, I’m the one who pays for it after. Not you. Me.” Your eyes still wouldn’t meet hers. That hurt too, almost more than the words themselves. “You keep saying you’re trying to protect me, but all you do is make everything worse. You get in the way and then I’m the one stuck with them when you’re gone. I’m the one who has to train. I’m the one who has to hear it and fix it afterward.” By then your breathing had gone shallow, your chest lifting too fast under your jacket. “So stop,” you said, and your voice finally cracked fully. “Just stop. Stop pushing. Stop making this bigger. Stop acting like you know how to save me because you don’t.”

Alysa tried, in those first few seconds, not to take any of it straight into the heart. She really did. She had been afraid of this exact moment for weeks, maybe longer—the point where their voices would get so far inside your head that when the pressure finally needed somewhere to go, it would come at her. And because she knew you, because she had seen the deterioration up close, because she understood how exhaustion could twist blame into the nearest available shape, she recognized almost immediately that this wasn’t really you in full. This was fear and isolation. This was their narrative coming out of your mouth because you were too depleted to keep rejecting it. But understanding that did not make it painless.

The sting still went through her anyway, quick and deep, because part of what you were accusing her of touched the exact place she’d already been guiltily prodding in herself. She had inserted herself in your life. She had not been able to stop wanting you, stop reaching for you, stop grabbing any scrap of closeness the second you offered it. She knew that it was causing them to be crueler. She also knew she couldn’t regret loving you like that, couldn’t regret being there when you fell into her arms, couldn’t regret feeding you, letting you sleep, pulling you toward joy. That shouldn’t have been a punishable offense. It shouldn’t have been something anyone could weaponize against you. But here it was in your voice anyway, thrown back at her with all the misery of the last two weeks behind it. Alysa stood there feeling suddenly useless in her own skin, like nothing she had done had reached you in time.

“Baby—” she started, but the word died the second she saw your expression. You were furious now only because fury took less energy than collapsing, and even that seemed unstable, like one wrong response from her would make you break apart right there. So Alysa swallowed the rest. She knew if she pushed again, you would either cry or leave. Maybe both.

You chose to leave anyway. You grabbed your bag with jerky, angry movements and headed for the door before Alysa had figured out what to say that wouldn’t make it worse. “I can’t do this right now,” you muttered, voice low and wrecked and final.

Alysa took one step after you on instinct. “Wait—” But you were already yanking the door open. You didn’t even turn back. The only sign that any part of you was hurting as badly as she was came in the way your shoulders hunched for half a second before you disappeared out into the hall. Then the door slammed, loud enough to shake the room into silence. Alysa just stood there, phone still in hand. Her heart pounding so hard it almost made her feel sick.

The quiet afterward was horrible. It felt like staring at the aftermath of something that had broken while you were still trying to convince yourself it might be fixable. Because that was what it was, really. For the first time she felt, not just feared, that she was actually losing you to them. They had gotten between your mind and your instincts. They had made her feel like danger to you. They had turned the person trying most desperately to protect you into one more thing you had to brace against.

Alysa stood there for another few seconds, breathing hard, her own hurt trying and failing to compete with the larger, colder fear underneath it. Then something in her locked into place. This was the last straw. She could survive you being angry at her. She could survive you blaming her if that blame had been fed to you by people hollowing you out from the inside. She could not survive standing back while you took stimulants to stay upright for them. That crossed a line too clear to ignore. Whatever happened next, she was not letting you get hurt because she was too afraid of upsetting you.

So she went looking for Philip and Massimo. She found them fast because the day was already in motion, people moving through hallways with credentials swinging and practice schedules in hand, and Alysa must have looked bad enough that both of them stopped what they were doing the second they saw her. Philip’s expression shifted first, all business beneath the concern.

“What happened?” he asked.

And Alysa, who had been holding herself together by force for the last ten minutes, finally let the full scope of it out. Not in some neat report but in a rush. She told them about your weight loss, how tired you were, how your coaches had been restricting food and water, how they kept you up, how bad things had gotten. Then she held up the phone like evidence and said, “They’re giving her caffeine pills. Or telling her to take them. She’s barely sleeping, she’s barely eating, and now this.” Her voice shook once on the last part and she hated that it did. “She won’t listen to me anymore. She thinks I’m making it worse.”

Philip went very still in the way he did when something crossed from upsetting to actionable. Massimo swore softly under his breath, face tightening with the same alarm Alysa had felt that morning.

Philip didn’t waste time. “Okay,” he said, calm in the deliberate way people get when panic would only slow them down. “Then we go to the chief medical officer. We raise a red flag that something’s wrong and they’ll do a medical check on her.”

Alysa nodded immediately because it was something. She wanted a clean rescue, but at least this was something concrete. A step. A way to get another adult with authority to look at you and maybe finally see what she had been seeing at night in the dark when you were too tired to hide it. For a second she almost sagged with relief just from hearing a plan said out loud. Then Philip put a hand on her shoulder.

“We’ll handle this part,” he said. “You need to get ready. Official practice starts soon.” Alysa wanted to protest, wanted to say no, wanted to tell him she couldn’t possibly go skate now with her insides scraped raw like this. But he was right, and that almost made it worse. The day was still moving whether her world had just tilted or not. She had to let them take over because there was nothing else she could do right this second without making a bigger mess.

So Alysa handed the problem off with the sick feeling of someone placing glass into another person’s hands and hoping it didn’t shatter further on impact. Then she went back to her room, or maybe straight toward the rink, already running on fumes of adrenaline and dread.

She felt hopeless in a way she had never allowed herself to before, because for all her anger and all her protectiveness and all the small acts of care she had forced into your days, she had still reached a point where begging you wasn’t enough. She had begged. She had literally stood there asking you to let her help, asking you to open your eyes, asking you to let her be the one to stand between you and the harm. And you had looked at her with all that fear and exhaustion and thrown their words back in her face because you were too worn down to do anything else. That image stayed with her as she moved through the rest of the morning: you not looking at her, your voice cracking, the door slamming behind you. Under all the shock and hurt, what remained strongest was still the same thing that had driven every fight between you—love sharpened into urgency. Alysa did not want to ruin anything for you. She didn’t want to cost you your Olympics, your trust, your sense of control, whatever was left of it. But she wanted even less to stand by and let your body break under their hands. If stepping in now meant you would hate her for a while, then maybe that was the price. She could live with your anger. She could not live with your collapse. And with that awful compromise lodged in her chest, she kept moving toward the rink because there was no other choice, carrying the knowledge that even while she was lacing up her skates, somewhere else in the building wheels had finally been set in motion to force someone to look at you before it was too late.

———

They were too late, and Alysa knew it before anyone said the words out loud. Not in some clairvoyant way, but in the sick, instinctive way she had come to know your body almost better than her own these last few weeks. She got to the rink on time, did everything she was supposed to do, let her own routine carry her forward even while her mind kept trying to run back to the room you’d stormed out of.

Official practice was already underway, the arena loud in that strange half-energized, half-clinical way practice sessions always were at something as big as the Olympics—music clips starting and stopping, blades scratching over fresh ice, coaches clustered at the boards. Philip and Massimo had already spoken to medical staff, but whatever urgency Alysa had felt in her own body clearly had not translated with enough force on the other side.

You had been flagged, yes, they told them that much. They’d check after your run-through, since you were already on the ice.

After.

Alysa had heard that word and felt something in her chest sink. After was too late when a person was being held together by fumes and caffeine and stubbornness. After was what people said when they still thought there was a comfortable margin left before anything went really wrong. Alysa wanted to argue, wanted to grab somebody by the shoulders and make them feel what she was feeling, but practice didn’t stop because one person was scared. So she moved with Philip and Massimo toward the arena and stood by the boards, arms folded tight over herself, trying to act like she was simply another skater watching the session while her heart kicked much too hard against her ribs.

She found you immediately. Of course she did. You were impossible not to find now, her eyes always going to you first before they settled anywhere else. You were with Elena and Martin near the far side, your jacket zipped up, posture too neat, too held together. Alysa saw the med team approach Martin a minute later and pull him slightly aside, speaking low enough that the content was lost beneath the general arena noise. Martin’s head turned almost instantly toward Alysa and her coaches, his expression flattening in a way that made it obvious he knew exactly where this had come from.

Philip, beside Alysa, watched him and murmured, “He definitely knows it was us.”

Massimo let out a short, contemptuous breath. “Good,” he said. “Who cares if he knows.” Alysa didn’t answer either of them. She just kept staring, her face gone still.

There was no satisfaction in being right anymore, no relief in seeing someone else finally paying attention. Only the awful sense that all of this was moving slower than it needed to. That even with medical staff now aware, you were still out there. Still expected to skate. Still under Elena’s hand and Martin’s eye. The air in the rink suddenly felt too dry, too cold, too bright.

Elena leaned in and said something. Alysa couldn’t hear it from where she stood, but she didn’t need to. She saw the effect of it in your body immediately. You got smaller in that familiar way you had around her—shoulders drawing in by a fraction, chin dipping, every line of you suddenly more contained. You nodded once to whatever Elena was saying, obedient and exhausted all at once. Then you peeled off your zip-up, hands slower than they should have been, and the announcer’s voice cut through the arena to call your name, signaling your turn.

Alysa’s stomach twisted. She watched you skate out to center ice and take your opening position, music already beginning to rise around you, and for one fleeting moment you looked almost like yourself again once the movement started. The first elements were clean. The blade beneath you sure. There were flashes of your old sharpness, enough that someone who didn’t know better might think the fear was overblown, that maybe this was just another hard day and not a body approaching its limit. Alysa didn’t, or rather couldn’t, relax. The bad feeling had already settled in her too deeply by then, sitting just under her breastbone like a stone. She followed every move with a kind of hyperawareness that made her feel slightly detached from her own skin. Then came the programmed glide toward the boards, and because that part of the choreography brought you along her side of the rink, your eyes found hers for the briefest second.

It was only a second, barely anything at all, but it cracked something open in Alysa. There you were, gliding past the boards as the choreography carried you down her side of the rink, and for one breath of a second your eyes met Alysa’s. It should have been nothing more than that—just a glance, a familiar point of comfort, the kind of tiny grounding moment two people in love steal from each other without thinking. But Alysa knew you too well not to feel the difference immediately. Usually, when you looked at her during a program, even for the briefest second, something in your face softened. Not enough to break performance, but enough that she could see you register her, could feel that flicker of mutual recognition pass cleanly between you. This time it didn’t feel clean. Your face stayed composed in the careful, overtrained way it always did when you were trying to hold yourself together, but your gaze looked thin somehow, stretched and delayed, like there was a fraction of a second between your body arriving there and your mind actually catching up to it. It was as if you saw Alysa and did not know what to do with seeing her. And Alysa, standing there with her hands curled over the boards, only had time to register that something was wrong before you were already gliding past her, the moment gone almost before it formed.

Then you drifted nearer to Elena’s side of the rink, and Elena—who had absolutely seen that glance, seen whatever softness or instinct had pulled you toward Alysa for even that split second—cut through the music with one cold word. “Focus.” She said it sharply, not loud enough to draw attention from most of the arena, but with that specific clipped precision Alysa had come to hate, the kind meant to land deep because it was aimed at a wound somebody else couldn’t see. Alysa didn’t know exactly what the word did inside your head. She couldn’t hear the whole rotten narrative your coaches had been building in there for weeks, couldn’t know how Elena had spent days trying to recast Alysa in your mind as a threat instead of a refuge, as competition instead of comfort. Alysa didn’t know that by saying “focus,” Elena wasn’t really talking about the program at all. She was reminding you, in the cruelest possible shorthand, of everything she wanted you to believe: that Alysa was the distraction, Alysa was the enemy, Alysa was standing in the way of your success, Alysa was why you were suffering now. And because you were so exhausted, so underfed, so dehydrated and overspun by then, there was no sturdy wall left in you to keep those ideas out. So the second Elena’s voice hit, it threw you into that awful clash of instinct and conditioning. One part of you had just looked at the girl you loved, the person your body still reached for automatically no matter how badly others tried to twist that impulse. Another part had been trained, over and over, to hear her name like a warning. To associate her with consequences. With punishment waiting later. With guilt. With the possibility of being weak, distracted, not enough.

Alysa didn’t know any of that as it happened. All she saw was the physical result. The word hit you and your body answered before your face really did. You faltered—not dramatically, not enough for anyone who didn’t love you to panic, just the slightest visible disruption, a tiny stagger in your edge, a near-miss in the smoothness of your glide. Most people would have called it nothing. A normal wobble. The kind of inconsistency every skater has at some point in a run-through. But Alysa saw the way it traveled through you. Saw how the disruption wasn’t just in your blade for that instant, but in your whole presence afterward. Something in you had split open. From that point on, the program changed in a way she could feel more than explain. You kept moving, kept hitting the structure of the routine, but there was a lag to you now, a strange secondhand quality, like your body was still dutifully performing the sequence while your mind was trapped half a step behind trying to sort through too many conflicting commands. The softness of that glance at Alysa had not fully faded before Elena’s voice came down on top of it, and suddenly you were trying to skate through both at once—through love and fear, through instinct and conditioning, through the brief comfort of seeing Alysa and the immediate punishment of being reminded what your coaches wanted her to mean. Alysa knew that the second Elena spoke, your skating stopped looking inhabited. The shell of the program remained, but you were harder to find inside it. And that, more than the small stagger itself, was what made cold panic spread through her so quickly. Because Alysa knew the difference between you making a mistake and you disappearing from yourself in real time.

From that point on the program changed. You were a half-second behind the music in places. Your movements had that awful, lagging quality of someone trying to push through a fog their body no longer had the strength to hide. You finished the routine in the center and stopped there, chest rising, arms lowering. Alysa could already see it: the shell of you continuing because it had been told to continue, while the rest of you was somewhere farther away, slipping.

Elena called for you immediately, voice clipped and impatient, motioning you back toward the boards. Alysa waited for you to respond the way you always did. You didn’t. You just stood there for one extra second. Then another. Elena called again. Nothing. And that was when Alysa’s gut truly dropped out from under her.

The feeling was so sudden and physical it nearly stole her breath. Her chest tightened with such force it hurt, as if her body had already registered the fall before her mind caught up. She was moving before she consciously decided to move, already heading toward the rink entrance with her guards still on, the blood rushing loud in her ears. Somewhere behind her Philip said her name, maybe sharp, maybe trying to stop her, but it didn’t matter. Elena called out again, harsher this time, and Alysa had just reached the opening when your body folded. There was no graceful catching yourself, no stumble recovered at the last second. You pitched forward and hit the ice hard enough that the sound of it seemed to slice through everything—the music, the chatter, the scrape of other blades. Alysa felt it in her own body like a blow. A brutal, immediate pain flared through her chest, not literal injury but the kind of fear that hurts so sharply it mimics one. Her voice broke before she was even fully on the ice. She took off her guards so fast one of them was flown away toward the boards and then she was running, blades biting in quick desperate strokes, getting to you in seconds that still felt impossibly slow. By the time she dropped to her knees beside you, you hadn’t moved. Not at all. You were facedown and still, and for one hideous instant the whole arena seemed to tilt around Alysa. Other skaters were coming in too, concern drawing them toward the center before officials began waving them back, but Alysa barely registered anyone else. Her hands shook as she reached for your shoulder, careful and terrified at once, rubbing gently because she couldn’t bear not to touch you. “Hey,” she said, and her voice was nothing like her own, thinned out by panic. “Hey, baby.” No response. Her throat closed around the next breath and then she was louder, lifting her head toward the approaching medics. “Help! Please—”

They were already coming, fast now, crossing the ice with equipment in hand, and a few officials were ushering the other skaters away to clear space. Somebody told Alysa to move back. She didn’t. Or maybe she physically couldn’t. She stayed right there by your side, knees freezing through her tights against the ice, one hand still on your shoulder as if keeping contact alone might anchor you. Then, after another agonizing 4 seconds that felt much longer than that, you stirred. It was slight at first. A blink. A breath dragged in unevenly. Your head shifted. Relief hit Alysa so hard it almost made her dizzy, but it wasn’t clean relief, because you looked so confused when your eyes finally opened, blinking slowly up into all that bright arena light. “Hey, hey,” Alysa said immediately, leaning closer so you’d find her first before anything else. “You’re okay. Don’t move.” Her voice was shaking badly now and she knew it, couldn’t stop it. Your gaze found her but didn’t quite settle. It drifted, unfocused, then came back. Medics were beside you, one kneeling near your head, another already talking in the brisk calm voices medical people use when they’re trying not to pour urgency into a situation that absolutely has urgency in it. They asked Alysa to give them room and this time she shifted only enough to let them in, never fully leaving your side. One of them checked your airway and breathing first, speaking softly to you while another assessed where you’d hit and whether there was any obvious neck or spinal concern from the fall. They stabilized your head, hands firm and practiced, and started asking you simple orientation questions while watching your eyes carefully. “Can you tell me your name?” one asked. “Do you know where you are?” Another medic shone a light briefly into your pupils, watching the reaction, fingers at your wrist a moment later to check pulse. Someone else was already unzipping equipment, preparing more formal vitals. You tried to push up almost immediately, instinct stronger than sense, but the medic at your shoulder pressed you back down gently and firmly. “Stay with us,” he said. “Don’t sit up yet.”

And you, in the middle of all that, still went straight to apology. Your voice came out rough and dazed and so heartbreakingly automatic Alysa wanted to cry from the cruelty of it. “I’m sorry,” you mumbled, barely louder than the scrape of the medics’ gear against the ice. “I just slipped. Please let me do it again.”

No one answered that directly at first because they were trying to assess you, trying to get your attention to stay on them. “What year is it?” one medic asked. “Can you tell me what event this is?”

But you kept trying to return to the only thing your mind seemed to think mattered. “I can do it again,” you insisted weakly, not fighting them exactly but not really hearing them either. “Please, I can finish. I’m fine.” Alysa felt another stab of pain go through her, fierce enough to make her chest seize. Even like this, even half-conscious and confused, you were still trying to earn your way back onto the ice.

She moved one of her hands to yours then, your fingers freezing cold in her grip, and held on tightly. “Baby,” she said, voice low and unsteady, trying to draw your focus back to her. “You already finished. You did it. You were amazing.” Your eyes flickered toward her again. “Just rest right now, okay? Just rest.”

Something in the sound of her seemed to reach you where the other voices couldn’t. You looked at her, really looked this time, and the frantic edge in you softened by a fraction, quieted enough that you stopped trying to rise. Alysa kept holding your hand between both of hers, rubbing warmth into it uselessly, like maybe if she held you tightly enough she could stop all of this from getting worse.

Once the medics were satisfied enough to move you, everything sped up and slowed down at the same time. A carrier came out onto the ice, the sight of it making Alysa’s throat tighten all over again because it made the whole thing feel unmistakably real in a way even the fall hadn’t yet. The medical team coordinated calmly, talking through each step, maintaining stabilization as they prepared to transfer you. They fitted a cervical collar as a precaution because of how you’d fallen forward and because you’d lost consciousness, then log-rolled you carefully onto a backboard before lifting you onto the stretcher, each movement controlled and deliberate. You looked so small under all of it. Too pale. Too still between moments of groggy blinking. Alysa hovered as close as they would let her, answering what little she could when they asked about how long you’d been overtraining, whether there had been dizziness before, what she knew about your intake. Her answers came out clipped and shaky because her whole focus kept breaking apart every time your face pinched faintly with discomfort.

When they finally started moving you off the ice, wheels rattling once they hit the rubber mats beyond the boards, Alysa went with them without hesitation. Of course she did. No one was keeping her back now, and even if they had tried she didn’t think she could have stopped. She followed close enough to reach for your hand again the second there was room, her own pulse still hammering uncontrollably, that bad feeling in her gut now transformed into something even heavier and more terrible: the confirmation that her fear had been right, and that being right had not protected you in time.

The walk off the ice felt wrong in a way Alysa would remember later not as a sequence of images, but as one long, distorted sensation. The corridor behind the rink was bright and clinical and moving too fast around her, people stepping aside, doors opening ahead, medics speaking in calm, efficient voices that only made the panic in her chest feel louder by comparison. You were on the stretcher, pale beneath the fluorescent lights, strapped down more securely now and the brace at your neck making you look even smaller than you already had on the ice. Every few seconds she squeezed your hand gently just to remind you she was there, that you weren’t alone in this, that even if your eyes kept drifting half shut and your responses were slow and delayed, there was still something solid beside you. You gave almost nothing back except small things Alysa had learned to read anyway—the faintest twitch of your fingers, the slow blink when she said your name, the way your eyes found her and stayed there for one extra beat before sliding elsewhere again because even that seemed to cost too much energy right now. Alysa kept talking in a low, shaky stream she barely registered afterward, little scraps of reassurance spilling out because silence would have been unbearable.

“You’re okay,” she kept saying, though her voice betrayed how badly she needed it to be true. “I’m right here. I’ve got you. You’re okay.” She was so focused on you, on the frightening stillness of your body and the fragile evidence that you were awake, that she barely processed anything else. Not the footsteps behind. Not the fact that Elena and Martin were following too. Not Philip and Massimo moving off to the side with tense faces and clipped questions to whatever official had met them in the hall. Alysa’s whole world had narrowed to the hand in hers and the impossible fact that only minutes ago you had been skating and now you were here.

They reached a set of double doors with frosted glass panels, the kind that marked a threshold from public crisis into private medical reality, and that was where everything stopped. An official stepped in front of the stretcher and told the medics to continue inside, then turned to the cluster of people trailing behind and held up a hand. “Only medical personnel past this point.” Alysa blinked at him, not understanding for a second because understanding would mean letting go.

“No,” she said immediately, voice cracking on the word. “I’m coming with her.” The man’s expression softened in that rehearsed way people’s faces do when they’re used to delivering bad news kindly but firmly.

“You can’t. Not right now.” He looked past her then, toward Elena and Martin. “Same for you.”

Only then did Alysa fully register that your coaches were there at all, just several feet away, all hard edges and watchful eyes, suddenly reduced to the same powerless position as everyone else by the closed doors ahead. But Alysa barely had room in her for them yet. She turned back to you instead, leaning down quickly before the stretcher rolled any farther. Your hand was still in hers, limp and cold, and she pressed a kiss to your knuckles because she didn’t trust herself to do more without falling apart. “I’ll see you soon, okay?” she whispered, trying to smile and failing somewhere in the middle of it. You looked at her with those dazed, exhausted eyes and blinked once, slow and heavy. It was the smallest thing, but Alysa understood it for what it was—your version of okay, or as close to it as you could manage right now. Then the medics guided the stretcher through the doors and they swung shut between you. Alysa stood there staring at them as if the force of her wanting could make them reopen.

For a few seconds she didn’t move at all. She just stood in the middle of that hallway with the imprint of your hand still in hers and an immense, unbearable weight settling in her chest. It was too much feeling at once, too many things trying to occupy the same space in her body. Love so fierce it hurt. Fear so sharp it had made her hands shake. Desperation, because the doors were closed now and you were behind them and she could no longer see for herself whether you were all right. Her whole body felt wrong, wound too tight and suddenly abandoned by action. On the ice there had at least been things to do—run, kneel, hold, speak, follow. Here there was just waiting, and Alysa had never been good at waiting when it came to you. She could feel her pulse in her throat, in her temples, in the tight corners of her jaw. Her breathing came a little too fast, each inhale catching against something sore and brittle in her chest.

She might have stayed suspended in that terrible, helpless stillness a while longer if not for the voices off to the side. At first they were just another blur of sound in the corridor, low enough to disappear beneath the general bustle of medical staff moving in and out. Then one phrase cut cleanly enough through the noise that Alysa turned her head without meaning to. Elena and Martin had cornered another medical officer near the wall, not close enough to seem aggressive, just close enough to make sure their version got spoken early. And what they were saying—Alysa only caught pieces at first, but the pieces were enough.

“We told her to rest…” Elena was saying, her voice pitched into something practiced and concerned.

“She gets anxious before big events, and sometimes she overdoes it on her own. She’s been taking some caffeine pills because she gets nervous and wants extra energy…” Martin added something lower, calmer, more insidious because of how reasonable he sounded. “…appetite’s been off too, likely nerves. This first official practice is a lot, but she was fine before. There really hasn’t been an issue.”

Alysa went so still it felt unnatural. Then all at once she felt cold from head to toe. Not the normal cold of a rink hallway, not the stale chill of air conditioning against damp skin. Something deeper and sharper than that, like ice had been dropped straight into her bloodstream. Her fists closed so hard her nails bit into her palms. She could feel the skin there protesting and didn’t care. Her lip twitched once. Then her eye. It wasn’t dramatic from the outside, probably—just tiny movements in a face gone frighteningly blank—but inside her, something was building so fast and violently it was almost hard to track. Because Alysa knew what they had been doing to you. She knew it in the accumulation of bruises and the exhaustion you wore at night and the meals you stopped coming to and the way your body had felt too light in her arms for weeks now. She knew it in that text message still burned into her vision. She knew it in the scale, the water restrictions, the relentless practice, the lies they’d fed you until your own voice started echoing theirs back at her. And now, standing not twenty feet from the doors you had just disappeared through on a stretcher, they were lying. Not just lying to save themselves, but shifting it onto you. Making you sound careless, unstable, self-destructive by choice. Playing the part of concerned adults trying to manage a nervous athlete who had gone rogue with stimulants and stress.

Alysa hated them so suddenly and completely it felt almost animal. She was not a person who lived in anger. She had fought too hard to stop giving ugly people power over her mood, over her body, over her peace. She had learned how to laugh things off, how to shrug, how to stay light. Most of the time anger slid off her before it could root. But this wasn’t irritation. It wasn’t even normal fury. It was hatred with sharp teeth. It rose through her so fast it made her vision pulse at the edges. For one raw second she genuinely thought she could kill them.

She turned toward them slowly, but only because the force of what she felt had to gather itself somewhere before it could move. Elena was still talking, still wearing that awful polished expression—the controlled frown, the hand lightly touching her own wrist as if she were burdened by concern. Martin stood beside her in his usual measured way, solemn and careful and every bit as false. If you didn’t know them, if you hadn’t seen what they did to you when no one else mattered, they might even have looked convincing. That was what made it worse. They were playing victim now, or close enough to it. They were the responsible coaches. The people caught in a difficult situation because their athlete had, tragically, pushed herself too hard.

Alysa’s body moved before her coaches could fully stop it. One second she was standing there rigid with rage and the next she was launching forward, all that cold fury tipping into motion so abruptly it startled even her. Philip was on her almost instantly, clearly having read the shift in her posture a beat before anyone else did. His hands caught her shoulders hard enough to jolt her back. “Hey, hey—” he was saying, voice low and urgent, trying to anchor her. “It’s okay, she’s going to be okay.” But Alysa didn’t hear him. Or maybe she heard the shape of the words and they simply couldn’t compete with the blood rushing in her ears. She jerked against his hold anyway, trying to get at them, and that was when Massimo came in too, grabbing at her forearms, helping keep her from actually making contact. Elena had gone wide-eyed now, Martin stepping half in front of her with that same infuriatingly calm expression as though he were the aggrieved party here. That almost made Alysa lose it worse.

“This is your fault!” she screamed. The sound ripped out of her throat so hard it hurt. She was not elegant when she was this angry. Not controlled. Her voice shook and broke and still she kept going, straining forward against Philip and Massimo as they held her back. “You did this to her! You pushed her, you kept pushing her, you made her do all this and now she’s hurt and it’s your fault!” The words were loud enough to turn heads all down the corridor. Alysa didn’t care. If anything, some vicious part of her wanted people to hear. Wanted the nice, professional little story Elena and Martin were spinning to be shattered publicly. “How dare you lie?” she shouted, her face hot now, tears stinging unexpectedly at the backs of her eyes from the force of everything in her. “How dare you stand here and act like she did this to herself? You know exactly what you’ve been doing to her!” Elena opened her mouth—whether to deny it, deflect it, or tell Alysa she was being inappropriate, Alysa never found out, because the second she saw Elena trying to form another lie she surged forward again with enough force that Philip had to actually haul her back against him.

“Don’t,” he warned, breathless himself now from the effort of holding her, but Alysa was beyond hearing warnings. Her whole body had become one line of desperate, shaking fury aimed at the two people standing there pretending innocence while you were behind those doors being examined for damage they had caused.

“She collapsed!” Alysa yelled, voice gone ragged. “She collapsed because of you! Because you wouldn’t leave her alone, because you kept starving her and pushing her and drugging her so she could stay on her feet for you—”

“Alysa,” Massimo cut in sharply, not because he disagreed but because she was close to ripping herself apart trying to get through them. “Enough. Come on.”

“No!” she snapped, twisting again, but the word came out thinner than before, already fraying under the strain. Philip’s hold on her shifted from restraint into something more protective as the fight started bleeding out of her all at once.

That was the thing about anger that big—it burned brutally, but it didn’t hold forever, not when the person carrying it was already exhausted, terrified, and running on nothing but adrenaline. The second the immediate chance to get at them was truly gone, the whole force of it folded in on itself and left Alysa shaking. Her breaths turned uneven. The scream in her chest changed shape. She gave one last, useless jerk against Philip’s grip and then just… gave up. Her knees didn’t fully buckle, but the tension holding her upright did. She sagged back into Philip’s chest like her strings had been cut, one hand fisting in the front of his jacket because she needed something to hold and because if she didn’t grip something she thought she might fall apart right there on the floor. Philip’s hands moved immediately, one flattening between her shoulder blades, the other firm at the back of her head for a second in that grounding, almost parental way he had when she was too far gone to steady herself.

“Shh,” he murmured, softer now, his mouth near her hair. “It’s okay. Come on. Breathe.” Massimo was there too, one hand rubbing down her arm, the other briefly touching her shoulder, all his earlier sharpness gone because now this wasn’t about management, it was about keeping her from imploding. Alysa pressed her face into Philip’s chest and felt how badly her whole body was trembling now that the rage had nowhere to go.

When she spoke, it came out in broken, desperate little fragments she probably would have been embarrassed by any other day. “I’m scared,” she mumbled into the fabric of his jacket, voice so small compared to how loud she had just been. “I just want her to be okay. I just—” The rest dissolved. Philip kept rubbing slow circles into her back like she was something frightened he was trying not to startle more.

“She’s getting help,” he said quietly. “She’s getting help now.” Alysa clung to the words because there was nothing else to cling to.

By then she was too tired to keep fighting anyone. Too wrung out from days of alertness, from the collapse, from the helplessness of those closed doors, from the hatred that had just ripped through her so violently it left her hollow. So when Philip and Massimo steered her gently away down the corridor, she went. Not because she wanted to leave the doors that separated her from you, but because there was no strength left in her to protest. Her steps felt strange, unsteady, like she was moving through water. She glanced back once, just once, at the double doors, and the sight of them still shut made something ache so sharply in her chest she had to look away again. Behind her, Elena and Martin were still there somewhere, still playing whatever role they thought might save them. Alysa couldn’t deal with that again right now. She let her coaches guide her toward the locker room, one on either side like they were escorting someone barely keeping it together, which, at that point, they were. The anger was still in her, yes, simmering hot and poisonous beneath everything else, but it was drowned for the moment by fear and by the awful emptiness of not knowing.

All she could do now was wait. And Alysa hated waiting almost as much as she hated them.

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the cure by olivia rodrigo is sooooo good. it had nothing to do with the making of this story but i love promoting my girl... stream if u want another update from me LOL

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It was May, the city still clinging to that in-between feeling where everyone was pretending they hadn’t already started sweating through their nice clothes, the air sat heavy on your skin even after sunset, and Alysa looked entirely too calm about it. She always looked calm about most things.

She stepped out of the car in all black, button-up tucked neatly into loose trousers, her hair falling around her face in those soft, choppy layers with the blonde pieces catching under the hotel lights. She looked cool in that unfair way, like she had not thought about the outfit for more than three seconds and still somehow landed on something that made her look like the most interesting person in every room. Even her poses on the carpet felt like her, casual and slightly amused, as if she were letting everyone take their pictures but refusing to give the cameras too much power over her.

You, meanwhile, were already touching the back of your neck and muttering, “It’s actually hot. Like, sweltering hot.”

Alysa glanced over at you, her expression steady, mouth tipping up like she was trying not to smile too hard. “You look pretty, though.”

You stopped complaining immediately, which was exactly why she said it like that in the first place. Alysa said it close enough that only you heard, her fingers brushing the inside of your wrist before she took your hand properly. Her thumb settled against your knuckles and the feeling of her was steady, familiar. It was the kind of touch that made your whole body relax before your brain could catch up.

“You can’t just say that every time I complain and you want me to shut up.”

“I can,” Alysa said, eyes forward as photographers called her name. “It works.”

You rolled your eyes, but you were smiling when she guided you forward with her hand still wrapped around yours.

That was kind of your whole thing with her. Alysa had this quiet, unbothered center to her, like she could walk into any room, any rink, any press line, any overheated hotel lobby, and somehow not let it shake her. She wasn’t loud about taking care of you. She just did it with a hand at your waist when the room got crowded. She did it with a small tilt of her head when someone asked you a question you clearly didn’t feel like answering. And with a soft “you good?” murmured near your ear before you could even decide if you were. You weren’t helpless, not even close, but you liked letting her lead sometimes. You liked how naturally she made space for you and that she could tell when you were just being quiet and when you actually wanted rescuing.

And Alysa liked it too. She liked being the person you looked for first. She liked when you let her pull you through crowds, when you leaned into her side without thinking, when you handed her your water bottle to open even though you absolutely could’ve done it yourself. She teased you about it sometimes, called you dramatic or spoiled under her breath, but she always said it while doing exactly what you wanted.

The gala was beautiful in a way that made you understand why Alysa had wanted you there. There were photographers and donors and elegant little clusters of people holding drinks, but underneath all of that, it was still about skating. That was what made it different because it wasn’t one of those events where people recognized Alysa because she was famous now, because she had won, because her face had been clipped and reposted and analyzed until even grocery store cashiers had started congratulating her. This was a room full of people who understood what she had done. People who knew the hours behind it and knew the cold mornings. Understood the way a program could live in someone’s body for months before the rest of the world ever saw it.

You watched her get stopped by a little girl in a glittery dress near one of the display tables, the girl’s hair pulled into a bun so tight it made your scalp hurt in sympathy. She looked up at Alysa with this wide, nervous face and told her that she was the reason she wanted to keep skating. Alysa’s whole expression softened, she was clearly touched but subtle in the way most people wouldn’t have noticed; you saw the change because you were always looking at her. She bent down just enough to be closer to the girl’s height and listened like whatever the kid was saying mattered more than anyone else in the room. Your chest did that annoying thing where it got warm and full and almost painful. You loved seeing her appreciated like that where people weren't grabbing at her or treating her like some internet object people wanted a piece of. Alysa had earned every bit of that admiration, and somehow she still stood there in her loose black pants, nodding seriously at a child’s story about landing her first jump like it was the most important information she had received all night.

When she came back to you, you were smiling like an idiot.

“What?” she asked, suspicious immediately.

“Nothing.”

“No, that’s your face when you’re about to be annoying.”

“I just like you,” you said simply, acting bothered by the fact, because sometimes the truth was the most annoying thing.

Alysa blinked once, then looked away like she had somewhere else to put her face. “Okay. See? Annoying.”

But she squeezed your hand tighter anyways and tugged you closer. No matter how annoying your love—or like—confessions could be, she needed you.

Team USA eventually collected you both the way they always seemed to, little by little, until you were moving through the event in a loose pack with Isabeau, Amber, Madi, Ellie, Evan, Danny, Jason, and whoever else had drifted into orbit. You got along with them well, which still felt lucky even after the time spent with Alysa. Alysa’s skating life had existed long before you and would exist whether or not you were standing beside her, but no one ever made you feel like an accessory.

Alysa stood beside you through all of it, calm and cool, her hand never far from you. Sometimes it rested against the small of your back. Sometimes she hooked two fingers around yours while talking to someone else. Sometimes, when she thought no one was paying attention, she leaned close and said something entirely useless like, “Your hands are so warm,” or “I like this dress,” or “Can't wait to get you back to our room.”

“We're in public.” you chided her once, narrowing your eyes at her but the blush still crept up your neck to coat your cheeks.

“I still want you.” she said, barely moving her mouth because a donor was speaking three feet away.

You pressed your lips together, trying not to react which meant forcing yourself to not smack Alysa's arm in retaliation.

Dinner was somehow worse and better, because sitting down meant you could finally stop pretending your shoes were comfortable, but it also meant Alysa had direct access to you with fewer interruptions. You ended up tucked beside her at the table, your legs pressed up against each other under the tablecloth, Alysa's shoulder brushed yours every few seconds, her posture loose like she owned the chair and maybe half of yours too. You didn’t move away because why would you?

She leaned toward you while everyone else talked across the table. “You’re really pretty tonight.”

“You said that already.” You didn't flinch as you brought your fork to your mouth and didn't look at her.

“I’m allowed to say it more than once if it's a fact. A fact that is true, mind you."

You huffed, turning your face away before she could see how quickly she had gotten to you, but she saw anyway. Her smile sharpened just a little, pleased with herself, and she pressed her knee harder into yours under the table.

“You’re so annoying,” you muttered.

“Mhm.” Her mouth was near your ear when she hummed it, and the warmth of her breath against your skin made your fingers tighten around your fork for one embarrassing second. She sat back after, smug and relaxed, while you pretended very hard to be normal.

After dinner, when the plates had been cleared and there was that soft lull before speeches, you turned toward Alysa and started fussing without really thinking about it because you knew she would be called up on stage soon. Her shirt had wrinkled slightly from sitting, the black fabric creasing near the buttons, and one piece of her hair kept falling forward into her eye. You smoothed the front of her shirt with careful fingers, then adjusted her collar, then brushed her bangs away while she leaned back in her chair and let you do it. She looked absurdly content, eyes half-lidded, mouth curved in a small smile like she was enjoying the attention more than she wanted to admit.

“Hold still,” you murmured, your face scrunching in concentration.

“I’m literally not moving.”

“You have a weird way of breathing that makes you restless. Thought you should know.” The flatness of your tone makes Alysa roll her eyes fondly at you.

“My bad, thanks for letting me know. I'll adjust moving forward.”

You glanced up at her, unimpressed, and she smiled wider.

There were probably people watching. There were always people watching, especially now, but you forgot for a second because Alysa was looking at you like that, soft and openly amused, like the whole room had narrowed down to your hands on her shirt and your fingers in her hair. It was ridiculous, honestly. You were both twenty, maybe you were supposed to be cooler about love now, less obvious. But there were moments where it didn’t matter how careful either of you were. Alysa looked at you like you had hung the moon, and you looked at her like you were still trying to figure out how someone so steady could make you feel so dizzy.

Then Alysa, Amber, and Isabeau had to get up for their speech, and you instantly became the most embarrassing girlfriend alive.

Your phone was in your hand before Alysa even reached the front. You sat forward in your chair, recording like you were documenting a presidential address, the corner of your mouth lifting when Alysa adjusted the mic with that easy, slightly awkward composure she got when she knew attention was on her but refused to be weird about it. You kept your phone steady, but your heart went soft as Amber spoke about what Alysa means to her, about how Alysa taught her different things about skating that weren't technical and more about mentality. Alysa dropped her head slightly as the words entered the room and hung there in appreciation.

That was your girl. Your cool, annoying, gorgeous, secretly sweet girl who made you carry her purse and then stood in front of a ballroom blushing about how she helped her teammate develop a better outlook on skating.

———

By the time the event ended, everyone was tired in that overstimulated, dressed-up way where even breathing felt like effort. Back at the hotel, the group clustered near the elevators, a loose mess of garment bags, small purses, tired laughter, and people talking over each other about who was on what floor. Your rooms were scattered between ten and twelve, and you had long since given up on pretending you weren’t ready to get out of your dress and lie across the bed.

Alysa’s purse was still on your shoulder.

This had started earlier in the night when she handed it to you “for one second” and then somehow never took it back. It was a nice bag, obviously, but it was still her bag, and every time you tried to return it, she gave you this little look like you were personally abandoning her.

At the elevators, you lifted the strap off your shoulder and held it toward her. “Take your purse.”

Alysa looked at it, then at you. “Can you bring it up?”

“You have hands.” You said as you shook the bag in her face.

“Please?”

“No.”

“Pleeeease,” she repeated, softer, dragging the word just enough to be obnoxious.

You stared at her and she stared right back, completely shameless about the fact she was now doing those stupid puppy eyes that worked on you.

“Fine,” you said, pulling it back onto your shoulder. “But I’m only doing this because you embarrassed yourself by begging.”

“I didn’t beg.” You gave her a look, brow slightly raised and she gave in. Alysa’s eyes narrowed with a smile. “Okay, fine. Bet I still get to the room before you.”

You turned slowly. “What?”

She nodded toward the elevators like this was serious business. “I’ll make it there first.”

“You’re delusional.”

“Probably faster than you, though.”

That was all it took. Suddenly, the tired group became invested in a race no one needed to have. Evan laughed and immediately stepped slightly behind you like he had chosen his team. Madi, already amused, took Evan’s hand. Amber pointed at Alysa and told her not to start something she can’t finish. Jason looked between both elevators like he was watching a sport with stupid rules.

When the doors opened, you slipped into one elevator with Evan, Madi, and a few others, lifting Alysa’s purse slightly as the doors began to close.

“Don’t cry when I win,” you called.

Alysa stood in the other elevator with Danny, Ellie, Amber, Isabeau, Jason, and someone half-hidden behind Jason’s shoulder. She raised her hand in a lazy peace sign, face perfectly calm. “Don’t steal my bag.”

The doors shut on her smile.

Your elevator ride started normal. Everyone was laughing about the fake race, the speeches, how hot the ballroom had gotten near the end. Madi asked if you had gotten good videos, and you immediately said yes, maybe too proudly. Evan teased you for being obsessed with Alysa and you told him some people just believed in supporting their girlfriends. The little screen above the door ticked upward. Seven. Eight. Nine. Then, just as the elevator slowed near ten, your phone buzzed.

Lysa🤰

You answered with your victory voice already prepared. “Already calling to raise a white flag?”

There was a pause on the other end. Then Alysa said, very calmly, “Technically, this isn’t my fault.”

Your smile faltered. “What isn’t?”

“We’re stuck in the elevator.”

You laughed once because obviously she was joking. It sounded like a joke. It had to be a joke because Alysa said it like she was telling you they had taken the scenic route. “Yeah, okay.”

“No, like seriously.” Another pause. You heard muffled voices behind her, Amber saying something you couldn’t make out. Then Alysa came back, still dry as ever. “Please send help.”

The elevator doors opened on ten, and your body moved before your mind fully did. “Wait, actually?”

“Mhm. It just stopped.”

Your stomach dropped in such a clean, sudden way that for a second the hallway seemed too bright.

You turned to Evan and Madi, holding the phone against your ear. “Their elevator’s stuck.”

The mood changed instantly. Evan stepped forward, brows pulling together. “What?”

“Alysa’s elevator. They’re stuck.”

Madi reached for the button panel before the doors could close again. “We need to go back down and tell the front desk.”

You kept the phone pressed close as the elevator started descending. “Where are you? Like between floors?”

Alysa’s voice stayed even, but you could hear the difference now that you were listening for it. Alysa didn’t panic, but there was a tightness around the edges, a slight distance like she was paying attention to more than one thing at once. “I think around three? It stopped after two. Or before three. I don’t know, babe, I’m not the elevator.”

Despite everything, you huffed a laugh. “Can you not be funny right now?”

“I’m trapped. This is all I have.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Everyone’s okay.”

You heard Jason’s voice faintly in the background, then Amber saying something that sounded like, “Tell them to hurry up,” followed by Danny laughing in a way that sounded slightly forced.

You swallowed. “We’re going down now. We’re gonna tell someone.”

“Yeah, okay.” A beat. “You’re winning by default, by the way.”

Your eyes widened. “You’re literally stuck in an elevator and still a sore loser I won?”

“I didn’t choose this outcome so you’re not really winning. It would be unfair to say you won.”

“You’re calling me to talk about fairness?”

“I called you because I’m the only one smart enough to call my girlfriend.”

That did something awful and tender to your chest. You tightened your grip on her purse strap and closed your eyes for a second. You needed to get her out. “Okay. I’ll call you back with any updates or I’ll text you so you don’t have to talk and conserve the air in there.”

“Wait, we can run out of air?”

By the time you reached the lobby, your pulse had gone from concerned to something sharper. You weren’t panicking outwardly: you could still walk, you could still explain the situation to the front desk with enough clarity that Evan and Madi didn’t have to take over completely. But inside, your thoughts had started stacking too quickly, one on top of the other. It’s fine. Elevators get stuck. People get out. It happens all the time. But how many people were in there? Was it hot? Was there enough air? Was Alysa standing? Sitting? Was she pretending to be fine because everyone else was there? Was she doing that stupid thing where she made jokes instead of admitting she was uncomfortable?

The front desk called a manager. The manager called maintenance. Someone led you, Evan, and Madi into a small security office where they could pull up the camera feed from inside the elevator. That helped for about five seconds, and then it made everything worse, because now you could see her.

The camera angle was terrible, slightly warped and high up in the corner, but there she was, standing near the back at first with one hand on her hip and her shirt already a little rumpled. Amber was sitting on the floor. Isabeau leaned against the wall. Danny seemed to be talking to Ellie, who had her head tipped back. Jason looked like he was trying to keep spirits up, because of course he was.

Alysa looked up at the camera.

Then, after one second of making direct eye contact with the lens like she knew you were watching, she lifted both hands beside her face and mouthed, very dramatically, “HELP. HELP.”

Evan and Madi burst out laughing, one of them already with their phone out to record. You also laugh, because it was funny. It was so Alysa that for a second your fear cracked right down the middle. She stood there in her all-black gala outfit, trapped in an elevator, still committed to being funny and a comedic relief. Then she dropped her hands and sat down beside Amber like nothing had happened.

You texted her immediately.

ur so annoying

A few seconds later, bubbles appeared.

Dying

Send help.

I love u

Your laugh came out weak, your knee bouncing under the chair.

don’t say dying

But I am… dying to get back to you. Please baby hurry I need u so bad rn

You stared at the message, horrified. Then typed back:

ALYSA

She sent a heart and like 10 memes.

The first fifteen minutes felt manageable because everyone kept saying it would be quick. Then thirty minutes passed, and the room inside the camera feed looked different. Not dangerous, not chaotic, but heavier. People had shifted lower, sitting or crouching. Amber had fanned herself with something. Ellie had her hair pushed back. Alysa had undone one button on her shirt, which annoyed you so badly you wanted to reach through the screen and undo another one yourself. Her hair clung slightly near her forehead. Every time she looked up at the camera, your chest tightened.

You weren’t an anxious person by nature. Not the way people used the word casually. You could handle crowds, interviews, travel stress, awkward conversations, bad weather, delayed flights, whatever. But this was Alysa. This was the person who usually made everything feel easier just by standing next to you. The person who put her hand on your back and guided you through rooms before you even asked. The person who realized when you got quiet and knew whether to tease you or leave you alone. The person who called you pretty like it was a true fact, not a compliment. That was why seeing her stuck on the security camera did something awful to you. She was your girlfriend trapped in an elevator, the one person who always seemed able to fix the shape of the room for you was suddenly somewhere you could not reach, needing something you could not immediately give her.

Your knee kept bouncing under the chair, and no matter how many times you pressed your palm over it or shifted your weight, it started up again, a quick, restless rhythm you could not fully control. Evan glanced down at it, then at your face. He didn’t say anything at first, which you appreciated, but he shifted a little closer and said, “They’re okay. It sucks, but they’re okay.”

You nodded quickly. “I know.”

And you did know. Logically, you knew that elevators stalled and maintenance knew how to fix them and people got hot and annoyed and then got out with a story they could laugh about later. It was not a disaster nor the end of the world. But logic felt thin and useless when Alysa was on the other side of a closed metal door with six other people, in a very hot May day, in formal clothes, with the air probably getting warmer by the minute. Logic did not stop you from thinking about the fact that if she had just stepped into the same elevator as you, she would be sitting safe and cool—literally cool and cold—beside you right now instead of turning it into a stupid race. Or even if you had gone with her, at least you would be in there with her. At least you could have pressed yourself against her side, checked her face yourself, made sure she was breathing evenly, fanned her with that event program before she had to ask anyone for anything. It would still be uncomfortable, still annoying, still hot, but she would have been close enough to touch, and that somehow felt like the only version of this you could have tolerated.

That was what made the helplessness sit so badly in your stomach. You knew it was not your fault the elevator broke and you had not caused it, knew you could not have predicted it, knew there was no rational reason to blame yourself because Alysa had chosen her elevator and you had chosen yours and it was supposed to be nothing more than a dumb little race to the room. But the guilt still found somewhere to land because Alysa so rarely needed you like this. Usually, she was the one who noticed the small things first like how she would notice when your voice got quieter around people you did not want to talk to. She noticed when you were warm before you said anything, when your shoes were hurting, She was the one who guided, teased, opened, carried, checked, steadied. So the first rare time she needed relief, the first time she was the one stuck somewhere uncomfortable, you were sitting in a security office with nothing useful in your hands except your phone. It made you feel ridiculous, because what did you expect yourself to do, pry open the elevator doors with your bare hands? But loving someone did not always make you reasonable. Sometimes it just made you sit there with your pulse in your throat, furious at the distance between you and the person you wanted to protect.

Your phone buzzed again.

U still have my purse?

You inhaled through your nose, half furious, half relieved.

yes idiot

Okay good. There’s water in there

The text made her discomfort become real in a way the camera had not fully made it yet. You had already seen the signs, even if you had been trying to file them under small so you would not spiral. Alysa had undone one button on her shirt inside the elevator, and that alone should have told you enough, because Alysa always buttoned her shirts all the way up. It was part of her look, part of that composed, cool little uniform she carried herself in like she was too relaxed to care and too intentional for it to be accidental. Seeing that top button open on the camera had bothered you before you knew why, because it was not something she did casually. It was a sign that she was warm enough to want relief, warm enough to loosen something she normally kept neat and closed, and now she was asking about water. She was trapped in a hot elevator and had started thinking about how dry her mouth felt, how long it might take, how uncomfortable her own body was becoming in clothes she had looked so effortless in an hour earlier. You froze. On any other night, you would have teased her for being a water connoisseur, and she would have shrugged like being hydrated wasn’t the hottest thing in the world. But now, staring at the little bottles in the bag, all you could think about was how badly you wanted to get them to her. The absurdity of it made your throat feel tight: the solution was right there, cold plastic under your fingers, and still completely useless because she was behind elevator doors you could not open. Water was such a small thing, but in that moment it felt enormous because it was the one comfort you could actually give her and even that had to wait.

ur thirsty?

Well yes... I’m just thinking ahead for when I get out unless u can teleport

She was trapped in a hot elevator and still somehow reaching for you, still trying to make the situation lighter from the inside, still taking care of you in the only way she could while you were supposed to be the one taking care of her. Your fingers hovered over the screen. You wanted to say something dramatic, something big enough to match the way your heart was acting, but all the options felt too heavy for a text message right now. You wanted to tell her that you loved her in the huge, ugly, terrifying way that made even forty-five minutes feel unbearable. You wanted to tell her that you did not like worlds where Alysa was uncomfortable and you could not reach her. You wanted to tell her that the thought of something happening to her made your brain go somewhere so dark and unreasonable that you hated yourself for even imagining it. There was the selfish fear underneath all the tenderness: who would look after you the way she did, who would make you laugh when you were trying to be mad, who would call you pretty like she was reminding you, who would you love if not her?

Instead of typing any of that, because you were still trying to be normal and because Alysa did not need a love confession while she was probably sweating through her shirt, you wrote the only thing that felt manageable.

i can try but in case i cant ill just wait here for u w ur water

Thank u baby

ofc 🙂‍↕️ i love u

I love u too ❤️ get ready to freak out after this 🤤

You put the phone face down on your thigh because your eyes were getting hot, even with her stupid text which made it genuinely humiliating.

The last fifteen minutes were the worst because everyone started moving faster but it still felt like everything was slowed down. Maintenance had gotten the elevator working enough to bring it down to the lobby, since it had stopped closer to the third floor than anywhere else. The manager kept explaining things in that careful professional voice people used when they knew a situation was stressful and wanted very badly not to be blamed for it. You barely heard him. You were already standing.

When the elevator finally moved on the camera feed, your whole body went still.

Evan said, “They’re coming down.”

The three of you went back toward the elevators, and the wait felt longer than the entire forty-five minutes before it. The numbers above the doors changed slowly. Three. Two. One. Lobby. Then the doors opened.

Amber came out first, flushed and laughing in that exhausted, disbelieving way people laughed after being miserable for too long. Isabeau followed, fanning herself with her hand. Danny and Ellie came next, both looking overheated and relieved. Jason stepped out with a hand to his chest like he had just survived some spiritual awakening.

Then Alysa.

Your body moved toward her before she had fully stepped out.

She looked rumpled and warm and a little dazed, her black shirt clinging slightly where the heat had gotten to her, hair messy around her face. Her cheeks were flushed, her bangs damp enough that they stuck where she pushed them back, and she still had that lazy little smile like she knew exactly how scared you’d been and was already trying to make it less bad.

“Hey, baby,” She looked like she was trying to make it normal for you before you could decide it was scary, her shoulders relaxed, one hand lifting slightly like she was greeting you after being gone for five minutes instead of forty-five, but the performance did not fully hold. Her voice gave her away, softer than usual and roughened at the edges from the heat, and when she swallowed, you could see the dryness in it, the small pause before she managed the smile again. The relief hit you so hard it almost made you feel weak. For so long, you had been sitting with her on a grainy screen, close enough to see and too far away to touch, and now she was in front of you again, warm and real and irritatingly calm, and something in your chest seemed to loosen all at once. You didn't cry or collapse into her or make a scene in the middle of the hotel lobby, but inside, it felt like the floor had finally stopped tilting. She was there. She was standing. She was looking at you like she already knew you had been seconds away from unraveling and was trying to smile you back into yourself before you could admit it.

You were on her immediately, both hands reaching before you even made a conscious decision to move. “Are you okay?” you asked, and the question came out rushed, too full, almost irritated with how badly you needed the answer. Your fingers brushed her forehead first, checking the warmth there before sliding into her bangs to push them away from her face, then down to her cheek, her shoulder, the front of her shirt. You were looking for signs faster than you could name them, taking in the flush across her cheeks, the dampness at her hairline, the way her black shirt sat a little less perfectly against her now, softened and wrinkled from heat and sitting too long in a stalled elevator. Alysa let you fuss because of course she did, because even when she was the one who had been trapped, she still understood that you needed to touch her to believe she was fine. She stood there with that dazed, lazy smile, eyes following your face like she was trying to reassure you without making a big thing out of it, and that somehow made you want to shake her and hold her closer at the same time.

“Yeah,” she said, still smiling. “Just really hot.”

“You only undid one button?” you said, horrified less by the shirt itself and more by what it meant, by the image of her sitting in there too warm and too stubborn to do more for herself.

Alysa looked down at herself like she had forgotten she was wearing clothes at all, then gave a small, tired shrug. “Drip over everything.”

“You’re so—” You cut yourself off and undid another, then one more, not enough to make it a whole strip tease in the middle of a lobby but enough that the collar loosened and the fabric finally stopped sitting so tightly against her. It bothered you that she had not done it herself. It bothered you that she had needed relief and had only taken the smallest possible amount, as if she had been more focused on keeping the mood light than making herself comfortable. Your hands moved quickly, almost impatiently, smoothing the loosened edges of her shirt away from her neck so she could breathe easier, and Alysa watched you with a look that was too fond for someone who had just gotten lectured by her girlfriend in front of half her team.

You pulled out one of the tiny water bottles, cracked it open, and handed it to her. Alysa took it with both hands like you had offered her the Holy Grail. She tipped her head back and drank the entire thing in one go, her throat moving as she swallowed. You watched her throat move as she swallowed, watched the flush on her cheeks start to look a little less alarming with every second, and your hands hovered near her without knowing where to land because every part of you wanted to help and there was suddenly too much to do with that want.

When she finished, she exhaled and blinked at you. “I need more.”

You already had the second bottle out. Alysa’s smile softened around the rim before she drank, and you hated how much you loved her. You hated that even overheated and wrinkled and mildly traumatized by hotel infrastructure, she still looked at you like you were the best part of her night.

You found the folded event program in your hand somehow, the glossy paper bent at the corner from how tightly you must have been holding it back in the security office, and without really thinking, you lifted it and started fanning Alysa. It was not much, not even close to enough after that much time in a hot elevator, but it was something, and that mattered to you more than you wanted to admit. You needed something to do with your hands that did not involve grabbing at her too much. Every part of you wanted to touch her, to press your palms to her cheeks and her neck and her shoulders, to keep checking the warm skin at her hairline, to hold her there until your body fully believed she was out and safe and not behind those closed doors anymore. But she was already overheated, flushed, visibly drained even with that lazy smile still sitting on her mouth, and the last thing you wanted was to crowd her when she needed air. So you fanned her instead, wrist moving in quick, determined motions, your eyes flicking over her face every few seconds like you were watching for proof that the color in her cheeks was going down, that her breathing was staying even, that she was not just pretending to be fine because pretending came easier than admitting she had been uncomfortable.

Alysa noticed immediately, her gaze dropped to the program, then lifted back to your face, and the corner of her mouth twitched in that familiar way that meant she was amused but also touched and trying not to make too much of either. “Don’t look at me like that,” you warned, still fanning her, your voice sharper than you meant it to be because the fear had nowhere clean to go. Alysa’s smile grew by the smallest amount, not enough to be smug but close, and she murmured that she wasn’t looking at you any kind of way. She was lying, obviously. She was looking at you exactly the way she always did when you got protective: soft-eyed, a little entertained, like she wanted to tease you but knew you were too wound up for it to land right. You narrowed your eyes at her, trying to make your face stern, but your hand kept moving, the event program pushing warm lobby air toward her open collar while she stood there and let you fuss over her like she knew this was the only thing keeping you from unraveling.

The group slowly drifted away from the elevator doors toward the lobby couches, everyone collecting water bottles from the front desk and talking over each other in that overly loud, relieved way people did once something was over enough to become a story. Amber was already recounting some specific moment from inside the elevator with dramatic hand gestures, Isabeau looked like she was trying to recover with dignity, and Danny was laughing with the tired disbelief of someone who knew the whole thing was going to be brought up for the rest of tour. Alysa moved with them, slower than usual but still acting casual, still carrying herself like she had simply been mildly inconvenienced instead of trapped in a metal box long enough for your brain to start inventing terrible endings. When she reached the couch, she dropped down beside Ellie with a heavy little exhale, her body loosening all at once against the cushions, head tipping back like the act of sitting somewhere open and cool was the first real relief she had allowed herself.

You followed her instantly, but you stopped yourself from folding into her the way you wanted to. Instead, you sat close enough that your knee pressed against hers, close enough that she could feel you there, but not so close that you trapped more heat between your bodies. It felt stupidly difficult, that restraint. You were used to being tucked under Alysa’s arm, used to leaning into her without thinking, used to her body being the safest place in whatever room you were in. But now she was the one who needed space and air, so you kept your hands busy with the program again, fanning her from the side while your other hand hovered uselessly near your lap. You wanted to touch her collar because you had undone it. You wanted to brush her hair away again because it was still sticking slightly near her forehead. You wanted to put your hand on her chest just to feel her breathing. Instead, you watched her carefully as she wiped at her face with the heel of her hand, then let her head rest back against the couch, eyes half-lidded but clearer than they had been when she stepped out. She looked better, but better did not erase the image of her on that security camera, trapped and mouthing for help like it was funny while you sat there unable to do anything but wait.

Alysa glanced at you from the corner of her eye, catching the way you were holding yourself back even before you fully understood you were doing it. That was one of the most unfair things about being loved by her: she noticed everything. She saw when you were trying to be good about something, when you were swallowing down your feelings to make things easier, when your body was asking for closeness but your head was reminding you not to smother her because she was already hot. Her hand, which had been resting loose against the couch, slid toward you and brushed lightly against your wrist, not pulling, not demanding, just making contact. It was enough to make your breath catch. “You can sit closer,” she said quietly, like she was giving you permission and teasing you for needing it at the same time.“You’re hovering."

You looked at her, the program still moving in your hand. “You were in a metal box for forty-five minutes. You're hot."

“I know,” Alysa said, and somehow, even exhausted and flushed and still recovering from elevator captivity, she managed to make it sound like a joke.

You gave her a look. “Like temperature hot.”

“Also know.”

You huffed despite yourself, and Alysa’s smile softened because she had gotten exactly what she wanted which was one tiny break in the worry. Still, you did not fully move into her space. You only shifted an inch closer, careful and conflicted, your knee pressing more firmly against hers while your hand kept fanning. The problem was that you wanted to do everything at once. You wanted to cool her down, give her water, keep her comfortable, ask if she was dizzy, ask if her head hurt, ask if she needed another minute before going upstairs, ask if she was sure she was sure she was okay. You also wanted to wrap yourself around her and not let go. Those wants pulled in opposite directions until you felt ridiculous sitting there beside her, stiff with restraint, trying to care for her without turning your fear into something she had to manage.

Alysa saw that too, because Alysa always saw the part of you that you thought you were hiding. Her fingers moved from your wrist to the side of your dress, then settled gently at your waist, not dragging you in all at once, just anchoring you there. She did not make some big speech about being fine. She did not laugh at you for worrying, even though you knew she could have. She just rubbed her thumb once against your side and said, “I’m okay,” quietly enough that it did not sound like a performance for everyone else in the lobby. It sounded like it was meant to reach the part of you still sitting in that security office, staring at the camera feed and counting the minutes. You nodded, but the motion felt automatic, not convincing. Alysa’s eyes moved over your face, taking in the furrow between your brows, the tightness around your mouth, the way your grip had creased the event program almost beyond recognition, and she added, softer, “I mean it. It sucked, but I’m okay.”

“I know.” Your voice came out smaller than you wanted it to. You hated that. “But still. That was so bad. I just hated not being able to do anything."

Alysa’s face changed a little, the teasing slipping away into something quieter. Her hand stayed at your waist, but her thumb stopped moving for a second, like she was really taking that in. “It was bad,” she agreed, which helped more than if she had tried to brush it off. “But you did do something,” she said, and when you started to give her a look, she lifted her eyebrows faintly. “You got people. You picked up the phone. You had my water ready. I’m out now. Don’t worry.”

You didn’t answer, because you were worried. Or maybe not worried exactly. The worry had already happened and now it had nowhere to go. It was stuck in your hands, in your chest, in the tightness behind your eyes. Your throat tightened, and you turned the program in your hand, smoothing the bent edge with your thumb even though it was already ruined. You could feel her watching you, waiting without forcing you to say anything else. She knew when to fill silence and when to leave it open. She knew that if she pushed too hard, you would retreat into jokes, and if she stayed soft enough, you would eventually give her the truth in pieces. “You’re usually the one who fixes stuff,” you said finally, still looking at the program because looking straight at her made the words feel bigger. “Or not fixes, but you know what I mean. You always make things easier. And then you were the one stuck in there and I was just sitting there watching you on some horrible little camera like an idiot.”

Alysa did not answer right away. She only shifted closer, the movement slow enough that you could have pulled away if you wanted to, then leaned her shoulder against yours. You looked at her then, and she was smiling at you, tired and fond and still a little flushed, her hair messy around her face in a way that made her look younger and softer than she had looked on the gala carpet. The sight of her like that made something in you ache, because she was so alive in front of you, so present, so frustratingly herself. You wanted to kiss her, but even that felt like a negotiation with your own worry. You did not want to take more from her when she had already been stuck and hot and touched by too many terrible minutes in a cramped space. Alysa, because she was impossible, seemed to understand the exact shape of that hesitation. Her eyes dropped briefly to your mouth, then came back up to your face, and her hand gave your waist the smallest squeeze. She did what she always did when she wanted your brain to stop running away from you.

She kissed you.

It was soft at first, her hand firm at your waist, your fingers still twisted in the front of her shirt. You leaned into her carefully, aware that she was still overheated, still tired, still probably wanting space and air. For a second, the restraint held. Then she tilted her face and kissed you again, a little firmer, still gentle but familiar enough that your whole body seemed to sigh into it. Relief moved through you in a way that was almost embarrassing, not loud or dramatic, but total. She was here. Her mouth was warm against yours, her hand steady at your side, her breathing close enough for you to feel. The forty-five minutes did not disappear, but they finally stopped happening to you.

When Alysa pulled back, you followed her by instinct, and she gave you one more quick kiss because she knew you needed it, because she knew you were not ready to be done yet even if you were trying to behave. Her smile brushed against your mouth before she leaned back just enough to breathe easier, and you let her, though your hand finally gave up and found the loose front of her shirt. You did not tug her closer. You only held the fabric lightly between your fingers, using it as proof, as an anchor, as the smallest compromise between touching her and giving her space. Alysa looked down at your hand, then back at your face, and she did not tease you this time. She just let you hold on.

“You good?” she asked, which was insane because she was the one who had just been trapped in an elevator.

You breathed out a laugh, shaky and annoyed. “I’m supposed to ask you that.”

“You did. Like twelve times.”

“Can I ask again?”

“I’m good.” Her eyes dipped over your face. “Are you?”

You opened your mouth, then closed it. The answer was mostly yes, now because she was looking at you with that calm, steady Alysa look, and her hand was on your waist, and the worst thing that had happened was over. But you could still feel the edge of it inside you.

Alysa didn’t make you explain. She just brought you in with the arm she already had around your waist. Alysa made the decision for both of you because she could tell you were still trying to be careful.

You let yourself go the second she tugged you closer because you could. Your head settled against her chest, careful of the damp warmth of her shirt, and Alysa’s chin came down gently on your hair. She was still hot, still recovering, still probably better off with no one clinging to her, but even then, she wanted you close. Maybe she needed it too, in that quiet Alysa way where she would never make a whole speech about being shaken up, but would pull you against her and keep you there like your weight against her body made the lobby feel less loud.

You turned your face slightly into her shirt and breathed her in, the familiar clean warmth of her mixed with the faint stale heat of the elevator, and somehow even that made you feel better because it was proof. She was under your cheek, real and solid, her breathing moving through her chest in slow, even rises, her arm firm around your waist. You could hear her heartbeat beneath your ear, steady enough that your body started to believe what your mind had been trying to force on it for the past several minutes: she was okay, she was out, she was here with you. The fear did not vanish all at once, but it stopped being so sharp. It loosened by degrees, unhooking itself from your ribs every time Alysa’s thumb moved lightly against your side or her chin shifted against your hair.

Alysa stayed quiet too, which said more than any reassurance would have. Her body had loosened under yours, the tension in her shoulders slowly easing, her breath coming more naturally now that she had water in her system and you pressed against her side. It made your chest ache all over again, realizing that even Alysa, with all her coolness and jokes and stupid little elevator-death comments, had probably needed this moment of being held just as much as you did.

Around you, the lobby had started to feel normal again in that messy, post-chaos way where everyone was still too wired to actually go upstairs. The hotel staff had finally backed off into professional apologies and quiet conversations by the front desk; someone had brought more water. Amber was laughing too loudly at something Isabeau said, the kind of laugh that made it obvious she was still running on adrenaline. Danny had taken on the tone of someone giving a TED Talk about emotional resilience in confined spaces, which seemed to be aimed at nobody and everybody at once. Madi was half-listening, half-checking her phone, and Evan kept glancing toward the elevators like he personally no longer trusted them. It should have been funny to you sooner, probably. The whole thing had enough absurdity baked into it now that the danger had passed—a gala, a fake race, Alysa’s purse on your shoulder, half of Team USA trapped in an elevator. But it took a minute for the humor to find you again. You were still too busy listening to her heartbeat, still too busy letting yourself come down from the private, awful spiral your brain had built while everyone else was trying to stay practical.

Then, slowly, because your body had finally stopped treating the situation like an emergency, awareness returned in pieces. After a minute, with the kind of delayed horror that only arrived once you were no longer actively worried about your girlfriend’s survival, your eyes shifted from the rest of the lobby to in front of you and remembered Ellie was sitting literally right beside Alysa.

Ellie was leaned back against the couch with her water bottle in hand, hair pushed back from her face, cheeks still flushed, watching the lobby with the blank, exhausted expression of someone who had just spent too long in a tiny metal room and was now being forced to exist near a couple having a quiet emotional crisis. She was not staring at you, which somehow made it worse, because the effort not to stare was obvious. She had absolutely been there for all of it. She witnessed you fussing with Alysa’s collar, the fanning, the kiss, the shirt-grabbing, and now the full head-on-Alysa’s-chest recovery period.

Your face warmed instantly, and you shifted back a little, not far enough to actually leave Alysa’s side because embarrassment was not stronger than your desire to stay glued to Alysa, but enough that you could pretend you had some awareness of public decency. Alysa’s arm stayed around your waist, and the tiny squeeze she gave you told you she knew exactly why you had suddenly remembered how to sit upright. You ignored her. Instead, you turned toward Ellie with the most casual expression you could manage while still basically tucked under your girlfriend’s arm. “You okay, Ellie?”

Ellie turned her head toward you, a little breathless, hair pushed back from her face. “Oh yeah. I’m good.”

You winced sympathetically. “How hot was it? Sauna level or less?”

Ellie made a face like she was considering it with utmost seriousness. “Ehhhh.”

“Sauna level,” Alysa said immediately.

Your eyes went wide, neck snapping to face her. “What?!”

Alysa sat up a little faster, seeing your face change. “Only for like the last five minutes. And then we were saved."

"That's not very comforting ."

Ellie laughed under her breath, reaching for her water. “It definitely got worse at the end, but we were okay. Mostly just sweaty and annoyed.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you guys,” you said, looking between them, guilt tugging at you even though there was no rational reason for it. “That’s so awful.”

Ellie shrugged, kind but tired. “I’m just glad you picked up. Evan and Madi’s phones were on DND.”

You turned slowly toward Evan across the lobby. “Interesting.”

Evan lifted both hands defensively from where he was standing. “I didn’t know I was emergency services tonight.”

Alysa tugged you back closer. Then, because Alysa could not leave a tender moment alone for more than five seconds, she glanced toward the elevators with this dry little look and said, “Another five minutes in that elevator and you would not be sitting with me right now.”

Your head turned so fast she barely had time to look innocent before you smacked her arm. “Alysa.”

She recoiled dramatically, brows lifted, and she rubbed the spot with a dramatic little frown like you had actually injured her. “Hey.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

“I meant I might’ve passed out or something. I didn’t mean dead.”

“Alysa.”

She pressed her lips together, clearly trying not to smile because she knew she was in trouble and also knew you were only mad because you loved her too much to find it funny yet.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though her eyes were bright with amusement. “No more elevator death jokes.”

“Good.”

“For tonight.”

You shoved her and she finally laughed, the sound low and tired and so familiar that it made the last of your fear loosen its grip. She caught your hand before you could pull it back and held it against her chest, thumb sweeping over your knuckles.

You stared at her for a second, taking in the messy hair, the flushed cheeks, the open collar, the lazy smile she wore like she hadn’t just scared ten years off your life. She looked tired, overheated, and pleased with herself for somehow still managing to annoy you. She also looked so painfully alive and yours that it made your chest squeeze all over again, softer this time.

“You scared me.”

“I know.” This time, she didn’t joke. She squeezed your hand. “I’m sorry.”

You exhaled, looking down at where your fingers were tangled with hers. “It’s fine. I just…”

Alysa watched your face while you failed to say the rest. She did not need you to finish it. She had always been good at reading the shape of what you could not get out, especially when your words got stuck behind pride or embarrassment or too much feeling. Her fingers tightened gently around yours, and she leaned in just enough that her temple brushed yours for a second. “I know,” she said, and then, before you could complain about her saying that too much, she added, “I would’ve hated it too if it was you trapped.”

You hummed instead of responding because those words had made you feel too much. Instead of delving deeper into the fear and worry of the night, you shifted to grab her bag and said, "It's so heavy."

Her eyes flicked to it, then back to your face with a very amused smile, “Thank you.”

It was said lightly, but there was something underneath it. Something soft and intimate. Thank you for the bag. Thank you for the water. Thank you for worrying. Thank you for being there when the doors opened.

You looked at her and felt your heart settle. “You’re welcome. Apparently, I'm like your assitant now and it's my job to carry your things and pick up your calls." you said.

“My very pretty assistant. Oh, are we doing some roleplaying tonight?"

“Don’t try to flatter your way out of carrying your own stuff.”

"Fine, I'll take it." She reached for the purse like she was finally going to take responsibility for it, but you shifted it away before she could grab the strap.

"Well, now it feels like this purse and I are trauma bonded so I'll take it up. But moving forward, everything else is yours." She knew this was another way of you taking care of her after everything, and though she would've argued just because she's warm doesn't mean she can't carry a bag, she didn't.

Soon, you would both have to get up. Someone would decide the elevators were untrustworthy and suggest the stairs before immediately remembering your rooms were ten floors up. Someone else would ask if anyone wanted more water. Alysa would eventually stand, a little steadier now, and you would hover without admitting you were hovering. She would let you keep her purse. You would follow the group back upstairs, probably packed into a different elevator and Alysa would keep her hand on you the whole time just to make sure you did not start imagining worst-case scenarios again. Soon, you would be back in your room, away from the lobby lights and the hotel staff and the teammates who were absolutely going to bring this up later. Alysa would finally get out of the wrinkled black shirt, you would make her drink more water even if she complained, and eventually the whole thing would become funny enough to retell properly.

For now, though, you stayed on the couch with her shoulder pressed to yours and her hand covering yours, the heat of her no longer frightening, only familiar. She was still a little flushed and tired, still annoying, still watching you like she knew exactly how much you needed the contact and was willing to give it without making you ask. The night had turned stupid and scary and soft all at once, but it was ending with Alysa beside you, safe enough to tease, close enough to touch, and only a few minutes away from being yours in private again.

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i think she looked so hot w her shirt like that omgggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

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tag list :P

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You stay anchored to her, fingers laced together, but it’s obvious how easily Alysa slips into this version of herself. Her posture loosens, her smile comes quicker, brighter, her voice shifting as she responds in Mandarin, fluid, effortless, like she doesn’t have to think about it at all. People greet her all at once, hands on her shoulders, her arms, her cheeks, voices layered over each other as if they’ve been waiting specifically for her to walk through that door. And because she won’t let go of you, you’re brought along too, passed from person to person in a way that’s not overwhelming exactly… just disorienting. Faces blur together, smiles kind, welcoming, but conversations slip past you like water. You nod when it feels right, laugh when others do, hoping it lines up.

At some point, Alysa gets pulled a step too far ahead of you—still holding your hand, but just enough distance that you’re left standing half a beat behind her conversation. You catch maybe one word in ten, watching the way her expression shifts as she talks, how animated she gets, how her family mirrors it.

You don’t feel unwelcome. If anything, it’s the opposite because there’s warmth in every glance sent your way but it’s also like standing just outside a glass wall. You’re included, but not quite inside.

Then there’s a gentle tug at your sleeve. You turn to find Alysa’s grandma is right there, her hand wrapped lightly around your arm. Her face is soft, smiling in that patient, knowing way that older women have, like she really likes you without needing to say it. You brighten instantly, shoulders straightening a little as you reach out, removing your hand from Alysa’s to shake her hand with both of yours like you’ve seen people do before.

“Hi—hi, it’s so good to see you,” you say, slower than usual, like that might somehow make it easier to understand. You gesture vaguely between the two of you, nodding, your smile widening. “You look… amazing. Really, you do.”

You add a little thumbs up at the end without thinking, and immediately feel a tiny flicker of embarrassment, but she just nods along, smiling just as brightly, murmuring something back in Mandarin. You have no idea what she said, but you nod anyway, like you understood every word.

For a second, you both just stand there, smiling at each other, this silent agreement settling in that this is enough. It’s a little awkward, a little funny, but not uncomfortable, just truly limited.

Alysa appears at your side again because she noticed immediately when your hand left hers, her hand sliding back around yours without making a show of it. She leans down to greet her grandma properly, her voice softening, respectful in a way you’ve only seen in moments like this. Then she glances at you, her thumb brushing over your knuckles.

“She’s asking how you’ve been,” Alysa says, easy, natural. “And she said you look very pretty today.”

You let out a quiet laugh, shoulders relaxing. “Tell her she looks even better.”

Alysa huffs softly through her nose, translating, and her grandma laughs this time, patting your arm like she approves. It’s small, but it helps. Alysa stays close, translating here and there, filling gaps without making it obvious she’s doing it. It’s subtle, the way she includes you—never making you feel like you’re slowing anything down, never making it a big deal.

Eventually, you drift toward a quieter corner where her siblings are gathered, the noise dipping just enough that you can breathe again. Justin leans back against the wall, half-smirking as he watches the room, Julia and Jaylinn mid-conversation, Selina scrolling through her phone before glancing up.

“You made it,” Justin says, nodding at you like you’ve passed some kind of test.

“Yeah, just about,” you mutter, but there’s a small smile tugging at your mouth.

Alysa doesn’t let go of your hand even here, her arm brushing against yours as she slots into the group. The conversation shifts easily into English, and you feel yourself settle more, finally able to follow without guessing.

“I heard Maya’s bringing her new boyfriend,” Julia says, lowering her voice just enough to make it feel like gossip.

You blink, trying to place the name, your brows pulling together for a second, and before you can even ask, Alysa tilts her head toward you slightly.

“She’s the short one with red hair,” she murmurs.

Recognition clicks immediately, your mouth forms the shape of an O and you nod, remembering her from the last party Alysa invited you to. Alysa just nods, like it was obvious she’d fill that gap for you, her thumb still tracing along your hand.

It’s easy here with her and her siblings that you almost forget that feeling of being an outsider from earlier—almost. Until the front door opens again.

There’s a subtle shift in attention as people glance over, Julia straightening a little. “That’s her.”

You follow their gaze, watching as Maya steps in, bright and confident, and beside her is her boyfriend. You feel that flicker of relief immediately, something in your chest loosening. Because he just looks normal. Like really normal. Just an average white guy, mid-twenties, clean-cut. There's nothing about him that screams prepared for this. No cultural cues, no hint that he belongs here more than you do.

Okay. Good. Not just you.

He looks like someone who's about to go through the exact same thing you just did. He'll probably walk in with the smiling and nodding and try to piece things together as he goes. You almost feel a little bad for him, already bracing yourself to watch him fumble through the respectful, slightly awkward interactions.

He reaches Alysa’s grandma. You expect the same polite smiles, maybe a few gestures. A shared understanding that neither of you fully understands the other but you'll meet somewhere in the middle anyway. But then, he bows his head slightly and starts speaking...

In Mandarin.

It's fluent and smooth. There’s no trace of hesitation, it flows out of him like it belongs there, like he's done this before, like he fits in a way you just assumed he wouldn't. Alysa's grandma lights up instantly, her face opening with genuine excitement, responding just as quickly and suddenly, they're having a full conversation.

The reaction is immediate. You see the way a couple of the aunts and uncles glance at each other, impressed, eyebrows lifting. Justin lets out a quiet, surprised laugh under his breath. Even Alysa’s posture shifts a little beside you, her attention sharpening.

And you just… sit there. Still smiling but something in your chest tightens in a way that’s harder to ignore this time, annoyed.

Of course he speaks Mandarin. Of course the new guy walks in and just fits.

You look down for a second, your fingers curling slightly in Alysa’s hand, suddenly hyper-aware of how little you understand, how much you’ve been relying on her to fill in every gap, every silence. It hadn’t felt like a problem before because Alysa and her family never made it seem like one. But now it’s loud in your head because it's not about being new anymore. It's about you not trying.

Who are you, really, if you can’t even meet her family halfway? Who are you if you haven’t taken the time to understand something that’s such a big part of her?

It's not like anyone's ever made you feel bad about it. But rather, they've all done the opposite. They're patient, kind in ways that never once made you feel like you didn't belong. So pressure isn't coming from them but rather from you. It creeps in as a feeling you can't shake. It's like you've somehow slipped into a place you didn't fully earn, like you've been getting by on Alysa's presence alone, letting her carry you through every interaction. It feels like this is something temporary. Like you're replaceable so there’s no point in trying to learn.

You don’t say anything and you don’t pull away. When someone looks your way, you’re still smiling, still present. But there’s this quiet shift under it all, something unsettled. Your grip on Alysa’s hand tightens just slightly, and this time she notices. She glances at you, briefly, her expression softening in that subtle way she gets when she’s reading you without asking. You shake your head a little before she can say anything, offering a small, easy smile like nothing’s wrong. But as your eyes flick back toward the room, toward the conversation you still can't understand, toward the ease you can't replicate, that feeling gets deeper and more certain.

You don't want to be the person who just stands there and smiles anymore. For the first time, it's not just a passing thought.

It's something you know you're going to act on.

-------

It doesn’t happen all at once. It starts quiet and a little stubborn.

That night sticks with you longer than you expect. It lingers in the background, replaying in pieces. The sound of Alysa’s voice slipping so easily into Mandarin. Her grandma’s smile. The way you stood there, smiling, present but not really part of it. And then that moment of watching someone else step into that space so effortlessly, like it wasn’t even something to think twice about.

You don’t feel angry. You don’t even feel embarrassed anymore. You just feel… aware. And that awareness settles into something steady, something that doesn’t fade after a day or two. It turns into a decision.

This isn’t about proving anything to anyone in that room. It’s about Alysa. It’s about the way she didn’t let go of your hand once that entire night. The way she translated without asking, without ever making you feel like you were behind. It’s about the way her world opened up around you. You realized how much of it you were only skimming the surface of.

If you’re going to be here, like really here, long-term, years from now, holidays and birthdays and quiet family dinners, you don’t want to just exist in the corner of it. You want to fully belong in it.

You start small at first, like a copy of Chinese for Dummies and Duolingo, and then you don’t.

The first Mandarin class feels humbling in a way you weren’t fully prepared for. It’s not an app you can casually scroll through in bed. It’s structured and intentional. You chose to go to an actual classroom, see a professor who expects participation, pronunciation that matters. You sit there the first day, notebook open, pen hovering, listening as sounds are broken down into tones that feel almost impossible to control.

You repeat them anyway and you mess up. A lot.

Your voice feels awkward in your own mouth, unfamiliar shapes forming with every word. But you don’t stop. You write everything down, your notes messy at first, then more organized as weeks pass. You practice in your car, under your breath, in front of the mirror sometimes, watching how your mouth moves, correcting yourself over and over until it starts to feel a little less foreign.

And then there’s everything else too. Your apartment slowly fills with books and not just textbooks, but novels, memoirs, essays. Stories written by Chinese authors, about Chinese families, traditions, relationships, identity. You sit curled up on the couch at night, highlighter in hand, pausing every few pages to look something up, to understand context you don’t want to skim over.

It’s not just about language. It’s about truly understanding why certain things matter, why certain traditions are done a certain way. The small details that no one explains out loud because they’re just known.

You want to know them too. You don't want to rely on Alysa for the smallest interactions forever. You want to meet her more than halfway.

This takes time. A lot of time you don’t always have. Time you start making.

At first, it’s easy to hide. Alysa’s away for competitions for a few months, traveling, training, her schedule packed in a way that gives you space to build your own routine without raising questions. You tell her you’re catching up on work, that you’ve been busy, and it’s not even a lie. You are busy, just not in the way she thinks.

Your days start revolving around it. Classes, studying, reading, repeating, learning. You fall into a rhythm, one that feels productive, purposeful. There’s something satisfying about it too, watching yourself improve, even in small ways.

But then she comes back and that’s when it gets hard. Now it’s not just about commitment—it’s about choosing.

You miss her in a way that feels physical sometimes, like it sits in your chest and doesn’t quite go away. You want to be with her, to fall back into your usual routine of late nights, lazy mornings, the easy way you exist together without effort.

But you can’t do both, so you start by making excuses. They're small at first. “I’ve got something I need to finish tonight.” “I can’t make it, I already promised someone I’d help them with something.” You reschedule plans, push things back, cut time shorter than you normally would. And every time, it feels wrong. She doesn’t get upset—Alysa’s easygoing in that way, understanding even when she doesn’t fully get it. She’ll just nod, shrug a little, kiss your temple like it’s nothing.

“Okay. Tomorrow then?” she says one night, standing in your doorway, already halfway out because you told her you had something to do.

“Yeah,” you answer, forcing a small smile. “Tomorrow.”

But tomorrow turns into next week. Next week turns into “I’ll see you after this.” And it builds quietly, this distance that wasn’t there before.

You notice it in the little things. Like in the way she lingers a second longer when she hugs you goodbye. The way she looks at you sometimes, like she’s trying to figure something out but doesn’t ask. The way her texts come in a little more often—nothing overwhelming, just small check-ins.

u busy?

can I come over later?

miss you

And you sit there, phone in your hand, staring at the screen longer than you should before replying because you miss her too, so much. There are nights where you’re sitting at your desk, notes spread out in front of you, repeating phrases under your breath and all you can think about is how much easier it would be to just stop. To text her, tell her to come over, forget about all of this for a few hours.

But then you remember why you started. You remember that feeling of standing in that room, knowing you weren’t even halfway there. Knowing that if this is the person you’re choosing, if this is the life you’re stepping into, you don’t want to stay on the outside of it. This isn’t for a moment. It’s for everything that comes after, for years down the line, when it’s not just parties and introductions, but real relationships with the people that matter to her. You want to be someone her family doesn’t just welcome but someone they can know. And more than that you want to be someone Alysa doesn’t have to carry through those moments. So you keep going. Even when it’s hard and even when it means missing her.

You give yourself until Alysa's birthday which comes out to be ten months. Ten months of learning, of building something quietly that isn’t for show, isn’t for approval. Something that’s just yours and for her and for the life you’re trying to grow into with her.

And if it costs you a little distance now, you tell yourself it’ll be worth it later.

———

At first, Alysa doesn’t think anything of it.

That night at her mom’s birthday passes in her head the way most family parties do. She remembers keeping hold of your hand through most of it without really thinking about why, remembers translating here and there when she caught that look on your face—that polite little smile you got when you were trying hard to keep up even while clearly not understanding half of what was happening around you. But to Alysa, none of that reads as a problem. You looked okay. Maybe a little quieter, maybe a little clingier than usual, but still smiling, still laughing when it counted, still leaning into her side when you found those calmer moments with her siblings.

She doesn’t notice the small shift when Maya’s boyfriend starts speaking Mandarin. There was your hand tightening in hers but then you smiled when she checked your face, so there wasn't anything there that felt urgent enough to ask about. She lets it go. In her mind, the night lands where it always does—fine. Good, even. Another family thing you came to, another room you survived with that easy willingness of yours, another night where she got to bring you into her world and you handled it like you always did. She leaves thinking you did well.

Then competition season starts, and like always, life breaks into pieces.

Alysa leaves, and distance becomes normal in the way it has to when travel takes over everything. When she and you talk, she doesn’t overanalyze the fact that you seem a little split between her and something else. Your calls are still happening. Your texts are still sweet, still full of enough warmth that nothing feels off in any major way. You pick up when you can. You answer her messages. You tell her about your day, even if a little vaguely. Sometimes she hears papers shifting in the background or the click of your laptop keys while she’s talking, and maybe once or twice she jokes, “Are you even listening to me?” and you laugh and say, “I am, keep talking,” and she does. It’s not ideal, but it’s fine.

She tells herself that a hundred times because from far away, fine is easy to believe in. Especially when you still show up for the events you can like the domestic ones, the competitions close enough that your being there feels possible. She sees you in the crowd and the whole room settles. She gets that same stupid rush every time, that automatic softening in her chest just from spotting your face. So whatever slight distraction lives in your calls, whatever busyness fills your texts, she writes it off. You’re still there and that’s what matters.

It’s when she really comes home that it changes.

Not slowly, either. That’s the thing that gets under her skin the fastest. It feels immediate, like walking into a room expecting the furniture to be where it’s always been and realizing someone’s moved everything two inches to the left. Nothing is technically wrong, nothing is obviously broken, but the entire shape of things is off enough that she can’t stop noticing it. You’re suddenly hard to pin down in a way you’ve never been before. Plans become tentative, then flexible, then constantly changing.

You’re “so sorry” and “something came up” and “can we do later instead?” and at first she takes it the way she takes most things—with a shrug, with a quick yeah, okay, with the assumption that whatever’s going on has nothing to do with her. Because Alysa, by nature, is easy. She doesn’t like making things heavier than they need to be. She’s not someone who wants to trap you into explaining every schedule change or every canceled night.

The first month, she adjusts. That’s the word she’d use if anyone asked. If you can’t come over, fine, she’ll meet you somewhere. If you only have a few hours, fine, she’ll take the few hours. If the only way she gets time with you now is by waiting for you to fit her into your calendar, then she tells herself to stop being weird about it.

And when she does get you, it only confuses her more because nothing is wrong when you’re actually there. That’s what makes it hard for her to grab onto any one explanation. You still kiss her the same way when she opens the door. Still step into her space like you belong there. Still let your hand find the back of her neck when you’re talking, still laugh at the same things, still melt into the couch beside her like you always have. The conversations are normal. The touches are normal. She still gets that same warm, stupid, full-body ease whenever you show up, that same sense that everything in her settles the minute she has you in front of her again. It’s just that now those moments come with a clock attached.

There’s always somewhere else you have to be. Always a reason you can’t stay the night. Always a glance at the time eventually, followed by that apologetic look she’s starting to hate. And Alysa, who can usually let things roll right off her, starts feeling every goodbye harder than she should. You’ll be standing in her kitchen finishing a conversation like nothing’s wrong, and then suddenly you’re putting your shoes on and saying, “I have to go,” and she has to stand there pretending it doesn’t hit her in the chest every single time. She tells herself it’s temporary. She tells herself you mean it when you say you’re busy. She tells herself people go through phases.

By the start of the second month, all that understanding starts to wear thin around the edges because now she’s home. Fully home. Competition is over, her schedule is open, and all that time that used to have you in it is just empty.

She isn't good at stillness. During season, missing you has somewhere to go—it gets tucked into routines, into training and recovery and the constant forward motion of needing to be somewhere else. But home strips all that away. At home, missing you becomes so obvious.

She wakes up and there’s time. She gets through her day and there’s time. She’s in her apartment at six in the evening and there’s nothing pressing, nowhere urgent to be, and all of that space used to fill so naturally with you that she almost doesn’t know what to do with it now.

She finds herself reaching for her phone more. Opening your text thread just to stare at it. Thinking I should ask if she wants to come over, then stopping because she asked two days ago and you said you couldn’t. She misses the ordinary parts most like the way you used to just exist around her, not even doing anything special. It becomes this ache she can’t really name without sounding dramatic, so she doesn’t say it. But it’s there, constant, low and annoying at first, then sharper, more restless, until by the middle of the second month it starts putting her on edge.

And that’s when her mind turns on her. If Alysa can’t find a reason, she starts looking for one in herself.

At first it’s just little thoughts, passing ones she doesn’t fully believe.

Did I miss something? Did I say something weird? Was it that night with my family?

But then the thoughts start linking together, building structure, and once that happens they get harder to shake.

You’ve never been this unavailable before. Never this slippery or this consistently almost-there. What else is she supposed to think? She starts replaying conversations in her head after they happen, combing through them for tone, for hesitation, for anything she might’ve missed. She thinks about every time you looked distracted on the phone while she was away, and suddenly those moments don’t feel harmless anymore. She thinks about how easily you say sorry now, how practiced it sounds. She starts wondering if you’re pulling away on purpose and if there’s something she did that hurt you and you’re waiting for her to be smart enough to figure it out on her own. That thought gets its claws in her fast, because it would almost be easier if she had done something wrong. Then at least there’d be an explanation, at least she could fix it. But the harder she looks, the less she finds, and that uncertainty turns into frustration, then anxiety, then a kind of quiet panic she keeps mostly to herself because she doesn’t even know how to make it sound reasonable.

When she finally asks, it doesn’t happen in some huge blowout. It’s too late in the day for that, and Alysa’s too thrown off to come in angry right away.

It’s one of those shortened evenings again. You’re at her apartment because you’ve stopped inviting her over, sitting on the edge of her bed while she stands across from you, pretending to tidy up when really she’s just trying to work up the nerve to say something without sounding needy. You’d been normal all night—sweet, affectionate, tucked under her arm on the couch like nothing in the world had changed.

And then, like always, you checked the time. Started gathering your things. Started leaving. That’s what finally does it so Alysa says your name before she can overthink it, and there’s something in her voice that makes you pause immediately. She’s not looking at you at first, which is rare for her when something actually matters. Her hands are busy with nothing—picking up a hoodie, dropping it again, jaw tight in a way she doesn’t know how to hide.

“Did I do something?” she asks finally, and the question comes out flatter than she means it to, less emotional, more careful. “Because it kind of feels like I did.”

You stare at her for a second like you genuinely don’t understand what she means, and somehow that throws her off more than if you’d immediately gotten defensive. “What?”

Alysa lifts a shoulder, but it’s tense, not casual. “You’ve been… I don’t know. Busy, I guess. A lot. Since I got back.” She glances at you then, finally, and there’s enough rawness in her expression that she hates it instantly. “And I’m trying not to be weird about it, but it feels like you’re avoiding me.”

The incredulous look on your face comes fast. “Alysa, no.” You step toward her right away, your brows pulled together, like the idea itself bothers you. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not mad at you, I promise.” And for a second, the tension in her eases just a little but then you keep going. “I’m just really busy right now. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you.” You say it sincerely, you sound honest. You sound apologetic, like someone who cares.

And still, nothing changes.

It starts souring something in Alysa by the end of the second month—not because she stops believing you care, but because your reassurance stops matching your actions.

She tries after that conversation to settle back down, to trust what you said, to stop making herself crazy over it. But the next week comes and goes and you’re still hard to reach. Still rescheduling and still finding time for her only in small, pre-measured pieces. “I’ll make it up to you” becomes one of those phrases that starts echoing in her head in a way she hates, because she keeps waiting for the making-up part and it never comes. And Alysa, who is usually the least dramatic person in the room, starts getting irritated in this quiet, simmering way that’s foreign to her. At some point “busy” stops feeling like an explanation and starts feeling like a wall.

She can’t tell if you’re hiding something, sparing her something, or just genuinely refusing to let her in but whatever it is, she can feel it now every time you leave too early, every time she checks her phone and sees another changed plan, every time she wants to ask what the hell is going on and stops herself because she already asked once and you gave her nothing she could actually hold onto.

So she ends up in this awful in-between state of feeling restless, on edge, trying not to push too hard while feeling more and more certain that if she doesn’t push, nothing will change. If you were angry, she could deal with that. If you were upset, if you needed space, if there was an actual reason—something clear, something solid—Alysa could work with it. She could apologize. She could adjust and try but you won’t tell her anything.

And she doesn’t know how to start a conversation with someone who keeps insisting everything is fine while slowly disappearing from the life you used to share so easily.

———

Alysa doesn’t go to her friends looking for answers. At least, that’s not how she frames it to herself.

She tells herself she just needs to get out of the apartment, just needs noise, something to fill the empty space that’s been sitting too loudly around her lately. So she meets them for something casual. They’re sitting across from her, half-eaten plates in front of them, drinks sweating against the table, and Alysa’s leaning back in her chair trying to act like everything’s normal. She listens to them talk for a while but she’s not really paying attention. She’s nodding at the right times, chiming in just enough to not seem completely checked out.

Eventually, one of them notices. “You’re quiet,” she says, narrowing her eyes slightly, not accusatory.

Alysa shrugs, reaching for her drink. “I’m fine.” She says it too quickly which they both catch immediately.

“What’s going on?” the other one asks, leaning forward a little now, elbows on the table. “Is everything good with you and—” she gestures vaguely, like she doesn’t even need to say your name.

Alysa hesitates.

That’s all it takes because once she pauses, even for a second, they know there’s something there.

“It’s nothing,” she says, but softer this time, less convincing even to her own ears. She exhales, running a hand through her hair, gaze dropping to the table. “She’s just… busy. Like really busy. Since I got back.”

“Busy how?” one of them presses.

Alysa shakes her head, trying to downplay it. “I don’t know, just… stuff. Work or whatever. She keeps having to reschedule, or she can only hang out for like a few hours and then she leaves.” She shrugs again, like it’s no big deal, like she hasn’t been thinking about it constantly. “It’s just different. She doesn’t even invite me over to her place and if we’re not in my apartment I’m having to go meet her somewhere instead of just driving together. She’s kinda always on her phone too when we are together.” There’s a pause. A look passes between them. It’s quick, subtle, but Alysa sees it and something in her stomach drops before either of them even says anything. “What?” she asks immediately, her voice sharper than she means it to be. “Why are you guys looking at each other like that?”

One of them hesitates, like she’s trying to decide how to say it without making it worse.

“Alysa…” she starts slowly, carefully, her tone shifting into something more cautious. “You don’t think…?”

Alysa frowns, confusion pulling at her expression. “What?”

But there’s something else under it too. Something tighter.

The other friend doesn’t hesitate. “It sounds like she’s cheating on you.”

It hits her like a drop, like that sudden, weightless feeling in her stomach, like everything just fell out from under her for a second. Alysa actually has to inhale sharply, like she forgot how to breathe for a second there, her hand tightening around her glass without her realizing it. She shakes her head immediately, too fast, like if she does it quick enough the idea won’t stick.

“No,” she says, almost instinctively. “No, that’s not—what are you talking about?” Her voice sounds off to her own ears. She doesn’t sound fully convinced even to herself but it’s also not fully dismissive either. “We’re fine when we’re together,” she adds quickly, like that proves something. “Like nothing’s different. She’s not weird, she’s not distant when she’s there. Wouldn’t—wouldn’t someone cheating be… different?” She frowns, trying to make it make sense. “Like tired? Or distracted or something?”

One of them tilts her head slightly. “Alysa, she is distracted. You literally just said she’s always doing something else when you guys talk.”

“That’s not the same thing,” Alysa pushes back, but it comes out weaker than she wants it to.

The other friend leans in a little more, her tone gentler but firmer. “You just said this is out of character for her. She’s never been this hard to get ahold of, right? She’s not letting you come over anymore. She’s always going to your apartment or you’re meeting her somewhere. That’s weird.”

Alysa opens her mouth to respond, but nothing comes out. When it’s said like that, when it’s laid out in a straight line like this, it does sound weird.

“She could be living a whole separate life right now and you wouldn’t even know,” her friend adds, not harshly, just matter-of-fact.

“And people don’t always act different when you’re with them,” the other one chimes in, a little more blunt. “They pick up right where they left off like nothing happened. It’s like—psychotic behavior, honestly.”

Alysa lets out a short, hollow laugh at that, but it doesn’t reach anywhere real. Their voices are still there, still talking, but they feel further away now to Alysa, like someone turned the volume down just enough that she has to strain to catch the words. Her focus drops to the table again, her fingers pressing into the condensation on her glass, dragging through it without thinking.

Cheating.

The word sits wrong in her head. She tries to push it away instantly but it doesn’t go because now it’s attached itself to everything. Every rescheduled plan and every “I’m sorry, I’m busy.” Every time you left early with every distracted call. Every moment she brushed off because she trusted you.

Her chest tightens. Actually tightens—like something is physically pressing down on it, making it harder to take a full breath. She swallows, her throat suddenly dry, her eyes stinging in a way that catches her off guard. She blinks hard, once, twice, trying to clear it, but it doesn’t help at all because her brain won’t stop.

What if that’s why?

What if that’s what all of this is?

The thought makes her feel sick, not metaphorically but actually sick. Like her stomach flips, a wave of nausea rolling through her so suddenly she has to lean back in her chair just to steady herself. Her grip tightens again, knuckles going pale around the glass.

The idea of you—of you doing that, of you choosing someone else while still standing in her apartment, still kissing her like nothing changed—

It hurts. It hurts in a way that’s immediate and overwhelming, like it bypasses everything logical and goes straight to something painful. Her chest aches, sharp and deep, and she doesn’t even realize her vision’s blurring until she has to blink again and a tear actually slips free.

“Hey,” one of her friends says immediately, her tone softening as she reaches across the table. “Hey, don’t cry. It’s okay.”

Alysa inhales shakily, shaking her head like she can physically push the feeling away. “I’m not—” she starts, but her voice cracks halfway through and she has to stop.

The other friend leans back a little, her expression shifting—less certain now, more careful. “We don’t know that she is,” she says quickly, softer than before. “Okay? We’re just—guessing. It could be something else.”

Alysa doesn’t respond right away because now that the idea’s in her head, it’s not just a guess anymore.

It’s a possibility, which, in circumstances where you don’t have much to go off of, is enough to wreck something in you.

“Then what am I supposed to do?” she asks finally, her voice quieter now, rougher. She wipes at her face quickly, like she’s annoyed with herself for reacting this way. “I already asked her. She said nothing’s wrong.”

“Check her phone.”

Alysa looks up immediately, frowning. “What? No.”

“That’s the easiest way to know,” her friend says, like it’s obvious.

“That’s—” Alysa shakes her head again, more firmly this time. “That’s an invasion of privacy.”

One of them gives her a look. seriously?

“Alysa.”

She exhales, frustrated now, running a hand over her face. “I’m not doing that.”

But the idea’s already there. What if that’s the only way she finds out? What if she’s just… sitting here, being stupid, trusting something that’s already broken?

Her jaw tightens. She looks down at the table again, blinking hard once more before finally nodding—small, reluctant. “…Fine,” she mutters. “I’ll… think about it.”

They don’t push her further after that. The conversation shifts, softens, but Alysa doesn’t really come back into it. She stays quiet for the rest of the night, answering when she has to, but mostly just sitting there, the weight of that one idea pressing heavier with every passing minute.

By the time she gets home, it’s changed shape. The sadness is still there—but it’s not the only thing anymore. It twists and sharpens until it turns into something hotter. The more she thinks about it, the more it starts to make sense in a way she hates.

That’s why you’re busy.

That’s why you won’t let me come over.

That’s why you leave early.

Her chest tightens again, but this time there’s something under it—anger, low and simmering, building with every new thought that slots into place.

“How could she do that?” she mutters out loud to no one, pacing her apartment now, hands dragging through her hair. “How could she actually do that?” Her voice breaks at the end, but she pushes through it, because now her brain is moving too fast to stop.

After everything?

After bringing you into her family, into her life, letting everything blend together so easily—it feels like a betrayal just thinking about it. Like something sacred got handled carelessly. Like she opened something up for you and you decided it wasn’t enough.

if this is what you’re doing then she wants to know. She just can’t sit here wondering or dragging it out. She wants proof. Something real she can hold onto so she can stop guessing, stop spiraling, stop feeling like she’s losing her mind trying to piece this together.

Because if you’re going to break her, she’d rather you just do it all at once.

———

Alysa is already wound too tight by the time you come over. It’s not obvious at first but it’s there in the way she keeps glancing at you when she thinks you won’t notice, in the way her shoulders never fully relax even after you’ve settled onto her couch, even after your shoes are off and your body has leaned into the familiar shape of her apartment like you’ve done a hundred times before.

The room itself is normal, almost painfully so. The lamp in the corner casts that same warm low light over everything, there’s some half-finished show playing that neither of you is really paying attention to. And that normalcy is almost offensive to her now, because it makes her feel crazy. It makes her feel like the only one carrying this terrible, shifting thing inside her chest while you sit there beside her looking so entirely like yourself. You answer when she talks. You smile in the right places. You let your knee knock against hers. But every few minutes your attention slips back to your phone, your thumb moving over the screen, your expression going distant in that tiny way she’s learned to dread.

Normally Alysa would say something easy about it, steal the phone from your hands, throw herself across your lap until you laughed and paid attention to her instead. But she can’t do that now, because now every small distraction feels loaded. Now every glance at your screen feels like proof of something she hasn’t been able to catch up to.

She shifts closer once, trying to make it look natural, trying to see what has your attention without directly asking. But all she catches is a darkened blur. The privacy screen turns your phone into a flat black wall the second it isn’t being looked at head-on, and the sight of it sends this immediate, irrational heat through her. Not because the screen itself means anything. People get privacy protectors all the time and you’ve had this one on for a year now so It shouldn’t matter.

But her mind is no longer in a place where it accepts neutral explanations. It’s been too many weeks of canceled plans, too many cut-short evenings, too many distracted calls, too many apologies that never amount to anything changing. So instead of seeing an accessory, she sees concealment. Instead of brushing it off, she sits there feeling her stomach turn over again, feeling that awful quiet certainty pressing harder at the inside of her ribs.

You don’t notice her looking. Or maybe you do and you say nothing. Either way, you stay where you are for another few minutes before standing up and saying you’re going to use the bathroom. You leave your phone behind on the couch, plugged in and charging, like it’s nothing. Like there’s nothing in it to hide. And that almost makes it worse.

The second you disappear down the hall, the apartment changes. It’s still quiet, but it’s a different kind now—too clear, too open, the kind of silence that makes every thought sound louder.

Alysa stares at your phone where it rests against the cushion, its charging cable stretched toward the wall, and she doesn’t move at first. Her heart is already beating too fast in this ugly, physical way that makes her feel vaguely sick, like adrenaline without somewhere to go.

She knows this is wrong. She knows it before she even reaches for it. This is not who she is, not how the two of you have ever worked. Trust has never been something she had to force with you; it was always just there, easy and unspoken, something solid under everything else. But that trust has been getting scraped thinner for months now because you keep handing her pieces that don’t fit.

She tells herself she just needs to know. That’s the justification she reaches for as her hand finally closes around the phone. She just needs to know whether she’s losing her mind or whether her body’s been trying to tell her the truth before her brain caught up.

Her fingers are clumsy with nerves when she unlocks it, but the passcode still works immediately. And then your wallpaper lights up, and it’s a photo of her you took, she’s not even posed, she’s mid-laugh, head turned slightly away from the camera, the kind of picture that only exists because you were looking at her with affection and reached instinctively for your phone.

That detail hits so hard it almost stops her. Her chest tightens with this sudden painful sadness, because if you were really building something behind her back, why would your phone still open to her face?

But the question doesn’t save anything. It just makes the next part hurt more.

She starts with Instagram because it feels like the easiest place to confirm it, and for a few brief, miserable seconds she actually hopes it’ll be obvious. Some hidden account, some flirty thread, some stranger’s name appearing too often. Something clean and straightforward. But there’s nothing. You only have your normal account, the one she’s seen a million times with no secret profiles logged in. There aren’t any suspicious message requests with no weird conversations.

She moves faster after that, more tense instead of relieved, checking the places her friends had thrown out as possibilities.

Twitter is the same. Your regular account with retweets from Alysa fan pages, clips of her programs and your defensive replies under mean tweets from people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and likes about movies you’re excited about.

It’s so completely, embarrassingly loyal that it makes her stomach twist. It should reassure her. Instead it makes her feel worse, because now the phone feels split in two—one half still so clearly built around her, the other half maybe hiding something she hasn’t found yet.

The photos app is no better in giving her tangible proof. You have a bunch of work screenshots, notes. There’s random saved images and pictures of your fish she’s already seen because you always send them to her. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

And at this point the pounding in her chest has become something almost unbearable, because if she’s wrong, then what is all this distance? What is all this pain she’s been carrying around? What is she supposed to do with the last two months if the answer isn’t sitting plainly in front of her?

That’s why she leaves iMessages for last. Not because it makes the most sense, but because some part of her is stalling. Some small, desperate part wants to hear the bathroom door open before she has to press it, wants to be interrupted, caught, forced to stop before she sees something that can’t be unseen.

She sits there with her thumb hovering for a beat too long, breathing shallowly, every muscle in her body tight. Then she taps it anyway. The text message list opens. Her own contact is pinned right at the top, and that almost makes her laugh from how cruel it feels. Of course she is after all this, after everything unraveling under her hands, your phone still arranges itself like she’s the center of your life. Beneath it are the names she expects—friends, family, spam, appointment reminders. Again, so normal that for one suspended second she thinks maybe this whole thing is about to collapse in on itself, maybe she really is just a paranoid mess who let two friends and too much silence rot her brain.

And then she sees it.

A contact she doesn’t know. Not a family member, not one of your usual friends, not anyone Alysa’s ever heard you mention.

P. Lucas.

Her entire body reacts before she has a thought coherent enough to name what she’s feeling. Her stomach drops so hard it’s almost disorienting, like she missed a stair that wasn’t there. Her mouth floods with that awful metallic saliva that comes right before throwing up. She opens the thread.

The messages are not dramatic. If anything, they’re worse for how ordinary they look.

Voice memos stacked one after another. A few short texts.

Can I call you? I’ll see you tomorrow. Great session today.

The words rearrange themselves instantly into the shape her fear has been waiting for. Her mind doesn’t pause to consider alternatives because she already built the framework weeks ago. It’s all been leading here.

Now there’s a name attached to it, and suddenly every piece slots in so neatly it makes her feel sick. Actually, physically sick. Her stomach turns so violently she thinks for a second she might genuinely throw up onto the floor. Her vision goes strange around the edges. Her chest feels like something inside it is caving in under pressure with this real, ugly pain that makes it hard to get a full breath.

And through all of it, one thought keeps battering into her from every angle: you lied to me. Not just once, not just tonight, but for weeks. You stood in her kitchen, sat on her couch, kissed her goodbye with this hidden thing tucked somewhere, and she had still been trying to understand you gently.

Then your voice breaks across the room and the whole moment jerks violently back into motion.

You’re standing there just inside the living room now, fresh from the bathroom, your expression changing the second you register what she’s holding.

“What’s going on?” you ask, and your voice is not defensive yet, it’s just earnestly confused, thrown off, cautious.

Alysa can’t look at you. That’s the first thing she realizes. She physically cannot make herself turn her head. She keeps staring at the thread like if she looks away, she’ll lose her nerve and let you explain it into something survivable.

You cross the room quickly, and she feels rather than sees you take the phone from her hands. There’s no fight in it, no scrambling. You just take it, look at the screen, and sigh.

That sigh destroys whatever was left of her ability to doubt herself. Because to Alysa, already deep inside this hurt, that isn’t the sound of someone confused by a misunderstanding. It’s the sound of someone caught.

You slide the phone into your pocket, shoulders dropping in this tired, defeated way, and say, “Alysa, can we talk?”

That’s the last click in the lock. If it were innocent, you’d say the innocent thing immediately. If there were nothing to hide, you’d laugh in disbelief, correct her, show her, explain it in one breath. But instead you sound guilty. You sound resigned and you sound like someone trying to manage fallout.

So when she tells you to get out, she's not bluffing. It isn’t an opening for you to convince her. It comes out of her with the force of two months of confusion finally finding a target.

“Get out.” The words sound sharper than anything she’s ever said to you, and even she feels the violence of them as they leave her mouth.

You blink at her, stunned. “What?” You look genuinely lost, and under any other circumstances that expression would undo her instantly.

But her mind is made up now. It has been making itself up for weeks, collecting evidence, bracing for impact, preparing her body for this exact kind of break.

“Get out,” she says again, louder, each word trembling with the effort it takes not to collapse. “Now. I don’t want you here.”

You take a step toward her, and she can hear the panic entering your voice now, hear the urgency in the way you say her name, in the way you ask what she’s talking about.

Right now, to her, even your confusion folds into the story she’s already accepted. You’re denying it, it’s expected and you’re trying to slow this down. So she throws Lucas at you like a weapon because she needs you to know she saw it, needs you to understand that whatever lie you had prepared no longer has room to work.

“Go have another session with Lucas or whatever that means.” Saying it makes her mouth water again with nausea. The words taste toxic but she gets them out anyway.

You’re staring at her now with this open, horrified look, and you say no immediately, too quickly, hands lifting slightly like you can still stop this.

“Alysa, what? No. This isn’t what you think it is. I promise. Please. I can explain.” But explain to her now sounds like stall. Explain sounds like twist it, soften it, make her doubt what she saw long enough for you to leave with your dignity intact. Alysa has nothing left for that since the hurt is too huge, too physical, too all-consuming. It feels lodged beneath her sternum like shattered glass.

“No,” she says, and her voice breaks with the force of it. “Get out. Now.”

When she moves, it’s to get away from you before the crying starts. Before her body betrays how destroyed she really is. But you reach for her wrist on instinct, maybe to stop her, maybe just to make her stay long enough to listen—and she jerks away so violently it shocks you both. The motion is harsh, almost wild, born from pure reflex and raw panic, and for a second the entire room freezes around it. Alysa turns back toward you with a look you’ve never seen directed at you before, her face drawn tight with fury and heartbreak so tangled together they’re almost indistinguishable. Her eyes are wet now, shining, furious, wounded. Her breathing is uneven. Every inch of her looks like she’s holding herself together by force alone.

“Don’t touch me,” she says, and it comes out low and shaking and deadly serious.

You physically shrink, enough that Alysa notices, enough that something inside her almost buckles. Your shoulders draw in, your face changes. The fight in you goes quiet. You grab your jacket without another argument, and she hates that too—hates that you’re leaving, hates that you’re listening, hates that some terrible traitorous part of her still wants to stop you even now. But she doesn’t. She just stands there rigid and trembling while you walk out of the apartment you’ve moved through so easily for so long, and the second the door closes behind you, all that anger burns off and leaves only the wreckage underneath

She breaks immediately. One second she’s standing there, jaw locked, chest heaving, and the next her body just gives up the performance entirely. A sound tears out of her—small at first, then broken open—and she folds in on herself like she’s been hit somewhere vital. Her hand flies to her mouth as if she can physically hold the grief in, but it’s useless. Tears spill fast enough to blur everything. Her knees weaken and she stumbles backward until the couch catches her, and then she’s sinking onto it, curling over herself, one hand gripping her shirt right over her chest like maybe pressure there will dull the pain. It doesn’t, nothing does. Her heart hurts in this brutal, humiliatingly real way, like an injury instead of an emotion. Her stomach is still turning and her throat burns. Breathing feels uneven and wrong. Under all of it is this enormous, unbearable grief because you are not some casual person she can hate cleanly.

You are built into her life, into her routines, her body memory, her sense of comfort. You’re in her apartment and in her phone and in the way she reaches automatically for someone at the end of the day. You matter in all the soft places. So the idea that you would do this—that you could look her in the eye for weeks while belonging partly somewhere else—doesn’t just upset her. It makes the whole world feel rearranged into something colder and uglier than it was an hour ago.

———

The door closing behind you doesn’t feel real at first. It’s just a sound—sharp, final—but your body doesn’t catch up to it right away. You stand there in the hallway for a second longer than you should, your hand still loosely wrapped around your jacket like you forgot what you were doing mid-motion. The quiet outside her apartment feels wrong, like you stepped into a different version of the world where everything is slightly off.

Just minutes ago, you were inside. Sitting next to her, leaning into her, existing in that same space that’s always felt like yours too.

And now you’re not allowed there.

The shift is so abrupt it leaves you disoriented. You walk out of the building on autopilot, barely registering the cold air when it hits your face, barely noticing the way your steps feel uneven beneath you. Your mind is stuck on a loop, replaying the last few minutes over and over again, but it keeps getting stuck on one thing…

That look on her face.

You’ve never seen Alysa look at you like that before. Not once. You’ve seen her annoyed, playful, even frustrated—but never that. Never something so sharp, so full of anger that it almost didn’t look like her. It wasn’t just anger either. There was hurt under it. Deep, unmistakable hurt. The kind that doesn’t come from a small misunderstanding. The kind that comes from feeling betrayed.

Your chest tightens at the memory of it, your stomach twisting uncomfortably as you unlock your car and slide into the driver’s seat. You don’t start it right away, sitting there with your hands resting on the wheel, staring straight ahead at nothing.

You know what she thinks but you didn’t fix it.

You had the chance to fix it. When she told you to leave, when she looked at you like you’d broken something that couldn’t be put back together—you could’ve just told her. You could’ve explained everything right then. You could’ve told her it’s all for you.

But you didn’t because in that moment, it didn’t feel like it would land the way it was supposed to. She was too upset, too far gone in whatever she was feeling. You saw it in her face, in the way her voice was shaking, in the way she couldn’t even look at you for more than a second at a time. If you had tried to explain it then, it would’ve sounded ridiculous. Like an excuse or like something you made up on the spot to cover whatever she thought she found. You couldn’t risk that, not after everything you’ve been doing. So you let her believe it for now.

The thought makes your chest ache in a completely different way, something heavier, quieter, harder to sit with. You know how much that hurt her. You saw it and you felt it in the way she pulled away from you, in the way she told you not to touch her like your hands suddenly meant something else.

And you still walked out.

You exhale slowly, finally starting the car, the engine breaking the silence just enough to pull you back into the present. The drive home is a blur. Your mind just keeps drifting back, filling in all the moments you should’ve said something and didn’t. By the time you make it to your apartment, the weight of it has settled deeper.

You drop your keys on the counter, shrug off your jacket, and for a second you just stand there in the middle of the room like you don’t know what to do with yourself. You were supposed to be somewhere else tonight. You were supposed to be at her place, spend the night and then wake up and give her birthday kisses. You’re supposed to go to her dad’s house together tomorrow for her birthday party and finally show off what you’ve been working on for months. The entire night and day after had already been planned in your head without you even realizing it.

And now, none of that is happening.

You swallow, your throat tight as you move toward your bedroom, your body feeling heavier with each step. When you sit down on the edge of your bed, the emptiness hits harder. It’s not just that you’re alone—you’ve been alone plenty of nights over the past few months. It’s that you shouldn’t be.

You lean back slowly, staring up at the ceiling, your phone resting on your chest as if you’re waiting for it to light up but it doesn’t. You don’t text her either because you don’t even know what you’d say that wouldn’t make things worse right now.

You close your eyes as your mind drifts to the image of her face, clearer now in the dark. The glare she gave you which wasn’t just anger but it was also something that looked like it hurt her to even look at you. You shift slightly, trying to get comfortable, but there’s nowhere for that feeling to go.

These past few months have been hard in a way you didn’t fully let yourself acknowledge. You filled every gap with purpose—classes, studying, reading, pushing yourself through something that felt worth it because it had her at the end of it. Every late night, every canceled plan, every moment you chose this over being with her, you told yourself it was temporary. That it would mean something when it was done. That it would bring you closer, not push you apart.

And now, you’re lying here, alone, and she thinks you betrayed her.

Your chest aches at the thought, your hand unconsciously curling slightly against your shirt as if you can hold that feeling in place. You miss her. Not in some passing way, but in this constant, physical sense of something missing where it’s supposed to be. You miss her voice, her presence, the way she fills a room without trying. You miss how easy it used to feel to just be with her. And tonight, more than anything, you miss what this night was supposed to be. You let out a slow breath, your eyes opening again as you stare at the ceiling, unmoving.

Tomorrow.

That’s all you have to hold onto now.

Tomorrow was supposed to be the moment everything paid off anyway. It was going to be the reveal and proof that all of this time, all of this distance, had a reason. That you weren’t just drifting away, you were building something.

You just have to make it there, just have to get through tonight.

But the night doesn’t move. It stretches and every time you close your eyes, that look comes back. Every time you start to drift, your mind snaps back awake, like it won’t let you rest while things are unresolved. So you stare into the dark, holding onto tomorrow like it’s the only thing keeping everything from falling apart.

———

Alysa wakes up slowly at first, still half inside sleep, her body reaching for something before her mind has caught up enough to know what it’s doing. One arm slides across the sheets beside her, searching for warmth on instinct, for the shape of you curled somewhere in the bed the way you were supposed to be, the way you said you would be. For one soft, stupid second there’s even disappointment before there’s pain—just that dull little feeling of where is she—and then everything from last night comes crashing back all at once, hard enough that it almost feels physical.

Alysa opens her eyes fully to an empty room that suddenly feels too bright, too still, too honest. The bed is only half slept in. The other pillow is untouched except for where it had been fluffed for you before everything went wrong. She stares at it for a long moment, throat tightening so fast it burns.

There’s no anger in that first minute but grief. Heavy, immediate grief, the kind that makes her feel like she’s mourning something that was still alive yesterday. Because in her head, that’s what this is now. It’s over. The best thing that’s happened to her in years—easily, undeniably—has been taken out from under her, and worse, it’s been taken out from under her by you. Her face twists before she can stop it, and tears come hot and fast, slipping sideways into the pillow while she lies there staring at the spot where you should have been.

Normally she’d be irritated with herself by now, annoyed at crying first thing in the morning, annoyed at how dramatic it feels, how weak. But today she just lets it happen. It’s her birthday after all. She doesn’t have the energy to police her own grief. So she presses her face harder into the pillow and cries quietly into the emptiness you left behind, her chest aching with every shaky breath, every thought returning to the same impossible point—that you were meant to wake up beside her today, and instead she’s alone in a bed that still looks like it was expecting you.

The whole day moves like that after. Each hour seeming longer than it should be, as if time itself has become aware that it no longer has anything good to deliver her. She gets up because staying in bed would only make it worse, but getting up doesn’t make anything feel better either.

The apartment is too quiet. Even the ordinary things feel hostile in some small way. The hoodie of yours still looped over the back of a chair, the half-finished conversation sitting dead in her texts like something abandoned mid-sentence.

This was supposed to be a day already shaped out in her mind before it arrived. You were supposed to be here. You were supposed to tease her awake, steal the first birthday kiss, make some comment about how you technically deserved credit for getting her into another year of life. You were supposed to get ready together, crowding each other in the bathroom while one of you complained about the lighting and the other pretended not to care. It was supposed to be easy and familiar.

Instead everything has this stripped-down, wrong feeling to it. At some point she calls her dad to cancel the party because the thought of smiling through it, of standing in a room full of people while this sits like a fresh wound under her ribs, feels impossible. But her dad, in that steady way he has, gently refuses to let her hide. He reminds her how much family is coming, how rarely everyone’s all in one place, how people are excited to see her. He tells her she doesn’t have to stay all night, just come by, make an appearance, let herself be loved a little. Alysa nearly says no again, but there’s something tired in her by then, something too worn down to keep fighting every small thing. So she agrees, though she doesn’t want to. She gets dressed without much care, pulling things on more than choosing them, and stares at herself in the mirror long enough to know she looks off like someone turned the brightness down on her from the inside.

She arrives alone, and that in itself says too much immediately. The house is already alive with voices and movement, the front rooms warm with the smell of food and that particular hum family gatherings always have when people are circulating and reconnecting at once. Under other circumstances, Alysa would have loved it. Today it feels like walking into a stage play she forgot she was cast in.

Her siblings realize the situation before she even makes it through the first round of greetings. Justin notices first because he’s Justin and because he’s already looking for you the second he sees Alysa by herself. Julia and Jaylinn catch it half a beat later, Selina’s expression changes more subtly but just as quickly. None of them say anything in front of everyone else. They just guide her with those quiet sibling instincts that don’t need much explaining, until they’ve tucked her into a back room away from the noise.

The second the door shuts, Justin asks where you are, and Alysa, already raw, already tired, has to say it out loud. Not every detail at first, just enough for the room to go still. Enough for all four of them to understand this is not some late arrival, not some scheduling issue. Her voice stays remarkably steady while she explains what she saw, what happened, how you left. Her sisters look devastated for her in a way that almost makes it harder. Justin looks immediately furious, jaw set, arms crossed so tightly it’s obvious he’s already decided what he thinks of you. Alysa tells them not to tell anyone else, not because she wants to protect you but because she cannot handle the room turning toward her in collective sympathy. She doesn’t want whispers or pity. So they promise or close enough to one. The mood that settles over the room is quiet and ugly, all of them feeling the same thing in different directions. They only know the story from Alysa’s side, and from that angle there’s not much room left for nuance. By the time they leave that room, it’s more or less understood between the siblings that they hate you now too.

She moves through the party on muscle memory, smiling where she has to, hugging the relatives she doesn’t see often enough, thanking people for gifts, for coming. It is astonishing how well the body can imitate normalcy when the mind is somewhere else entirely. People talk to her and she answers. People laugh and sometimes she even manages a version of it back. But under it all she feels hollowed out, like every interaction is happening one room away from where she actually is.

It gets worse every time someone casually asks where you are. There's the assumption that of course you’d be here and since you're not, everyone is now curious but each question lands like a bruise.

“Where’s your girl?” one aunt asks with a smile.

“Is she coming later?” another cousin says.

An older family friend looks around and says, “I thought she’d be glued to your side today.”

Alysa keeps deflecting without technically lying. “She couldn’t make it on time.” “She’s busy.” “Not here yet.”

The words feel brittle in her mouth. She can’t bring herself to say more, but she also can’t stomach inventing some clean excuse. So she lets the questions slide off as best she can and eventually retreats to sit near her sisters, letting them buffer her from the room a little. They do it naturally.

As she sits there, half removed from the center of her own birthday, Alysa can’t stop thinking the worst part isn’t even the anger. The anger is real, yes, hot and humiliating and still ready to rise any time she thinks too directly about last night. But underneath it is longing so deep it makes her feel weak. She misses you. God, she misses you. She misses you even while believing you hurt her. She misses the version of today that should have existed. She misses the idea of getting one more uncomplicated day before all of this, one more day to be with you before her brain attached betrayal to your face. She wants to hate you cleanly, but she can’t. What she really wants, in the most useless and painful way possible, is for it all to go back to before the suspicion, before the phone, before the look on your face and the one she threw back. Her sisters can tell. They can tell that this isn’t just anger, not just wounded pride, but something much softer and more devastating. They look at her with that protective sadness younger siblings get when the older one they rely on suddenly seems breakable.

———-

Outside, the air is cooler than it should be for a summer evening. The house glows from within, light spilling through windows, silhouettes moving back and forth behind glass, laughter occasionally escaping whenever the front door opens and closes. You stand at the edge of the driveway for a moment before walking up it, your body tighter with nerves the closer you get, your hands colder than they should be.

Every version of today that ran through your head last night ended with you finally getting to explain everything, finally watching that awful misunderstanding collapse under the weight of the truth. That hope is the only thing that got you through the night before, the only thing that kept you from showing up at her door again at some unreasonable hour and begging her to listen. Instead, you came here, to the party where this was always meant to end anyway—not with heartbreak, but with the reveal, with your months of effort landing exactly where they were meant to.

You’re so close to the porch when Justin spots you. He had been out there with one of Alysa’s cousins, talking quietly, both of them half-turned toward the driveway, taking a break from the noise inside. The second he registers it’s you, his whole body changes. He straightens immediately, all ease leaving him at once, and folds his arms across his chest with a look so openly hostile that you almost stop walking. His cousin glances between the two of you and wisely says nothing. You don’t have the energy for subtlety, not today.

“Justin,” you say, the plea already in your voice before you can flatten it out. “Please. Let me go in. I need to talk to Alysa.”

He lets out a humorless sound and shakes his head once, slow, incredulous. “Jesus. You can’t even let her enjoy her birthday?” The accusation lands hard because part of you understands exactly how this looks.

“I’m not here to ruin anything,” you say quickly, stepping closer despite the tension rolling off him. “I just need to explain this. It’s one big misunderstanding and I need her to hear me.”

But Justin has already made up his mind from the version of the story he got, and in that version you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

He scoffs, looks you up and down like he can’t believe you had the nerve to show up, and tells you to get lost. Tells you, flatly, that he’s not letting you in to make her birthday worse than it already is. For one dangerous second your frustration spikes high enough that you have to physically swallow it back down. You want to argue so terribly bad, but because he’s her brother, because he loves her, because from where he’s standing this reaction makes sense, you don't. You just take a long breath through your nose and force yourself still.

“I’m not leaving,” you say at last, quieter now but no less firm. “I’ll wait out here for her.”

Justin looks at you like you’re being dramatic, like there’s no way you actually mean it. He probably assumes you’ll get tired, embarrassed, cold. That eventually you’ll give up and go home and save him the trouble of throwing you off the property himself. So he just shrugs in that dismissive, irritated way and turns back toward the house, the cousin trailing in after him. The door shuts and you are left outside with the sound of the party muted behind it, the warm light unreachable now except through windows.

You walk slowly back down toward the curb and sit on it beside Alysa’s car, close enough that the metal of it catches the house lights in dull reflections. The curb is colder than you expected. You draw your knees up and rest your chin against them, staring at the cobblestone stretch of driveway in front of you like answers might rise from it if you look long enough.

You go over it all again in your head because you need to say it right. You need the explanation to be clear enough that nothing about it feels flimsy or opportunistic. You’ll tell her you started because you wanted more than a surface relationship with a big part of who she is. You’ll tell her about the classes, the professor, the notebooks full of tones and grammar and phrases you kept practicing even when your brain felt wrung out. You’ll tell her about the books too, the fiction and memoirs and essays, all the ways you’ve been trying to understand more than just vocabulary. You’ll tell her you kept it secret because you didn’t want it to feel performative. You wanted this to be real. You wanted to surprise her by showing her that you meant it—that you were in this for the long run, for years from now, for family gatherings where you could finally hold your own without her translating every second of it.

After a while the words stop sounding abstract in your head and start needing somewhere to go, so you whisper them instead. At first it’s just little fragments under your breath, your voice almost swallowed by the night. Then it becomes practice. Mandarin phrases repeated softly again and again, careful with pronunciation even through the ache sitting in your throat. You correct yourself, repeat, try again. Some of it is practical—greetings, short explanations, respectful phrases you know you’ll need if she lets you get inside. But the one you come back to most is simpler. Smaller.

The one thing you can’t stop wanting to say directly to her even now.

I love you.

You keep repeating it, low and quiet, trying to get the tones right despite how unsteady you feel. There’s something devastating about sitting outside her family home on her birthday while she thinks the worst of you, practicing how to tell her you love her in a language you learned for her in the first place.

You are so sad you almost feel numb around the edges of it. But under it there’s still certainty. Not blind optimism, not some easy confidence that this will magically be fine, but a hard little core of belief that this work did not happen for nothing. That eventually Alysa will hear you. That eventually this awful, ruined night and this miserable morning will make sense to her. You just need time to catch up to you. And you can’t wait anymore.

So you stay on the curb beside her car, chin on your knees, whispering I love you into the dark like a promise, like practice, like the only thing holding you together until she finally comes out.

———

By the third hour of being there, Alysa feels like she’s been holding herself upright by sheer politeness alone.

The party has only grown louder around her as the evening’s gone on. Under any other circumstance, Alysa would be fine here. She’d be drifting between rooms, getting pulled into conversations, stealing bites from plates she wasn’t supposed to touch yet, circling back to you every few minutes just because it would feel automatic to do that. But today the house feels like a place she’s performing inside of, and the performance is wearing her down.

Her face hurts from smiling on cue. Her body feels too hot, too tired, too aware of itself. Her sisters have been hovering in that quiet, protective way and she loves them for it, but even that has started to make her feel trapped.

If she tells her dad she wants to leave, she already knows what he’ll say—stay for the cake, at least, stay for another hour, people came all this way. And maybe on any other day she would. But tonight every minute feels like five, and the thought of staying until cake, of standing there while people sing at her when her insides still feel torn open from last night, makes something in her want to bolt.

So she waits for the right opening, slips away from her sisters when they’re distracted by an aunt who wants photos, avoids the hallway Justin just disappeared down, and finally makes it outside with the guilty, relieved feeling of someone sneaking out of their own life.

The driveway stretches long and dim in front of the house, the cobblestones washed in low porch light and the softer spill from inside the windows. Her car is parked all the way at the end just how she wanted it—unblocked, easy to get to, already angled like escape was something she’d subconsciously planned for hours ago.

She starts toward it with her head down, one hand already reaching into her pocket for her keys, her mind half on the relief of finally being alone and half on the shame of leaving her own birthday party early like she can’t even handle one bad day properly. Then something catches her attention. It’s soft enough at first that she almost mistakes it for the wind moving through leaves or voices carrying from farther down the street. But when she stops and listens, she realizes it’s neither. It’s murmuring, whispering, almost. The sound is coming from somewhere beside her car, low and steady, so quiet it keeps getting lost in the distance between them. Alysa stills completely.

There’s something strange about the sound—not just that someone is out here, but the shape of the words themselves. At first she can only make out fragments. A phrase in Mandarin, then another, spoken in an accent that is very obviously not native and yet somehow careful enough that she understands it almost immediately. The pronunciation isn’t perfect in that seamless way family speech is perfect, but it’s good. Shockingly good.

She hears words like sorry. Hears miss you. Hears love. Her brows pull together before she can stop them, and now curiosity outweighs the tiredness enough that she starts walking again, slower this time, cautious without really knowing why. As she rounds the front of her car, the source of the voice comes into view all at once.

It’s you.

You’re sitting on the curb with your knees drawn up, your body folded in around itself like you’ve been there long enough to settle into the discomfort of it. One hand is rolling a pebble back and forth between your fingers with absent concentration, your head tipped away as you mumble to yourself, too deep in it to notice her right away.

Up close, Alysa can hear you more clearly, and the clarity only makes the scene stranger. You’re not just repeating isolated phrases. You’re speaking in sequence, practicing like someone working through a lesson. Telling the time. Mentioning when you woke up. Saying what you ate. Stumbling once, correcting yourself softly, then continuing. It is not random or like you googled translations. It sounds lived in, the kind of speech that only comes from repetition and effort and time.

And for one suspended second Alysa doesn’t know what to do with what she’s seeing. Her chest tightens, but not in the clean, familiar way it has all day. This is different—sharper, more disorienting, almost like her body has recognized something before her mind can place it.

She clears her throat, mostly because she has to break the moment somehow, and your head snaps up so fast it’s almost violent. Your eyes find hers instantly. Then you’re scrambling to your feet, stumbling a little as circulation fights its way back into your legs, one hand flying out to catch your balance on the side of her car.

For a second neither of you says anything. You just look at each other under the weak wash of driveway light, and Alysa is struck by how terrible you look. Okay maybe not terrible, maybe she still hates you, but you look tired. Eyes blown wide with nerves and hope and fear all crowding into one expression, your face drawn with too little sleep, your whole body leaning toward her like it’s been waiting hours for this exact second.

“What are you doing here?” Alysa asks, and her voice comes out flatter than she means it to, worn thin by the day and by everything that’s happened since last night.

“I need to talk to you,” you say immediately. There’s no hesitation in it, it’s just pure urgency.

Alysa exhales through her nose, the sound edged with exhaustion more than anger, though the anger is still there. It resurfaces the second she remembers why she’s out here alone in the first place, why she woke up to an empty bed, why her whole birthday has felt empty. Her hand tightens around her keys and she starts to move past you toward the driver’s side door, because leaving would be easier, safer. But you step in front of it before she can reach it. And because you’re this close now, because she hasn’t really looked at you since last night, she does it now. Your eyes are huge, glassy in the low light, your expression open in a way that makes it impossible to mistake what’s there. You look pleading, scared. Hopeful in a way that almost hurts to witness. There’s no slickness to you, no confidence, no practiced excuse waiting smugly behind your teeth. You just look terribly earnest. Alysa should still say no. She knows she should. Every instinct built from the last twenty-four hours tells her to protect herself, to get in the car, to leave before you can talk your way back into all the places she just barely managed to start sealing off. But she has never, not once, been good at denying you when you ask softly enough. And when you add a quiet, strained “please,” it lands exactly where it always does. She closes her eyes for half a beat, then opens them again and says nothing, but doesn’t move. For you, that’s enough.

You start talking too fast at first, the words crowding each other like you’ve been holding them in so long they don’t know how to come out carefully anymore. “I’m sorry,” you say immediately, and then again, stronger this time, like the first one didn’t cover enough. “I’m so sorry, Alysa. This got so big and messy for no reason, and I should’ve told you everything last night. I should’ve explained the second I realized what you thought you saw.” You stop just long enough to drag in a breath, your eyes searching her face like you’re trying to figure out if she’s still listening, if she’s already shutting down again. “I just— I froze. You were so upset, and I’ve never… I’ve never had you look at me like that before. I was scared,” you admit, your voice dropping a little. “And I didn’t know how to explain any of it without making you more upset, and then you wanted me gone and I just…” You shake your head, frustrated with yourself, jaw tight. “I handled it wrong. I know I did.”

Alysa says nothing. She just stands there, shoulders tense, keys pressing into her palm, and lets you keep going because now that the dam is broken you clearly can’t stop if you wanted to. Then you say the name. P. Lucas. And the second you do, Alysa’s stomach tightens again, but now with anticipation instead of sickness. “It’s not some guy,” you say quickly, seeing the shift in her face. “It means Professor Lucas. He’s my Mandarin teacher.” There’s a flicker of confusion in Alysa then—small, enough that it passes visibly across her features before she can smooth it out. You see it and keep going, more steady now that you’ve begun telling the actual truth. “I’ve been taking lessons for like… ten-ish months,” you say. “Not even Duolingo, I mean yeah I started there but I realized it wasn't working so then it turned into like actual lessons, in person, with a professor, every day for an hour and a half whenever I could make it work.” You swallow, glance down for half a second, then force yourself to meet her eyes again. “And I’ve been reading too. Books, essays, memoirs, fiction, history—anything I could find that would help me understand more. I’ve been watching movies and interviews and lectures and taking notes like a psycho.” There’s a small, humorless exhale at that, not quite a laugh, gone as quickly as it appeared.

And as you talk, Alysa feels that unbearable tightness in her chest building again, but now it’s changing shape faster than she can keep up with. You take a breath, slower this time, and when you speak again your voice changes. It gets quieter and less frantic. Like you’ve reached the part that matters most and now you need her to hear every word exactly as you mean it. “It wasn’t just because of that party,” you say. “Or—okay, no, that’s not true. That party stayed with me, and Maya’s boyfriend showing up and just… fitting like that. Watching him talk to your family so easily. Sure, it bothered me.” Your eyes flick away for a second, toward the lit windows of the house behind her, then back to her face. “But it wasn’t just me feeling embarrassed or left out. It was more than that. I realized I didn’t want to keep standing on the outside of your world.”

But that wasn’t the whole thing. The whole thing, you say, was, “If I’m really in this, if I’m really in your life, then I don’t want to only exist in translation when it comes to the people and the culture that matter this much to you. I don’t want to just smile and nod and follow you around and depend on you to bridge every gap forever. I want to hold my own years from now without needing you to translate every second of it for me.”

Your voice gets quieter; the words matter more than how fast they come. “I kept it secret because I didn’t want it to feel fake,” you say. “I didn’t want you thinking I was doing it for praise, or because I wanted everyone to think I was this amazing girlfriend who cares so much.” You wince faintly at yourself, then keep going. “I wanted it to be real. I wanted to surprise you with something that actually meant something. I wanted to show you that I meant it—that I’m in this for real, for the long run.” Your face softens then, sadness pulling at it openly now. “I was literally imagining today as the payoff. Showing up here with you and understanding what people were saying. Trying to answer back but probably messing it up and making you laugh and then getting it right eventually.” The smallest, saddest smile tugs at your mouth and disappears again. “I thought if I could just get to your birthday, if I could just finish it the way I imagined, it would all be worth it.”

Alysa’s chest hurts.

There’s no better way to describe it. It just hurts. Tight and full and raw all at once, because she can hear the shape of your intentions now, can see how long you’ve been carrying this, how badly you wanted this reveal to go right. And at the same time, she can’t unknow the way the last two months felt. The loneliness of it. The confusion. The nights she missed you so much it made her restless in her own apartment. The resentment that started taking root when “busy” stopped feeling temporary and started feeling personal.

Maybe you see some of that flicker across her face, because your own expression crumples a little with guilt. “I know I pushed you away,” you say, voice rough now. “I know I did, and I’m sorry. I was wrong.” There is something almost unbearable in your sincerity, in the way every word seems dragged out of a place that has nothing to do with self-protection and everything to do with wanting her back. Wanting this back. Still, there’s something pressing behind it all.

“But why did you push me away so much?” she says, and the words come out smaller than she intended, not accusing now so much as wounded. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in so long. Haven’t been with you in so long.”

You look stricken at that, like this is the part you knew was coming and dreaded anyway. You let out a breath, glance down at the driveway for a second, then back at her. You admit it—you were excessive. More than excessive. A little obsessive, probably. You got fixated on making it all happen before her birthday, on making the surprise complete, on reaching some invisible finish line you set for yourself without realizing you were sacrificing the very thing you were supposed to be protecting. “I got too wrapped up in it.” Your eyes shine a little now, not fully crying but close enough that Alysa notices. “I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have prioritized some future moment over actually being there with you in the present. I know that now. I know I hurt you, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”. Your voice is quieter by the end, stripped down, almost fragile with honesty. “I want to make it up to you now. Like actually this time.”

By the time you switch into Mandarin, Alysa is barely holding herself in the same emotional shape she started in. The words are deliberate, each one placed with concentration and respect, and the accent is still yours—still undeniably you—but now she can hear how much time sits underneath it. How many repetitions. How many corrections. How many nights and mornings and stolen hours. You look a little embarrassed speaking it in front of her, a little exposed, but you do it anyway.

You say you’re sorry. You say you’ve missed her. You say you love her.

Hearing it in that language, in her family language—spoken by you, for her, with months of private effort sitting underneath each syllable—does something to Alysa so abruptly she almost has to brace herself against the car.

That tightness in her chest finally resolves into something she can name, and the name is not one emotion but too many at once. Hurt, still, because the last twenty-four hours happened and she cannot unfeel them just because there’s an explanation now. Relief, immense and dizzying, because the explanation exists at all and it is not cheating, not betrayal, not the ugly end she had been forcing herself to mourn all day. Love, most of all, rising through everything else so strongly that it almost feels like grief in reverse.

Because of course it comes back to love.

The anger came from love. The aching all day, the empty bed, the way she could barely make it through her own birthday party—all of it was love twisted into pain by what she thought she’d lost. And now this too is love. Love is ten months of Mandarin lessons. Love is notebooks and books and films and voice memos and time carved violently out of your own life just to learn how to stand a little closer to hers. Love is you sitting on the curb outside her family home whispering apologies and practice phrases into the dark because you couldn’t bear not fixing this tonight. The feeling that climbs into Alysa’s throat is so overwhelming it almost scares her. She could actually cry.

Alysa stands there breathing through the last of the adrenaline, the last of the fear, and logic finally starts returning in pieces. This is not an easy thing to fake. Not this level of detail, not the Mandarin, not the way your face has gone soft with genuine regret instead of defensiveness. Later, she knows, she can look through the messages with Professor Lucas, can listen to the voice memos and hear that they’re about pronunciation and phrasing, can come to your apartment and see the mountains of books and the notes and all the evidence of this life you built in secret. Though, she already believes you before any of that. But only because this explanation fits in a way the other one only forced itself to fit through pain. And the second she lets herself accept that, truly accept it, something in her gives way completely. She doesn’t say yes in words. She doesn’t make some neat declaration about forgiveness. She just steps forward with a breath that sounds almost like a break and collapses into you.

You catch her immediately, like you were ready for exactly that, like some part of you has been holding your whole body in place waiting for permission to do this. Her face buries itself in the side of your neck, and the second she’s there, the whole last day finally starts draining out of her. Your hand comes up to cradle the back of her head, fingers sliding gently into her hair, while your other hand settles firm and warm against the middle of her back. Alysa’s arms wrap tight around your waist, tighter than she means them to, but you don’t react except to hold her closer. She can feel how real you are then—your breathing, the weight of your body, the warmth of your skin under the collar of your shirt—and the relief of it is so intense it almost hurts as much as the grief did.

Being held by you after spending all day believing she’d lost you feels like stepping out of freezing water. Neither of you moves for a while. The driveway is quiet except for distant party noise spilling faintly from the house, some car passing far away at the street. But here, tucked against each other in the half-dark, everything has narrowed down to breathing and contact and the stunned, exhausted knowledge that this is over now. That the worst of it has finally loosened its hands from both your throats. When you speak, it’s into her hair, your voice low and a little wrecked still.

You murmur happy birthday, my sweet in Mandarin, careful with each word even now, and Alysa lets out a breath against your neck that might be the beginning of a laugh, might be a sob, might be both. Her grip tightens once more before easing, and she stays there a little longer, because after all that distance, after all that hurt, she is not ready to let go of you yet.

———

For a little while after Alysa folds into you, neither of you seems capable of doing. The misunderstanding has burned itself out and left only the two of you standing in the driveway breathing against each other like you’ve both just survived something uglier than either of you expected. Alysa’s face stays buried against your neck long enough that your shirt grows warm from her breath, and your hand never leaves the back of her head, fingers spread there carefully, like you’re afraid she’ll slip away if you loosen your grip too soon. Her arms are still locked around your waist with that same desperate tightness, and you let her hold on as hard as she needs to because you get it. You feel the ache of the last few months, the shock of last night, the loneliness of not being able to fix it fast enough—it’s all still in both of you, but now it’s softened by relief, by the steady realization that you’re here and she’s here and neither of you lost the other after all.

When Alysa finally lifts her head, it happens slowly, almost reluctantly, like she has to physically force herself to leave the shelter of your neck. Her cheeks are a little flushed, her eyes still glossy from everything she’s been carrying around all day, and for a second she just looks at you from too close, taking you in with the kind of focus that makes it obvious she’s still grounding herself in the sight of you.

Then she kisses you.

It isn’t hesitant. It's not even particularly gentle at first. It’s the kind of kiss that happens when both people have been starved of each other long enough that the second permission exists, restraint goes with it. Alysa’s hand comes up to the side of your face as she leans in, and you kiss her back instantly. The relief of it is almost physical. It really does feel like coming up for air after being underwater too long—like the first full breath after a long panic, like your ribs finally unlocking.

The kiss deepens quickly because too much has built up. Too many nights cut short, too many missed mornings, too many almosts and not-enoughs. Alysa lets out the faintest sound against your mouth when your hands settle at her waist and pull her in harder, and for a few seconds neither of you is thinking about the house ten yards away. There’s only the fact that she’s kissing you again, that you get to kiss her back, that all day she thought this was gone and now it isn’t.

When you finally break apart, it’s only by inches, lips still brushing, both of you breathing a little too fast. Alysa’s forehead nearly knocks into yours when she chases one more kiss, shorter this time, softer, and then she mumbles, still so close that the words warm your mouth as they leave her. “I missed you so much.” It comes out half-breathed, almost embarrassed by how honest it is. You answer before there’s even room for thought.

“I missed you too. So much.” And then you’re kissing again, not because either of you planned to but because apparently this is what missing each other for months does once it finally has somewhere to go.

The tone between you has shifted now, lighter in some ways but no less intense. The panic is gone and what’s left is all that pent-up affection and need rushing to fill the cleared space. Your hands start roaming without much thought, the way they used to when privacy wasn’t an issue and time wasn’t always running out. One slides from Alysa’s waist to the small of her back, then upward, fingertips slipping under the hem of her shirt to find warm skin. Alysa shivers at the contact, just enough that you feel it under your palms, and her mouth parts against yours in a way that immediately goes to your head. You are very clearly in the mode of wanting to make up for everything at once. For the distance, for the confusion, for the fact that she woke up without you this morning, for every time she looked at the clock and you were already leaving. So when your hand moves higher under her shirt you don’t even think about where you are. You only think about how badly you’ve missed touching her like this, how familiar and unbearable it feels all at once to have her body fitting against yours again.

Alysa, for her part, is hardly less affected. Her hands are on your neck, then sliding down your shoulders, then back up again like she can’t settle on one place because she wants all of it at once. But unlike you, she does remember where you are, and eventually some sliver of situational awareness cuts through the haze enough for her to pull back with a breathless little laugh that sounds half dazed, half disbelieving.

“Okay,” she murmurs, catching your wrist lightly before your hand can get too far. “Okay—wait.” You blink at her, clearly prepared to pretend not to understand the problem. Alysa has to bite back a smile because even now, even like this, you look so earnest in your desperation it’s hard to take seriously. “You should come inside,” she says, still close enough that your mouths brush when she talks. “Everyone’s been asking about you.”

You look at her for a second, trying to gather yourself enough to process the sentence, then your brows pull together. “I thought you were leaving.”

Alysa lets out a soft exhale through her nose, one shoulder lifting as her hand smooths once over your side, grounding both of you. “I was,” she admits. “It was unbearable without you. But I can go back if you go with me.”

You stop trying to pull her closer for a second and just hold her instead, your arms winding fully around her as if the answer is already yes and your body has moved on before your mouth does.

“Yeah,” you say quietly. “Okay. I’ll go with you.” The decision settles between you with surprising ease after everything.

You both take a second to straighten up after that, partly because you need to and partly because if you don’t, you’re probably going to end up right back against her car doing something neither of you can defend to the rest of her family. Alysa smooths a hand over the front of her shirt, glances at you, then laughs under her breath at the state of your face—tired eyes, hair a little wind-shifted from sitting on the curb and being immediately kissed senseless the second she forgave you. But you’re dressed fine. Better than fine, actually. You had come expecting to walk into a birthday party, not a breakup aftermath, so your clothes fit the room you’re about to enter even if your expression gives away the long night that came before it. Alysa reaches for your hand without hesitation, threading your fingers together with a possessiveness that feels earned now, and the two of you start back toward the house side by side.

Walking in hand in hand changes the room almost instantly. The second the front door opens and you step inside with Alysa beside you, the energy nearest the entrance shifts first in surprise, then in visible relief from the people who had spent the last few hours asking where you were. Her family brightens almost immediately, several of them greeting you before you’ve even made it two steps in. And this time you’re not shrinking from it. You’re still a little flustered, still carrying the emotional wreckage of the last twenty-four hours in your eyes, but you’re eager now, too eager in a way that seems to override your nerves.

You squeeze Alysa’s hand once and follow her further in, and she, suddenly back in her element now that the central wrongness of the night has been corrected, gets a little cute about the whole thing. She’s introducing you again to people who already know you, except now her voice has that barely contained edge to it that says she’s sitting on a piece of information she enjoys very much.

“She’s been taking Mandarin lessons,” Alysa says to one of her aunts, unable to stop the pride that sneaks into her tone.

The aunt blinks, looks from Alysa to you, and then, naturally, tests it. She says something in Mandarin and Alysa watches the split second where you process it, your lips parting just slightly while you sort through the words. Then you answer. It isn't perfect like family who grew up inside the language, but clear enough, correct enough, warm enough that the aunt’s face lights up in delight.

The response from the room is instant. People gush; someone laughs in surprise. Another aunt calls somebody else over to hear you say something again. You smile, visibly embarrassed by the sudden attention but also happy in a way that makes the embarrassment worth it. There’s color rising in your cheeks, and your eyes flick toward Alysa once like help me, but there’s affection under it rather than panic. And Alysa, watching you stand there in the middle of her family trying so sincerely, feels that ache in her chest return in its way better form—the one made of pride and relief and love rather than fear.

The further into the party you go, the closer you get to the real test of whether the night has truly turned. Her siblings are gathered near the living room, exactly where Alysa left them, and they notice the two of you immediately. Julia and Jaylinn both make near-identical faces the second they register your joined hands. Selina’s brows go up but Justin reacts the fastest.

He’s halfway to standing before Alysa and you have fully reached them, his expression somewhere between disbelief and protective outrage. “Alysa,” he starts, already exasperated, “what are you doing?”

Alysa doesn’t even let him build momentum. She squeezes your hand, steps slightly forward, and says, with a patience she probably would not have had an hour ago, “Please, guys. I appreciate everything you did for me. I really do. But it’s okay now.”

Justin looks deeply unconvinced. “Okay now?” he repeats flatly. “That’s what we’re calling this?”

You stand there taking it because, honestly, you’ve earned a little bit of hostility from them even if it came from the wrong story. There’s something sheepish about the way you say hello to her siblings from behind Alysa—small, careful, not trying to force ease where there clearly isn’t any. It is painfully awkward. Alysa can feel you trying not to make it worse just by existing there.

So she turns more fully to her siblings and lowers her voice enough that the conversation becomes a contained bubble rather than a scene. “It’s not what I told you,” she says. “I was wrong.”

That gets their attention if only because they know how difficult that sentence can be for anybody in the immediate aftermath of heartbreak. Then Alysa explains in a hurried, quiet version—the Mandarin lessons, Professor Lucas, the entire surprise gone horribly sideways.

Her sisters’ expressions change first, skepticism warring with reluctant intrigue. Justin remains harder to win over, arms folded, mouth set, until Jaylinn—because she wants proof and because she’s enjoying your discomfort just a little—tilts her head and says, “Okay then. Say something.”

You look briefly horrified by being put on the spot, which only encourages them.

“Anything,” Julia adds, crossing her arms but smiling now despite herself. “Go on.”

You glance at Alysa and she only raises her brows, amused now too. You clear your throat and, after one second of visible mental scrambling, start talking in Mandarin about your fish. It’s oddly specific how you say you have alarms set to wake you up in order to feed your fish. That she likes one food but not the other one you bought. The siblings listen, and though none of them understand enough Mandarin to assess the grammar properly, the evidence is embarrassingly clear in your pronunciation, in the fact that you didn’t freeze and fake it, in the confidence that arrived sentence by sentence once you got going.

They glance at each other in that murmured, grudging way of people being forced to revise an opinion they had already committed to. Jaylinn mutters something about you being a nerd. Julia snorts. Justin’s expression loosens last and least.

He looks at you for a long second, then away, then finally says, with all the magnanimity of someone pretending he was never worried at all, “You should’ve just said that outside.”

You have the grace not to point out that he wouldn’t have let you. Gradually, the tension begins to diminish. The siblings drift back into you in pieces, the way people do when love is still the underlying structure even after irritation. Jaylinn and Julia eventually pull you into some gossip you missed, talking over each other while you try to catch up. Selina asks a quieter question about your lessons and actually seems impressed when you answer. Justin, after an appropriate period of continued younger-brother glare, eventually mutters something about whether you’re still free for the hangout the two of you had planned before all this mess, and that’s basically his way of saying fine, you’re not dead to him.

From there the night begins to feel like it belongs to both of you again. The lost months don’t disappear, but now every touch has permission behind it again, and both of you are embarrassingly unwilling to waste that.

You and Alysa stay hand in hand for most of the rest of the party. Alysa’s hand brushes your arm when she passes behind you. Your palm settles low on her back as you guide her around clusters of relatives. More than once one of you leans in for what should clearly be a simple peck and it almost derails into something more—the kiss deepening too fast, one of you smiling into it because seriously? here? before forcing the other to pull back. There is a clinginess to both of you that nobody who knows the context would dare make fun of. Too much had been held back. Too much had almost been lost. So now the smallest contact feels necessary.

When you come across Alysa’s grandma again, the moment matters more than either of you expected it to. The older woman brightens the second she sees you, reaching for your hand the way she did the first time, and this time when she speaks to you in Mandarin you actually understand enough to answer. You do have to pause and search for a word here and there, but you get it now. Enough that her face changes with real pleasure, she laughs softly and squeezes your hand and responds again with the kind of warm patience that makes trying easier rather than harder. Alysa still has to step in every so often to supply a word you’re missing, and each time you glance at her with that quick, grateful look before continuing, but it doesn’t feel like being rescued now. It feels like being a part of something, like finally stepping into the world you had spent months trying to reach. And for Alysa, standing there watching you with her grandmother, the rightness of it is almost overwhelming.

Eventually it’s cake time, and the house shifts accordingly, people being called in from the kitchen and the porch and wherever else they’ve wandered. The lights in the living room are dimmed one by one until the room goes soft and warm around the edges, and voices start corralling into one place.

You disappear briefly into the kitchen and reemerge carrying the cake with the candles already lit, their glow catching along your tired face and turning it softer. The room starts singing almost immediately—family loud and off-key and affectionate in exactly the way birthday songs always are—but for Alysa the room narrows the second she sees you walking toward her through the dim light holding that cake.

She is vaguely aware of everyone else, but none of it lands the way you do. You look at her over the candles with so much open love on your face that it steadies something deep in her.

And she knows, right then, that this is the moment that you were working so hard for. It’s not perfect, the day didn’t go anything like planned, but it went wrong in the worst possible way and still ended here. With the two of you looking at each other across candlelight and noise and family and all the complications that come with loving someone fully. The misunderstanding, the distance, the hurt, the relief—it all points to the same thing. Your relationship has weight to it. It held through months of miscommunication and a day that should have wrecked it. It held because underneath everything else there is love, real and persistent enough to survive both your mistakes.

Alysa feels it when the song finishes and everyone starts cheering, feels it when you set the cake down and immediately reach for her hand again, feels it in the way both of you break into the same private smile at the exact same time. This is not some fragile thing that only works when everything is easy. This is something sturdier. Something that will keep asking things of both of you and keep being worth it anyway.

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first post back???? i wouldve split this up into two parts but i wanted to use those three pics LOL like theyre perfect for this story. Also... anyone at all get the very small wicked reference,,,,, hold out my....

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tag list :P

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