#powerplay

POWERPLAY RECORD

𝑰. the comedown

James was already there when you got to the auxiliary rink, which had never once happened in four months and which you noticed before you'd even gotten your bag off your shoulder.

He was lacing up at the bench, hood down for once, and he looked up when the door swung shut behind you with an expression that was trying very hard to be casual about something that clearly wasn't.

"You're early," you said.

"Traffic was light."

"It's never light on a Thursday."

He didn't argue that. Just kept lacing, eyes back on his skates, and you filed the non-answer away with everything else you'd been filing for the past five days and didn't open your mouth about any of it.

You set your bag down on the bench. "What are you doing here so early?"

"Had nothing else to do."

That answer was too flat to be the whole truth, and you both knew it. You glanced at him while you pulled your skate guards off. "That sounded fake."

"It was vague."

"You're telling me there's a difference?"

"There is."

You snorted, and he watched you with that same quiet attention he always had, the kind that made you feel noticed in a way that was more annoying than flattering. Not because it was intrusive. Because it was specific. Like he actually remembered the shape of your irritation from one day to the next, even now, even when you were doing everything you could to make that shape harder to read.

He leaned his stick against the bench. "How was your morning?"

That made you look at him. "Since when do you ask normal questions?"

"Since now."

You paused, then shrugged one shoulder. "Fine. Coach wanted me to clean up the landing on the flip again."

"Did you?"

"Eventually."

He hummed like that made sense, then nodded toward your bag. "You're not wearing the new blades."

You blinked. "You noticed that?"

"You've had them for three days."

"Okay, that's creepy."

"It's not creepy."

"It is a little creepy."

He looked faintly offended, which only made it worse because it meant he actually cared enough to react. "They're different. Your edge looks different on the first push."

You stared at him for a second, then shook your head. "You say stuff like that and expect me not to think you're weird."

"I don't expect you not to think it."

That made you laugh despite yourself, and the sound felt too easy in the empty rink, easier than you'd planned on letting anything feel tonight. He looked at you like he liked that more than he should have, like the laugh had gotten through some door you'd meant to keep shut, and you turned away before he could watch it land on your face for too long.

You both got onto the ice a minute later, the cold immediately sharpening everything. He moved to the far end without being told, and you started with your usual warmup patterns at the near boards. For a while neither of you said much. The rink was big enough to let silence stretch without turning ugly, and the sound of your blades cut the space into clean, measured pieces.

After a few passes, he called across the ice, "You're favoring the outside edge again."

You stopped and turned. "You're not supposed to be watching me that closely."

He scoffed. "I always watch you that closely."

"Not like this." You skated a slow circle, working out something in your hip that had nothing to do with your edge. "Not lately."

That was the closest you'd come in five days to actually saying anything, and you regretted it the second it left your mouth, because his expression did something complicated and he pushed off the boards and skated halfway across the ice toward you before catching himself and stopping short, like he'd remembered partway through that you hadn't actually invited him closer.

"What does that mean?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"It's not nothing if you said it."

"James."

"You've done this all week." His voice had an edge now. It wasn’t loud, just tighter than usual, the particular tightness that showed up when he was working a problem and couldn't find the variable that was breaking the equation. "You barely answer me. You leave before I'm done changing. You used to wait."

"I have a program to fix."

"You've had a program to fix since October. That's never stopped you from waiting before."

You didn't have an answer for that, not one you were willing to give him, so you ran the sequence again instead. Your shoulder dropped at the same spot it always dropped, the same two-inch tell from the very first night four months ago, and you knew it and kept going anyway because stopping to fix it would mean standing still long enough for him to say something else true.

He said something anyway.

"Your shoulder," he called after you.

"I know."

"You're not adjusting it."

"I know, James."

He skated closer instead of staying where he was, which wasn't the arrangement, not during a session, not when you'd very clearly been telling him with your whole body for forty minutes that you didn't want to be approached. He stopped a few feet off, stick trailing, and looked at you with the specific kind of confusion that came from someone who'd spent four months learning your rhythms and had just hit a wall where none of his data applied anymore.

"Did I do something?" he asked.

You almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because the honest answer was so simple and you weren't going to give it to him—yes, you gave your headphones to Lia like it was nothing, like the rule didn't exist anymore the second I wasn't the one asking—and saying that out loud would mean admitting the rule had ever meant anything to you in the first place, which was the one thing the entire arrangement wasn't supposed to let you admit. It would mean admitting you'd noticed. It would mean admitting you'd cared that you noticed.

"No," you said.

"You've been weird since nationals."

"I'm not weird. I'm tired."

"You're not tired. You're avoiding the back half of your own program right now to avoid talking to me."

That landed closer than you wanted it to. You turned and ran the sequence again instead of answering, shoulder dropping at the same spot, and he didn't call it out again. He just watched you run it wrong three more times in a row, arms crossed, jaw tight, which was somehow worse than if he'd kept pushing. You could feel him deciding not to say anything else, the same deliberate restraint he used on everything, except this time it didn't feel like patience. It felt like him giving up on a calculation he couldn't solve and choosing to wait for new data instead.

By the end of the session neither of you had said much else. You took your skate guards off slower than usual, stalling, and he stood there with his bag already on his shoulder like he was working up to something.

"Come over," he beckoned.

"James."

"We don't have to do anything." He said it fast, like he'd rehearsed it in his head a few times before committing to it out loud. "We can just watch something. I have a couch. It has a function beyond holding my shit."

You looked at him. He looked, for someone who spent most of his life being unreadable, almost nervous, which was such a foreign register on him that it nearly worked on its own. His hands were in his pockets, shoulders pulled in slightly, like he'd talked himself into the offer somewhere on the drive over and hadn't fully recovered from the effort of getting the words out.

"That's not really what we do," you hummed.

"I know what we do." His jaw tightened slightly. "I'm saying we could do something else. For once."

"Why."

"Because you've been somewhere else for five days and I don't know how to fix it and I figured—" He stopped, exhaled through his nose, started over with less momentum. "I figured if I stopped trying to fix it, maybe you'd just be normal again."

You thought about saying no. You thought about it seriously, for about four seconds, weighing the version of tonight where you went home alone and let the silence be a real silence instead of the kind you climbed into his bed to avoid.

"Fine," you shrugged. "Movie night. Very normal. Very platonic."

"Very platonic," he agreed, and the corner of his mouth moved like he didn't believe either of you for a second.

You didn't make it inside.

He'd barely gotten the car into park outside his building, hand still on the gearshift, engine ticking as it cooled, when you unbuckled and turned and kissed him before either of you had said a word about getting out.

It was… not soft. It wasn't anything close to the deliberate, considered thing he usually did with his mouth—you kissed him like you were trying to get something out of your own system rather than into his, hand fisting in the front of his jacket and pulling, and he made a startled sound against your mouth that had nothing composed in it at all.

Your teeth caught his lip wrong on the second pass, a clumsy graze that should have been embarrassing, and neither of you stopped to acknowledge it. He recovered fast—hand coming up to your jaw the way it always did, trying to slow you down, trying to bring it back to the version of this he knew how to do—and you didn't let him. You kissed him like there was something underneath it you were actively trying not to say, and the only way to keep it down was to keep your mouth too busy to say it. He tasted like the protein bar he always ate after sessions and underneath that just like himself, and you hated how easily you could still tell the difference.

"Hey," he mumbled, breaking away half an inch, breathing uneven. "Hey. Slow down."

"Why?"

"Because you're—" He stopped. His thumb was at your jaw, not guiding now, just resting there, and his eyes were doing the thing where they actually looked at you instead of through you. "You're somewhere else right now."

"I'm right here."

"You're not."

"James." Your voice came out lower than you meant it to. "Can you just—"

You didn't finish the sentence. You kissed him again before he could ask you to, harder this time, and he let you, because whatever else was true about James, he had never once in four months turned you away. 

His hand slid from your jaw to the back of your neck and he kissed you back properly now, matching whatever pace you'd set, fingers tightening in your hair in a way that pulled a sound out of you that you hadn't planned on giving him. The confusion didn't leave his face so much as it got folded into something else—want, mostly, with the confusion still sitting underneath it like a question he wasn't going to get to ask tonight, not with your mouth doing this, not with your hand already working at the front of his jacket like you'd forgotten there was a building two feet away with a door that locked.

He pulled back again, just enough to talk, forehead nearly against yours, both of you breathing like you'd run something. "We don't have to—"

"I know."

"I mean it. The couch thing. I meant that."

"I know you did." You kissed the corner of his mouth, his jaw, felt him swallow under your lips. "We can still watch something. After."

"After," he repeated, like he was testing whether the word held any weight, and then his hand found the back of your neck again and the conversation was over.

When you finally pulled back the windows had fogged at the edges and his mouth was a little swollen and his expression was unreadable in a way that meant he was choosing not to read it out loud.

"Movie night," he said, voice rough.

"Mm."

"That's not what this is."

"I know."

He looked at you for a long second, like he was deciding whether to push, and then he didn't. He just reached over and turned the engine back on, because the car had gone cold, and neither of you moved to get out for another minute, his hand still resting at the back of your neck like he wasn't entirely convinced you wouldn't disappear the second he let go.

𝑰𝑰. macklin

Macklin had a way of showing up that never once felt like an ambush.

You noticed it the second week of January, somewhere around the point where you'd stopped being able to tell whether you were avoiding James or just orbiting him from a worse angle—same rink, same hours, same vending machine, just less of the parts that used to make any of it feel good. Macklin didn't orbit. He just arrived, consistently, at the edges of your day, without making it a production.

He was there on Tuesday mornings now, doing supplemental ice work before his flight schedule picked back up, and he'd taken to leaning on the boards near wherever you happened to be running drills, not close enough to be intrusive, just close enough that a conversation could start if either of you wanted one to.

He caught you properly the day you came out of the rehab room, ankle freshly taped, jaw still set from forty minutes of a trainer pressing on something that didn't want to be pressed on. He spotted you first and grinned like he'd already found the best possible thing to say.

"Holy shit. All hail our national champ."

You rolled your eyes, but you were smiling before you could stop it, which was probably the only reason the line didn't immediately turn annoying. "You always this dramatic, or was this a special occasion?"

"Depends," he said, the smile widening in a way that made it obvious he was enjoying himself. "Did I need a reason to congratulate greatness?"

You gave him a look, but there wasn't any real heat in it, which seemed to surprise him a little. It surprised you too, if you were being honest. Usually when people brought up nationals there was a whole performance around it—the careful tone, the overdone praise, the thinly veiled expectation that you'd react like a person whose life had just become a highlight reel. Macklin didn't do any of that. He said it like he meant it, but lightly, like he knew exactly how much room to leave you to decide what to do with it. That mattered more than it should have.

You leaned back against the counter in the rehab room doorway, one hand still wrapped around the edge of the tape roll the trainer had left behind, and looked at him properly now that he'd made himself impossible to ignore.

He was half put together and half like he was still coming back to earth from the ice, hair damp at the temples, one shoulder held a little tight under his shirt. He had that loose, post-session quality some athletes carried, the kind that made it look like their bodies hadn't quite caught up to where the rest of them already was. But there was nothing clumsy about how he stood there, easy and unforced, taking in the room without making it feel like he was trying to take it over. It was a nice change from the usual energy in places like this, where everyone either looked miserable or determined to pretend they weren't.

"I didn't know you'd be here," he chuckled and looked around.

"I could say the same."

"Fair." He dropped his water bottle onto the counter beside yours and glanced around the room with exaggerated seriousness. "I should've brought a banner or something."

"Dude, you're obsessed."

"I'm respecting a champion."

"You're making me sound like I should be on a podium."

His eyes flicked back to yours. "You were. That's kind of the point."

It was annoying, how easy it was to talk to him when he was like this. Not because he wasn't trying, but because he was, and it didn't feel like a battle. He was just talking to you. Simple as that. You were used to people who either wanted something obvious or wanted to sound like they didn't. Macklin didn't seem interested in either. He just seemed curious, maybe a little amused, and that was enough to make the room feel less sterile than it had a minute ago.

The rehab room was quiet except for the low hum of a machine in the corner and the soft scrape of someone moving around behind the curtain on the far side. There was a faint medicinal smell in the air, the kind that never really left places like this no matter how much they cleaned. You sat down on the bench and pulled your leg up more carefully than necessary, checking the tape around your ankle out of habit even though the trainer had already done it. Macklin noticed. Of course he did.

"Still bugging you?"

"It's fine."

"That's not what I asked."

You glanced at him sideways. "You ask questions like you're in charge of a medical chart."

He laughed, low and easy enough that it softened the space between you. "I just mean you look like you're considering biting someone."

"Only because I'm in a rehab room."

"That tracks."

You almost laughed at that, and he saw it. His mouth curved, satisfied in the quiet way people got when they'd landed on the right version of a joke without forcing it. He nodded toward the bench across from you and sat, legs stretched out, posture loose enough that it was obvious he wasn't in a rush. It was strange how quickly the conversation settled. There was none of the overcorrection you usually got from people who knew who you were and wanted to prove they were normal about it. He just sat there like this was simply what the two of you did now—talked in a rehab room after training, like it was a perfectly reasonable way to spend the next ten minutes.

"So," he said after a second, "did nationals feel different from the outside?"

You looked at him. That wasn't what you'd expected. "What do you mean?"

He shrugged one shoulder. "I watched the broadcast. It felt bigger than the others. I know that sounds stupid, but there's a difference between skating well and skating with people actually watching because they know the stakes."

You studied him for a second, trying to figure out whether he was being polite or genuinely interested, and the thing was, he looked sincere enough that it was almost disorienting. "It did feel different," you said finally. "Not during it. During it you're just trying to get through each part without your brain getting loud. But after, yeah. There's this weird second wave where everybody starts acting like they were inside your head while it was happening."

"Were they?"

"Not even a little."

Macklin laughed under his breath. "That's reassuring."

"Why?"

"Because it means the whole thing still belongs to you."

That landed harder than it should have. Not necessarily because it was profound. Because it was simple enough to be true. You looked down at the tape on your ankle, then back up at him, and there was something careful in the way he watched you, like he knew he'd said something worth leaving alone for a second.

"You talk like that a lot?" you asked, looking him in his eyes.

"Like what?"

"Like you actually think about what you're saying before you say it."

He gave you a small, lopsided look. "Is that not normal?"

"No. People usually just say whatever comes out first and hope it lands."

"Sounds inefficient."

"Yeah, well. Most people are."

He huffed a laugh and leaned back against the wall. "I don't know. I just think if you're going to say something, it should probably mean something."

That made you pause. There was no dramatic shift in the room, no big moment attached to it—just a sentence dropped with the same casualness as everything else he'd said. But it stuck anyway, the way the simplest things sometimes did. You tilted your head at him, studying his face a moment too long, and he noticed. Of course he noticed.

"What?" he asked with a laugh.

"Nothing."

"That means something."

You smiled before you could stop it. "You're weirdly sentimental for someone who opened with 'all hail our national champ.'"

He laughed again, a little more edge to it this time. "I contain multitudes."

"You really don't."

"Wow," he said, mock-offended. "That was cold."

"Deserved."

He shifted forward, elbows on his knees now, more engaged. "Okay, then tell me what I am."

You glanced at him, then at the floor, then back. "Annoyingly observant."

He looked pleased by that, which was irritating. "That's one."

"And too comfortable saying things that make me suspicious."

"Also fair."

"And not embarrassed at all to act like a nerd about other people's skating."

He let out a quiet laugh, lifting one hand in mock surrender. "That one I'll own."

You shook your head, smiling again, and it was clear he'd already noticed the pattern and filed it away. It shouldn't have been this easy for him to make you feel like you weren't under a microscope. It should have been harder, even, because he was still paying attention—the difference was that his attention didn't feel like judgment. It felt like interest. The room was still too bright, too full of the low mechanical sounds that made rehab rooms feel like they existed outside the rest of life, but the conversation had started giving it shape. You could feel yourself settling into it without meaning to.

The trainer came back briefly to check the wrap on your ankle, and Macklin got up to give you space without turning it into anything. He stood near the sink while she talked through the wrap in that practical, clipped language people used when they spent their lives around bodies that didn't always cooperate. When she finished, he glanced over.

"Better?"

"Yeah."

He nodded once. "Good."

She left again, and the room went quiet enough to hear the fluorescent light buzzing overhead. Macklin looked at you, then at your ankle, then back at your face. "Does it bug you," he said, "that everybody treats your body like part of your job before it's part of you?"

The question was direct enough to catch you off guard. It wasn’t because it was invasive, but because it was accurate. You exhaled and leaned back on your hands. "Yeah. But I guess that's the deal."

"Doesn't have to be."

You looked at him, trying to tell whether he meant that in some broad, idealistic way or actually believed it. He didn't look away, which told you enough. He meant it. Maybe not in a grand sense. Maybe just in the sense that people should get to be whole before they were useful, which wasn't a thought you heard often enough to brush past.

"You always talk like you're about to say something smarter than everyone else in the room," you said.

He grinned. "And yet somehow you keep talking to me."

"Unfortunately."

"Tragic for you."

"Devastating."

He laughed, and this time you laughed too, because somewhere in the last ten minutes the conversation had stopped feeling like a series of lines and started feeling like a rhythm you could actually sit inside.

"So," he said eventually, "were you always this normal after winning, or did I get a special version?"

You groaned and tipped your head back against the wall. "I hate you."

"No, you don't."

That made you look at him sharply, and he was still smiling, but there was enough steadiness in it that it didn't feel like a challenge. Just confidence—thankfully the opposite of the obnoxious kind, the kind that came from someone who paid attention and had the sense not to misuse what he learned. You rolled your eyes, except you were smiling again, so it didn't land as a real dismissal.

"I swear you're impossible," you said.

"I know."

He said it the way he said most things. It was like he'd already thought it through and decided it was worth standing behind. The room felt quieter after that, but not in the uncomfortable way. More like the conversation had taken on a shape neither of you needed to define right then. He reached for his water bottle, drank, glanced at the clock. He probably had somewhere else to be eventually. He didn't rush to get there. That mattered too.

When he finally stood it wasn't because the moment had gotten awkward—it was just time doing what time did. He lifted one shoulder in a small shrug, that same open, easy expression still on him.

"See you around?"

You smiled, and this time you didn't bother hiding it. "Yeah. Probably."

He nodded once, like that was enough, then paused at the door and looked back—not long enough to be dramatic, just long enough to feel deliberate.

"Congrats again," he said, quieter now.

"You already said that."

"Yeah." The corner of his mouth moved like he knew exactly what he was doing. "But I meant it."

Then he was gone, and the room settled back into itself—same fluorescent hum, same smell of tape and menthol and clean cold air. But something about it had shifted anyway, because now it felt like there was room in it for someone else, someone who asked good questions and actually listened to the answers. You sat there a second longer than necessary, looking at the door he'd left through, then at your ankle, then at nothing in particular, smiling to yourself despite knowing you probably shouldn't be.

You noticed it again the second week of January, in the smaller, quieter ways he kept showing up. Tuesday mornings at the boards. A question about your flow management that wasn't really about your flow management. The way he never once made you feel like you owed him an explanation for anything.

"You've got a face on today," he said, on the Tuesday that mattered, though you wouldn't clock it as the one that mattered until much later.

"I don't have a face."

"You have several faces. This is the one where you're mad at someone but pretending you're mad at the ice."

You looked over at him properly. Hood pushed back, hair still damp, that post-session looseness like his body hadn't quite caught up with how still he was trying to hold it. He wasn't smiling exactly. Just watching you with the air of patience that didn't ask you to explain anything you didn't want to.

"I'm not mad at anyone."

"Okay."

"I'm focused."

"Sure." He picked at the tape on his stick, not pushing, just present. "You know you don't have to act fine for me, right? I'm not your coach. I don't actually care if your edges are clean today."

That got you. It got you not because it was a big statement—because it wasn't. He said it like a fact, easy and unbothered, and it landed somewhere different than anything James had said to you all week, because James's attention always came wrapped in analysis, like he was running your behavior through some private model to figure out what it meant. Macklin's attention didn't ask anything of you at all. It just sat there, available, and let you decide what to do with it.

"It's been a week," you said finally, surprising yourself.

"Bad week or weird week?"

"Weird."

"Weird how?"

You almost told him. You got as far as opening your mouth, the shape of the sentence already forming—there's someone, it's complicated, he did something that shouldn't have mattered and it mattered anyway—and then you closed it again, because saying any version of that out loud to Macklin felt like handing him something he hadn't asked for and didn't deserve to carry.

"Just weird," you said instead. "Nothing dramatic."

"Okay." He didn't push, which was the thing about him you kept clocking and reclocking like it might stop being true if you looked too hard. "For what it's worth, your flow management on that last pass was really clean. Even with the face."

"I told you I don't have a face."

"You have a face right now. I'm looking at it."

You laughed before you could stop yourself, and it felt easier than the laugh you'd given James two nights ago—lighter, without the same undertow pulling at the back of it. Macklin grinned like he'd been hoping for exactly that and hadn't been sure he'd get it, then pushed off the boards and went back to his own drills like the conversation hadn't cost either of you anything.

That was the thing about him. Nothing ever cost anything. He showed up, said something specific and a little too perceptive, let you deflect without making the deflection feel like a failure, then gave you space again without needing you to explain why you'd wanted it. It was, you were starting to realize, a genuinely rare skill—being interested in someone without making your privacy feel like a debt you owed him.

The Thursday after that, you and James went through an entire session without anything close to the conversation you'd had in the parking lot two nights before.

He was trying harder, which was its own kind of unbearable. He brought you the right water bottle flavor without being told. He didn't bring up the shoulder drop even though it was still there. He asked about your morning in a tone that had clearly been worked on, softened at the edges in a way that wasn't natural to him, like he'd spent actual time considering what version of himself might get through to you and was now testing it in real time.

You let him in exactly as far as you'd let anyone in for a week, which was: not very. You answered in full sentences instead of fragments, which felt like a concession, and he seemed to take it as one, relaxing slightly at the boards like the full sentences were proof the thaw was coming.

It wasn't proof of anything. It was just easier to talk in full sentences than to keep building walls out of single words, and you were tired in a way that had nothing to do with training.

You still went back to his place that night. You didn't examine that too closely either—the fact that you could spend forty minutes being distant on the ice and then forty minutes later be on your couch with your legs over his lap, his hand resting on your ankle like it belonged there, some show neither of you were watching playing low in the background while the real conversation happened in the silences between scenes.

"You're still doing it," he said at one point, not looking away from the TV.

"Doing what."

"The fucked up shutdown mode where you're here but not really here."

"I'm watching the show."

"You haven't laughed once and it's a fucking comedy."

"Maybe it's not funny."

"It's objectively funny. Keonho made me watch the first season twice."

You didn't say anything to that, and he didn't push, just moved his thumb in a slow, absent circle against your ankle bone. It was the same unhurried patience he applied to everything, like he was willing to wait you out for as long as it took even if he had no idea what he was waiting for.

Later, after the show ended and neither of you moved to put on another one, he said, quieter, "Whatever it is. You'll tell me eventually, right?"

You looked at him. The lamp was on low, throwing that same gold light across the apartment that always made things feel more honest than they were, and his face had the openness it only got this late, when the version of him built for everyone else had been set down somewhere near the door.

His face was lit up and your eyes traced the carefully carved slope of his nose and the sharpness of his features that seemed to always try and cut you.

"Maybe," you shrugged.

It wasn't a yes. He didn't ask you to make it one. He just nodded once, the way he nodded at things he'd decided to file away rather than push on, and pulled you a little closer, and you let him, even though some smaller, more honest part of you knew "maybe" was doing the same work it had always done—protecting you, mostly, from finding out what would happen if you actually said it.

The headphones sat on the corner of his desk the entire time, exactly where they always sat, and you didn't look at them once. You were proud of that, in the specific, hollow way you were proud of anything you'd had to work that hard not to feel.

𝑰𝑰𝑰. everyone in the room

The federation threw some kind of mid-season exhibition gala every January, the sort of event that existed mostly to give sponsors something to put on a slide deck, and you'd never once managed to get out of attending it.

This year it was at the rink itself, which made it worse somehow, because the building that had spent four months being the one place none of this had to perform itself was suddenly full of round tables and string lights and a step-and-repeat banner propped against the boards where you usually ran your warmup.

You wore the dress your coach had picked out, the one that photographed well and said nothing about you specifically, and you stood near the edge of the rink with a glass of something sparkling you weren't drinking and watched the room arrange itself into the exact configuration you'd been dreading.

James was near the far wall in a suit that fit him the way everything fit him, like it had been built around the specific shape of his restraint rather than just his shoulders. He had a drink he wasn't drinking either, and he was talking to one of the federation reps with the polite, contained version of himself you'd watched him deploy on staff and journalists for months. You knew that version. You also knew it wasn't the only one he had, which was the entire problem with watching him use it on someone else while you stood fifteen feet away pretending you weren't watching at all.

Lia found you first.

"You look like you're at a funeral," Lia remarked, sliding up beside you with her own glass, actually drinking hers.

"I'm at an event where I have to be charming for two hours."

"Same thing, different snacks." She followed your eyeline without being subtle about it, landing on James across the room, then glancing back at you with an expression you didn't love. "He's been weird lately too. Did something happen?"

"Why would something have happened."

"No reason. He just keeps doing this thing where he answers a question and then looks like he's bracing for a follow-up that doesn't come." She shrugged, swirling her glass. "Maybe it's just a January thing. Everyone's weird in January."

You didn't say anything to that, mostly because you were watching Macklin come through the side entrance in a blazer that looked like it had been an afterthought, hair still slightly damp, grinning at someone over his shoulder before his eyes found the room and then, a second later, found you.

He didn't come over immediately. He let himself get pulled into a conversation with one of the rink's board members first, nodding along, easy as anything, and you watched him do it the same way you'd apparently been watching James do his version across the room—aware of him without meaning to be.

"Oh, this is going to be fun," Lia murmured.

"What."

"Nothing." She was smiling at her glass like it had said something funny. "I'm just saying, this room has a lot going on in it tonight and you're standing right in the middle of all of it acting like you don't notice."

"I genuinely don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't."

You were saved, or not saved, depending on how you wanted to think about it, by Macklin extracting himself from the board member and crossing the room toward you both with the kind of unhurried confidence that made entire rooms recalibrate slightly around him without him asking them to.

"There she is," Macklin called, like he'd been looking for you specifically, which he probably had. "I almost didn't recognize you without ice under your feet."

"I almost didn't recognize you in a blazer that isn't covered in tape residue."

"Rude. This is a nice blazer."

"It's a fine blazer."

"Devastating, again." He glanced at Lia, offered her the same easy nod he gave everyone, no particular weight to it. "Hey. You're the edge work girl, right? James mentioned you."

Something in you went very still at that, a small cold drop you didn't examine, and you watched Lia's face do something complicated before settling into pleasant.

"He mentioned me?"

"Said you've got good instincts. High praise, coming from him. I don't think I've heard him compliment anyone unprompted the entire time I've been doing camp here." Macklin said it lightly, with no idea what he'd just handed you, and took a sip of his drink while Lia recovered faster than you did.

"That's nice of him," Lia offered, glancing at you for half a second too long before looking away.

You kept your face arranged. You'd gotten good at that, lately—a specific, hollow kind of good.

Across the room, James had finished with the federation rep and was scanning the space the way he did, methodical, cataloguing, and his eyes found yours for exactly one second before they found Macklin standing next to you and stayed there a second longer than a glance required. 

You may have noticed that they didn’t flick to Lia. And he didn't come over. 

You watched him decide not to, watched the decision happen in real time—a small recalibration, jaw setting, attention redirected toward someone else entirely—and you told yourself you didn't care, which was a lie you'd gotten almost as good at as the face.

"So," Macklin asked, turning back to you, oblivious to the entire silent transaction that had just occurred six feet away from him, "are these things always this stiff, or is tonight special?"

"They're always like this. Sponsors like watching us be charming in a controlled environment."

"Cool. Very normal. Very not dystopian."

"Welcome to figure skating."

He laughed, and it was easy, the way everything with him was easy, and for a second you let yourself just be in the conversation instead of also running the other one happening across the room in your peripheral vision. Lia excused herself a minute later with some line about finding the rest of her group, and you caught the look she gave you on her way out—not jealous exactly, something more careful than that, like she was filing away a data point she hadn't expected to get tonight.

You didn't think about what that data point might be. You had enough open files already.

Later, near the dessert table, you ended up close enough to James that avoiding him would have required an actual maneuver, the sort that would have been more obvious than just standing there.

"You clean up well," James offered, which was such a strange, formal thing for him to say that you almost laughed.

"You sound like you're reading off a cue card."

"I don't have a cue card."

"You sound like you do."

He almost smiled at that. The real version, brief enough that probably no one else in the room caught it. "Macklin seems like he's having a good time."

"He's a likable guy."

"I'm aware."

Something in his tone had an edge you weren't expecting this early, this controlled, and you looked at him properly for the first time all night. He wasn't looking at you—he was looking at the dessert table, very deliberately, like the petit fours required his full attention.

"James."

"What?"

"You're doing the thing."

"I'm not doing anything." He picked up a small plate he had no intention of using. "I'm standing at a dessert table."

"You're standing at a dessert table being weird about Macklin."

"I'm not being weird about Macklin." He set the plate back down, finally looked at you, and his jaw had that tightness you knew, the one that lived underneath everything else he wasn't saying. "I'm just standing here."

"Okay."

"Okay."

Neither of you moved. The room kept happening around you—someone's laugh too loud near the bar, a photographer working the crowd, the string lights doing their best to make an ice rink look like somewhere romantic instead of somewhere you both bled hours of your life into most weeks. You were standing close enough to him that you could smell whatever he'd put on for tonight. It was something smoother than his usual, and it annoyed you that you'd noticed, and it annoyed you more that noticing didn't feel new.

"You look tired," he murmured finally, quieter, dropping the cue-card formality. His hand dropped and you felt it pass behind the small of your back. It almost hovered until he reached up to adjust his done-up hair.

"I'm fine."

"You don't have to keep saying that."

"I'm not lying."

"I didn't say you were lying. I said you don't have to keep saying it." He looked at you for a second longer than the conversation strictly required. There was something unguarded slipping through the contained version of him he'd been wearing all night. "I miss—" He stopped himself, jaw working, and started over. "Tuesday was fine. I just feel like I'm catching maybe sixty percent of you lately and I don't know where the other forty went."

Sixty was enough for what you guys were. Right? You didn’t even want to think about the reason he even noticed that forty percent of you was gone at all. Why were you decreased to percentages in the first place?

You didn't have an answer that wouldn't cost you something to give, so you didn't give one. You picked up a petit four you didn't want, the same way he had, and the two of you stood there in a silence that had gotten too specific to be comfortable, while across the room Macklin laughed at something and Lia watched the two of you over the rim of her glass like she was starting to do the math on something she hadn't wanted to solve.

That was when Macklin found you again, Lia trailing half a step behind him with the particular expression of someone who'd been pulled into something she hadn't fully agreed to.

"There you two are," Macklin said, easy as ever, apparently immune to whatever atmosphere had been sitting over the dessert table for the last five minutes. "We were just talking about how insane it is that we’re all training in the same building. Like, statistically, what are the odds."

"Pretty good odds, actually," James said. "It's a good rink."

"It's a great rink," Macklin agreed. "I'm just saying, you've got a nationals champion, a top-five draft pick, an Olympic medalist, and—" He glanced at Lia, grinning. "What's your deal again? You're good too, right?"

"I'm good too," Lia said, dry, and you almost laughed despite everything, because that was such a Lia thing to say, flat and unbothered, no need to perform anything for anyone.

"See, this is what I mean. This building is just stacked." Macklin looked between the four of you like he was genuinely delighted by the math of it, no idea he'd just assembled the exact configuration of people you'd been actively trying not to put in one room together for weeks. "We should all hang out sometime. Like, properly. Not gala small talk."

"We do hang out," Lia said, glancing at James, then at you, then back at James. "Sort of."

What the hell?

Something shifted in the air at that. It was small but very, very real. You felt James go very still beside you the way he did when a sentence had more in it than the person saying it realized.

"Sort of," James repeated, careful.

"You know. The rink." Lia shrugged, oblivious or not oblivious, you genuinely couldn't tell anymore. "We're all just always here."

"Right," you said, too fast.

Macklin, to his credit or his detriment, didn't catch any of the undercurrent. He just nodded along, sipping his drink, looking at the four of you like you were the easiest group of people he'd talked to all night, which was its own kind of funny given that you could feel at least three separate silent conversations happening underneath the one out loud.

"Okay, but seriously," he said, "we should do something. Not this." He gestured at the string lights, the step-and-repeat, a passing photographer. "Something normal. Dinner. No sponsors."

"I'm in," Lia said immediately, too immediately, and you caught the flicker of her eyes toward James before she covered it with a sip of her drink.

"Sure," James said, after a moment that lasted half a second too long, eyes on you instead of Lia when he said it, like he was checking what your face would do before he committed to anything.

Your face didn't do anything. You'd gotten good at that.

"Great," Macklin said, delighted, utterly unaware that he'd just engineered the exact dinner you were going to spend the rest of January dreading. "I'll figure out a place. Somewhere with bad lighting and worse music. My favorite kind."

"Sounds perfect," you chuckled, and meant absolutely none of it, and across the small circle you'd all formed without meaning to, James was looking at you again, and Lia was looking at James, and Macklin was looking at all of you with the easy, unbothered face of someone who had no idea he'd just lit a fuse. 

Bless his poor soul.

𝑰𝑽. the dinner

The night before the dinner, you were lying with your cheek against James's chest, his arm loose around you, the lamp on low the way it always was this late, when he said, apropos of nothing, "He's a jolly fella."

You lifted your head. "What?"

"Macklin." He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world, eyes on the ceiling, completely straight-faced. "Jolly. Like a restless golden retriever that won an Olympic medal."

You laughed before you could stop it. It was a real laugh, loud enough that it startled out of you, and you smacked his chest with the flat of your hand. "Did you just call him jolly?"

"What's wrong with jolly?"

"Nothing's wrong with jolly, it's just—" You were still laughing, propping yourself up on one elbow to actually look at him. "You sound like someone's grandfather. Who says jolly?"

"It's an accurate word. He's jolly. He probably whistles in the shower."

"Oh my god." You dropped your head back onto his chest, shoulders still shaking. "Why do you hate him so much you've regressed to insulting him like he's a cartoon character."

"I don't hate him." James said it too fast, which made you lift your head again, grinning now, fully delighted.

"You hate him."

"I don't hate him."

"You called him jolly like it was a slur."

"It's not a slur, it's a description." His jaw had gone tight in that way that meant you'd actually gotten to him, and that, somehow, made it funnier, not less funny, and you couldn't stop the laugh that kept building in your chest no matter how hard you bit down on your lip trying to contain it.

"I genuinely cannot believe you," you managed, wheezing slightly. "You're jealous of a guy who said you have good instincts. He complimented you. Unprompted. You told me that yourself."

"I'm not jealous."

"You're so jealous you called him jolly."

"Stop saying jolly."

"You said it first!"

That seemed to be the final straw, because his expression shifted from wounded dignity into something more dangerous, and before you could register what was happening his head dipped and his breath hit the side of your neck, warm and deliberate, right at the spot he knew—because of course he knew, because he'd cataloged every part of you the same way he cataloged everything—made you absolutely lose your mind.

"James—don't—"

"Keep laughing at me."

"I'm not—oh my god, stop—" You were already shrieking, twisting away from him, except he had an arm looped around your waist now and wasn't letting you go anywhere, and every time you got a breath of composure back he blew against your neck again and undid the whole thing, until you were genuinely crying with laughter, kicking at the sheets, trying to use his own pillow as a shield between his mouth and your neck.

"Say I'm not jolly," he said, somehow managing to sound both completely serious and like he was enjoying himself more than he had in days.

"You're not jolly! You've never been jolly in your life!"

"Damn right." He finally stopped, victorious, settling back against the pillows with the specific satisfaction of someone who'd won an argument through entirely unfair means, and you collapsed against him again, breathless, face still hot from laughing, his arm coming back around you like nothing had happened.

For a second neither of you said anything. The lamp buzzed faintly. Your heart was still going from the laughing, or maybe from something else, you weren't entirely sure anymore.

"That whole thing was so weird," he said eventually, quieter now, the humor draining back into something more like himself. "This dinner is just going to be wonderful, isn't it."

"So wonderful."

"I'm going to have to sit across from him and pretend I don't think he's secretly a golden retriever."

"You can't call him that to his face."

"I wasn't planning on it." A pause. "Probably."

You laughed again, smaller this time, and pressed your face into his chest, and didn't think too hard about the fact that you'd just spent ten minutes being happier than you'd let yourself be in two weeks, all because he'd called another man jolly out of something that was very clearly not actual jolliness at all.

Your eyes drifted, unthinking, toward the desk. The headphones were still sitting there, exactly where they always sat, and the laugh in your chest went quiet before you could stop it. You didn't say anything. You just looked a second too long, and felt him notice you looking, and neither of you asked the other what it meant.

Macklin's idea of bad lighting and worse music turned out to be a tucked-away Italian place with red votives on every table and a sound system that hadn't been updated since the place opened, which meant you spent the first twenty minutes of dinner half-listening to a song that had been popular roughly a decade earlier and trying not to think about how loaded the seating arrangement was.

You ended up next to Macklin, James seated directly across from you with Lia beside him, which meant the entire table was arranged like some kind of unintentional cross-section of every tension currently running underneath your life. Macklin took the head of the table like he'd been born for it, ordering for the group without asking anyone if that was fine, which it apparently was, because nobody stopped him.

For the first hour it was easy in the specific, exhausting way group dinners were easy when half the table was performing normalcy. Macklin told a story about a teammate who'd gotten lost in an airport for four hours. Lia laughed at all the right places, leaning into James's side of the table more than she probably needed to. James contributed exactly as much as the situation required and not a sentence more, which you knew was its own kind of tell, because James at ease talked more than this, not less.

You felt his knee find yours under the table sometime around the second course.

It started small enough that you almost didn't register it—the brush of his leg against yours while he reached for the bread, lingering a half second longer than the reach required. You didn't move away. He didn't either. By the time the entrées came, his foot had found the inside of your ankle, slow and deliberate, and you kept your face arranged in exactly the same pleasant nothing you'd been wearing all night while your whole leg went warm under the table.

"You're quiet," Macklin said, looking at you.

"I'm eating."

"Fair. Can't argue with that." He turned back to whatever he'd been saying to Lia, and under the table James's foot pressed a little firmer against yours, and you had to take a very deliberate sip of water to keep from reacting to it.

It got worse from there. Not worse—better, technically, in the way that things that shouldn't feel good always somehow did. His knee against yours. Your foot finding his under the tablecloth in return, sliding up the inside of his calf in a way that made him go briefly, visibly still, fork pausing halfway to his mouth before he recovered. The whole thing felt giddy and reckless in a way nothing between you had felt in weeks, this small, secret, physical conversation happening directly under a table where Lia was telling a story about her short program and Macklin was laughing at the right moments and neither of them had any idea what was happening six inches below the tablecloth.

You almost smiled. You caught yourself almost smiling and looked down at your plate instead.

Then Lia reached for James's water glass instead of her own, an easy mistake, the kind anyone made at a crowded table, and took a sip before she realized, laughing at herself, sliding it back toward him.

"Oops. Sorry."

"It's fine," James said, and took the glass back, and drank from it without even glancing at the rim, which was such a small, nothing gesture that it shouldn't have done anything to you at all.

It did something to you anyway. Your foot stopped moving against his under the table. You felt him notice the second it happened—the stillness, the sudden absence of contact—and his eyes flicked to you, confused, like he had no idea what had just shifted.

You kicked him. Hard, deliberate, no warmth left in it at all, and he startled enough that his knee hit the underside of the table and rattled the silverware.

"You good?" Macklin asked, glancing over.

"Fine," James said, jaw tight, not looking at you.

You pulled your phone out under the table and typed without looking at him.

you [8:47 PM] bathroom. rn.

You watched him feel his phone buzz in his pocket, watched him pretend not to react, and a few seconds later your own phone lit up.

james yufine [8:47 PM] i was gonna go anyway

You looked up. He was already pushing his chair back, perfectly casual, the corner of his mouth doing that infuriating almost-smirk thing it did when he knew exactly what he was doing and wanted you to know he knew.

you [8:48 PM] stfu

He didn't reply to that. He just stood, said something easy to the table about needing to step out for a second, and walked toward the back hallway like he had all the time in the world, and you counted to ten before you followed him.

He was waiting by the bathroom door, and the second you got close enough he caught your wrist and pulled you in with him, shouldering the door shut behind you both.

"James—" You stumbled half a step, catching yourself against the sink, staring at him in the unflattering overhead light. "What are you doing, we can't both—" You crossed your arms, already bracing. "You know I'm not here to—"

"What?" His face did something genuinely confused, then offended. "No. I'm not a fucking dog, bro, I know." He said it like the accusation had personally wounded him, dragging a hand down his face. "I just didn't want to have this conversation in a hallway where anyone could walk past."

"Oh." You felt your face heat, which only made you crankier. "Okay. Fine."

"Fine?" He stared at you like he couldn't quite believe you'd gone there at all. "What did you think I was doing?"

"I don't know, you pulled me into a bathroom—"

"To talk." He gestured at the small space, the locked door, the buzzing light overhead, like the absurdity of having to clarify this was almost funny if he wasn't so annoyed. "I wanted five minutes where Macklin wasn't doing a bit and Lia wasn't performing normal at us. That's it."

"Okay, well." You straightened up, recrossing your arms, trying to recover whatever ground you'd just lost. "You have your five minutes."

He studied you for a second, the brief flash of humor draining back out of his face into something more serious. "What was that," he said. "You went somewhere. Under the table. What happened."

You crossed your arms tighter. "Nothing happened."

"Don't do the nothing thing. Not right now."

"Fine." You kept your voice low, even with the door shut, some habit of caution too deep to break. "You drank out of her glass."

He blinked. "What?"

"Lia's water. You just drank out of it like it was nothing."

"It was an accident. She grabbed mine first."

"And you didn't even think about it. You just drank from it."

"Because it's a water glass." His voice had an edge of genuine disbelief now, like he was trying to figure out if you were actually saying what he thought you were saying. "What was I supposed to do, wipe it down in front of everyone?"

"I don't know, James, maybe not put your mouth where hers just was."

"It's a water glass," he said again, like repeating it might make it land differently. "What do you think she has, herpes?"

"I don't think she has herpes, I think you didn't even pause."

"Why would I pause? It's water."

"Because it would've meant something if you had."

The sentence came out before you could stop it, sharper and more honest than you'd planned, and you watched it land on him the way honest things always did—a small flinch, a recalibration, his jaw setting in that specific way that meant he was about to say something he might not be able to take back.

"You're mad that I drank water," he said slowly, "but you've spent the last two weeks acting like I don't exist unless we're somewhere private. You want to talk about things that would've meant something?"

"That's different."

"How."

"Because I have a reason."

"You won't tell me the reason!" His voice rose enough that you both glanced toward the dining room, then dropped it back down, leaning closer, lower, angrier. "You've had a reason for two weeks and you won't say it, and now you're mad that I drank water out of the wrong glass at a dinner I didn't even want to be at."

"Maybe if you actually paid attention—"

"I pay attention to everything about you. That's the entire problem." He exhaled hard, dragging a hand through his hair, and for a second the contained version of him cracked enough that you could see something rawer underneath it. "I don't know what I did. I've been trying to figure it out for two weeks and I keep coming up with nothing, and now I'm locked in a bathroom getting accused of being weird about a water glass, and I don't—" He stopped. Started again, quieter. "I don't know how to fix something you won't tell me is broken."

You stared at him. The light overhead buzzed faintly against the tile. Somewhere outside the door a server dropped something in the kitchen and swore quietly.

"Maybe it's not yours to fix," you said.

"Then whose is it."

You didn't answer that, because the honest answer was yours, it's been yours this whole time, you're just too proud to say the word headphones out loud and admit it mattered, and you weren't going to hand him that, not here, not under a buzzing light with a dinner waiting twenty feet away.

"I should go back," you said instead.

"Of course you should." His voice had gone flat now, the anger folding itself back down into something colder and more controlled, which was somehow worse than the heat. "That's what we do, right? We don't finish anything. We just go back to the table."

"James."

"It's fine." He stepped back as far as the small room allowed, putting actual distance between you for the first time all night, and the loss of it felt sharper than it should have. "I'll see you out there."

He unlocked the door and walked back to the dining room first, leaving you alone in the bathroom with the buzzing light and your own reflection looking unreasonably calm for how furious you felt. You stood there for a full minute, arms still crossed, furious at him and furious at yourself in roughly equal measure, before finally pulling the door open to follow him back.

Lia was right outside, apparently mid-approach to the same door, and she slowed when she saw you, something careful crossing her face.

"Hey." She glanced toward the dining room, then back at you. "Everything okay? You guys looked tense out there."

"We're fine."

"Sure." She didn't sound convinced, but she let it go, stepping around you toward the door. Then, almost as an afterthought, light enough that it could've meant nothing: "Sorry about the water thing, by the way. James drank out of my glass and didn't even flinch. I felt bad."

You stared at her. "He drank out of yours?"

"Yeah, grabbed it by accident, drank half of it before he noticed." She shrugged, easy, already reaching for the door handle. "Guys are so weird about that stuff usually. He really didn't care."

The door swung shut behind her before you could say anything, and you stood in the hallway replaying the last twenty minutes, certain—you were certain—that it had happened the other way around, that she'd taken his glass first, that you'd watched it happen. You stood there long enough to start doubting your own memory of something that had occurred six feet away from your face less than ten minutes ago, which was its own quiet, specific kind of unsettling.

You went back to the table without saying anything to her about it, sat down, picked your fork back up, and didn't let your foot find his again for the rest of the night.

Across the table, Lia glanced between the two of you once, twice, something calculating moving behind her eyes that she didn't bother to hide particularly well, and Macklin kept talking, the only person at the table who had no idea that anything had happened at all.

𝑽. what you can't unsee

The thing about doubt was that once it got in, it didn't need much room to keep working.

You told yourself, on the drive home from the dinner, that Lia had just misremembered. People misremembered things under stress, under bad lighting, with three glasses of wine and a table full of cross-currents nobody else could see. It wasn't a lie. It was just a small, human mistake, and you were being paranoid for turning it over as many times as you had.

You believed that for about two days.

Then it was a Wednesday, not even one of your nights, and you'd come back to the rink after off-ice training to grab a jacket you'd left in your locker, and the building was quiet in the specific way it got mid-afternoon when most of the morning sessions had cleared out and the evening ones hadn't started yet. You weren't expecting anyone. That was the whole point of timing it this way.

James and Lia were at the boards on the main rink, and you saw them before they saw you, which was its own kind of unfair advantage you immediately wished you didn't have.

It wasn't anything. You told yourself that in real time, narrating it to yourself like evidence you'd need later. He was correcting her edge work, hand at her hip the way he'd corrected your edge work a hundred times in November, nothing in it that should have meant anything. She was laughing at something. He wasn't laughing, but there was a looseness in his shoulders that you recognized, the specific quality he only had with people he'd actually let in.

You stood in the doorway for four seconds. Then five. You counted them, because counting was easier than feeling whatever was happening in your chest, this tight, specific thing that had no business being there given everything you'd told yourself for four months.

You left without your jacket.

You didn't bring it up to him. That had become its own pattern now, this growing list of things you'd seen and decided not to mention, each one filed next to the last—the headphones, the glass, now this—building into an architecture of grievances he had no idea he was accumulating.

Thursday came anyway. You still went to the rink. You still ran your sessions on opposite ends of the auxiliary ice, still ended up in the alcove by the vending machine afterward out of a habit too old to break just because you were furious, and you still, against every piece of better judgment available to you, ended up back at his apartment by midnight.

It was different now, though. You could feel it in the specific way you were both careful with each other—not gentle, careful, which wasn't the same thing at all. He didn't reach for you the second the door closed the way he used to. You didn't curl into his side without thinking about it first. There was a half-second of hesitation in everything, a new kind of math neither of you wanted to do out loud.

"You're doing it again," he murmured, somewhere past midnight, both of you lying in the dark with several inches of space between you that hadn't existed in months.

"Doing what."

"Going somewhere else. Even when you're right here."

You stared at the ceiling, the hairline crack you'd memorized months ago barely visible in the dark. "I saw you with Lia on Wednesday."

The admission surprised you as much as it seemed to surprise him—he went still beside you, the specific stillness that meant he was recalculating something in real time.

"At the rink?"

"You were correcting her edge work."

"Yeah." He said it slowly, like he was trying to figure out where the trap was. "She asked for help with a transition. I help people with transitions. I helped you with a transition the first night I ever talked to you."

"That's not the same."

"Why not?"

You didn't have a clean answer for that, not one that didn't require admitting things you'd spent months refusing to admit, so you said nothing, and the silence sat there between you, heavier than it should have been for two people who weren't supposed to owe each other explanations.

"Are you accusing me of something," he asked finally, quiet, careful in a different way now—the way people got careful right before something broke.

"I'm not accusing you of anything."

"You sound like you are."

"I just—" You sat up slightly, pulling the sheet with you, putting more distance between your bodies than the conversation alone had already created. "I don't know what's happening with you two. I don't get to ask. That's the arrangement. I just—I saw it, and I didn't love how it looked, and I'm allowed to not love how it looked even if I don't get to say anything about it."

"Why don't you get to say anything about it?"

The question landed differently than you expected, quieter, more genuine than accusatory, and you looked over at him in the dark and found him already looking at you, his expression doing something complicated that you couldn't fully read even after four months of practice.

"Because that's not what this is," you muttered.

"Says who?"

"Says both of us. Day one. You said it. I said it."

"I know what we said." His voice had an edge now, frustration finally breaking through the careful. "I'm asking if it's still true."

You didn't answer that. You couldn't, not honestly, not without unraveling something you weren't ready to unravel at one in the morning in his bed with the ceiling crack staring back at you and four months of unspoken things sitting in the room like a third person neither of you would acknowledge.

"We said we wouldn't—" Your voice caught, and you hated it, hated that it caught at all. "With anyone else. That's all I'm saying."

"I should go," you said instead.

"Of course you should." He said it flat, unsurprised, like he'd known that was coming the second the conversation started. "That's what we do."

You got dressed in silence. He didn't try to stop you, which somehow hurt more than if he had, and at the door you both stood there for a second too long, neither of you saying the thing that actually needed saying.

"For what it's worth," he breathed, just as you reached for the handle, "there's nothing happening with Lia. I need you to know that even if you don't believe it."

"I want to believe it."

"That's not the same as believing it."

"I know," you whispered, and left before either of you could turn that into something neither of you could take back.

The drive home felt longer than it should have. You thought about the bruise you couldn't prove. Of course it wasn’t a real one, just the shape of something you'd seen and couldn't unsee, his hand at her hip, the looseness in his shoulders, the version of him he only gave to people he trusted, and the fact that you had no actual evidence anything was wrong except a feeling you'd been collecting evidence for since November without meaning to.

You thought about the headphones. The glass. The way Lia had looked at you in that hallway with something calculating behind her eyes that you still couldn't name.

You were starting to understand that the worst part of all of it wasn't James. It was that you didn't actually know who to be angry at, and that not knowing was its own kind of exhausting, the kind that didn't go away just because you went to sleep.

𝑽𝑰. the closet

It happened two days after the power outage, in the equipment closet off the main rink that nobody used except the Zamboni driver and whoever needed somewhere to hide from a conversation they weren't ready for.

You'd ducked in to avoid Macklin, who'd been trying to catch you near the lobby with an easy wave and a question you weren't in the mood to answer, and James had apparently had the same instinct from the opposite direction, because you both nearly collided in the dark between two rows of shelved pylons and spare nets.

"Jesus—" You caught yourself against a shelf. "What are you doing in here."

"Avoiding a conversation with Martin about my shot selection." He didn't move back, didn't give you the space the moment technically called for, and in the thin light bleeding under the door you could see his jaw doing the thing it did when he was holding something back. "What are you doing in here."

"Same. Different person."

"Macklin."

"Doesn't matter."

"It matters." He said it low, an edge under it that hadn't been there in the lobby small talk you'd both been performing all week. "I keep thinking about it. You and him. The dinner. The way he just—" He exhaled, frustrated with himself for not having the right words, which was rare enough that you almost softened before you caught yourself. "I've been with people who ran hot. People who ran cold. I know how to read both. I thought that's what you were—hot and cold, switching on me depending on the day."

"And?"

"You're not that." He was close enough now that you had to tilt your head back slightly to keep looking at him, the dim light catching the line of his jaw, the particular intensity he only had when he'd stopped trying to contain something. "You're on a different level. It's been driving me insane for weeks and I didn't have the word for it until right now, standing in a closet that smells like rubber mats."

"That's not very romantic."

"I didn't say it was romantic. I said it was driving me insane."

You opened your mouth to say something flippant, something to cut the tension before it did what tension between you always eventually did, and he didn't give you the chance—closed the last foot of distance and kissed you, hard, one hand braced against the shelf behind you, the other finding your jaw with that same precision he always had even when everything else about him was clearly fraying at the edges.

You kissed him back without deciding to. It was easier than the rink had been, less desperate, more like a fight neither of you wanted to lose, his mouth insistent against yours, your hands fisting in his jacket to pull him closer instead of pushing him away.

When he finally pulled back, both of you breathing unevenly in the dark, close enough that you could feel the words against your mouth before you fully heard them, he murmured, "Is he a better kisser than me?"

You laughed, sharp and surprised, and shoved his chest hard enough that he actually stumbled back a step. "Oh my god."

"It's a fair question."

"It's an insane question. He's never kissed me, James."

"How do I know that's true?"

You stared at him. "Because I'm telling you."

"You've told me a lot of things lately." He said it without real accusation, more like he was thinking out loud, jaw tight in a way that gave away exactly how much the not-knowing had been eating at him. "You disappear for whole sessions. You go quiet for entire days. I don't actually know what happens in the hours you're not at this rink."

"Neither do I, about you and Lia."

"That's different. I told you nothing's happening."

"And I'm telling you nothing's happening with Macklin. Why is your nothing more believable than mine?"

That landed somewhere, you could see it—the small flinch, the recalibration. "It's not," he admitted, quieter now. "I just hate not knowing. With you specifically. I've never hated it this much with anyone else."

"So you don't actually think he's kissed me."

"I don't know what I think anymore. That's the problem." He exhaled, dragging a hand through his hair, the smirk creeping back in despite himself, like he couldn't quite help it even mid-spiral. "Doesn't mean I'm not still going to ask if he's a better kisser than me. Hypothetically."

"There's no hypothetical answer to a kiss that hasn't happened."

"Try anyway."

"No." You turned to leave, more out of self-preservation than actual anger, because if you stayed in this closet with him looking like that—jaw cut sharp even in bad light, that particular intensity in his eyes that you'd spent four months trying not to find as devastating as you did—you were going to do something you'd regret being unable to take back.

He caught your wrist before you made it to the door.

"Hey." He pulled. Gentle yet immovable, and you ended up facing him again, closer than you'd planned, his hand still circled loosely around your wrist like he wasn't ready to give that contact up yet. "Is he?"

You looked at him properly then. You stared the way you tried not to let yourself anymore, because looking too long always cost you something. He had the sort of face that should have been unfair on one person, all sharp lines and that particular stillness that made everything he did feel deliberate, even now, even disheveled, hair messed from your hands a minute ago, mouth a little swollen.

You'd spent months cataloguing it without meaning to—the set of his jaw when he was concentrating, the way his eyes did something specific when he was actually paying attention versus performing it, the small scar above his eyebrow you'd never asked about and he'd never explained. He was, infuriatingly, the most beautiful thing in any room he walked into, and you'd known that since the first night in the rink and had spent four months pretending the knowledge didn't cost you anything.

"No," you sighed finally, quiet, more honest than you meant to be. "He's not."

HIs face claimed an emotion that was not smugness exactly, something closer to relief, like he'd needed the answer more than he wanted to admit.

"Good," he murmured.

"Don't get smug about it."

"I'm not smug."

"You're extremely smug."

"I'm relieved. There's a difference." His hand slid from your wrist down to rest at the curve of your waist, thumb hooking lightly into the waistband of your leggings, not pulling, just resting there with a kind of casual certainty that made your whole stomach tighten. "Lia's been around a lot lately."

The shift in subject was so abrupt it took you a second to catch up. "What?"

"Lia." He said her name like it cost him something, watching your face carefully. "I just mean—she's been around. A lot. And I've been letting it happen because it was easier than figuring out what I actually wanted, and I think that wasn't fair to her, and I think it definitely wasn't fair to you."

You thought about the boards, his hand at her hip, the looseness in his shoulders. You thought about the bathroom, her careful little lie about the glass. About the fucking headphones. And you just felt like you wanted to crush something all of a sudden.

"What does her lip gloss taste like?" you asked, mostly to be cruel, mostly because some petty, hot-faced part of you wanted to make him say something he didn't want to say. “Hypothetically.”

He blinked. "What?"

"You heard me."

"I haven't kissed Lia." He said it flatly, like the accusation actually offended him this time, no performance in it. "I've never kissed Lia. I don't know what her lip gloss tastes like because I have no data on the subject, which you know, because you're standing here interrogating me about a kiss that's never happened."

"I'm not interrogating you."

"You're absolutely interrogating me."

"Well, maybe I just think you'd find out eventually if you wanted to. If she wanted to."

"Maybe you're projecting onto a hypothetical because it's easier than admitting you've been thinking about it as much as I've been thinking about Macklin." His thumb moved against your waistband, slow and deliberate, and his eyes hadn't left yours the entire time, something dark and amused and frustrated all tangled together in his expression. "Which, for the record, has been constantly. So if we're being honest about hypotheticals."

"You've been thinking about Macklin constantly, huh?"

"You know what I mean."

"I want you to say it again. Slower."

"I'm not saying it again." But the smirk gave him away completely, even in the dark, even with his jaw still tight from everything else he'd just admitted.

You didn't have a comeback for that. You just stood there in the dark, his hand at your waist, both of you breathing the same charged air, neither of you having kissed anyone but each other, somehow still managing to make jealousy out of nothing at all.

"This is so stupid," you said finally.

"Extremely stupid."

"We're standing in a closet that smells like rubber mats, fighting about people neither of us has actually kissed."

"I'm aware."

"And yet."

"And yet," he agreed in a low hum, and pulled you back in before either of you could find a better argument against it.

𝑽𝑰𝑰. the feeling of nothing

You ran into Macklin at Zara, of all places, on a Saturday afternoon you'd set aside for absolutely nothing in particular—no training, no rink, just you and a half-formed plan to buy a new pair of jeans and otherwise let your brain go quiet for a few hours. God knows you need it.

He was standing in the kids' section looking deeply, comically lost, holding up two shirts like they might offer an opinion if he stared hard enough.

"Okay, don't laugh," he said, the second he spotted you, like you'd already caught him at something.

"I wasn't going to laugh."

"You were so going to laugh." He held up both shirts again, a dinosaur print and something with a rocket on it. "My little brother turns nine next week. I have no idea what nine-year-olds like. I thought I knew ball. I do not know."

"Rocket. Obviously."

"See, that's exactly the kind of decisive energy I needed." He put the dinosaur shirt back, genuinely relieved, like you'd solved something significant. "Do you have ten more minutes? I need a second opinion on, like, everything else too. I panic-bought a hoodie that's probably too big and I don't trust myself anymore."

"How panic are we talking?"

"I bought it in a men's medium because I forgot, mid-purchase, that he's nine and not, like, me." He winced at himself, holding up the offending hoodie from his bag like evidence. "I have a problem."

"You have a very specific, very fixable problem." You took the hoodie from him, checked the tag, shook your head. "We're returning this. He's going to swim in it."

"That's what I said, but then I doubted myself, because apparently I don't know basic facts about children anymore."

You should have said you had somewhere to be. You didn't, and some part of you—tired, a little lonely only a person surrounded by people could be lonely—didn't actually want to leave.

"Ten minutes," you said and pointed at him. "But if you buy him socks I'm leaving."

"Socks are a valid gift."

"Socks are a backup gift. You don't lead with socks."

"Okay, noted. No socks. What does… lead, in your professional opinion?"

"Something he picked out himself, probably, if he's old enough to have actual opinions. Nine is old enough to have actual opinions."

"You're very confident about this for someone with no younger siblings."

"I have a coach who's basically a nine-year-old in terms of impulse control. Close enough."

He laughed, delighted, head tipping back, and the sound of it did something easy and uncomplicated in your chest that you let yourself enjoy without examining too closely. The next two hours dissolved without either of you noticing them going—him narrating an increasingly chaotic internal monologue about every shirt, you vetoing roughly half his choices, the two of you eventually landing on a rocket-print hoodie in the correct size and a small, genuinely good Lego set that made him look so pleased with himself you didn't have the heart to tell him you'd basically picked it for him.

"I'm a great gift-giver now," he said, swinging the bag as you left the store. "This is a skill I have."

"You had help."

"I had a consultant. That's different. CEOs have consultants."

"You're comparing buying your brother a hoodie to running a company."

"I contain multitudes," he said, and you laughed, because it was the same line from the rehab room months ago and he clearly remembered saying it then too, the way his mouth curved like he'd been hoping you'd catch the callback.

It turned into walking the whole stretch of the college town near the rink, neither of you mentioning a plan, just drifting from one storefront to the next with his bag of nine-year-old approved purchases swinging from his wrist. He pointed out a bookstore he liked, told you a long, mostly true-sounding story about getting hopelessly lost in it once for three hours during a road trip, made you laugh hard enough that you had to stop walking for a second to recover.

He bought you ice cream from a place with a line out the door, insisted on paying before you could argue, swatted your hand away from your wallet with mock offense, and you ended up sitting on a bench at the overlook above the river with your cones half-melted and the afternoon going gold and soft around the edges.

It was, you kept thinking, the afternoon you used to imagine when you let yourself imagine anything easy at all. There was no schedule. No rink politics. No careful calibration of what you could and couldn't say. Just a funny, kind, uncomplicated person beside you, laughing at something you'd said, sun catching in his hair, absolutely no subtext humming underneath any of it.

"Tell me something nobody knows about you," he asked, out of nowhere, watching the river instead of you.

"That's a big ask for a Saturday."

"You don't have to go deep. Just something small. I'll go first." He thought about it for a second, genuinely considering it instead of performing the consideration. "I used to be terrified of the ocean. Like, actually terrified. Took me until I was fourteen to go past my knees in open water."

"You play a sport that requires you to fall on ice repeatedly and you were scared of the ocean."

"Ice doesn't have things living in it that could eat you. Different category of fear entirely." He looked over, expectant. "Your turn."

You thought about it, surprised by how easy it felt to actually answer. "I used to skate to the same song on repeat for an entire season because I was convinced changing it would jinx my scores. My coach eventually banned it."

"That's deeply ritualistic."

"I was twelve. I had some kind of main character syndrome and no perspective."

"I respect it." He grinned at you, easy, unbothered, and you found yourself smiling back without any of the careful calculation you usually applied to smiling at people lately.

"This was a good ten minutes," he said eventually, glancing over, the bag of gifts resting against his leg.

"You owe me for the socks intervention."

"I'll Venmo you."

"Don't. I'll frame it." You licked a drip of ice cream off your wrist, laughing at his expression. "What."

"Nothing." He was looking at you in a way that had gained weight, slightly. the easy humor still there but something steadier underneath it now. "I just like this. This whole afternoon. I wasn't expecting it."

"Me neither."

He set his cone down on the bench between you and turned slightly, and you felt the moment coming before it arrived, the way you sometimes could, and you didn't move away.

"Can I—" he started.

You answered by leaning in instead of making him finish the question.

It was a good kiss. Objectively. He was attentive, sweet. His hand was warm against your jaw, the gold light and the river and the whole soft, easy afternoon wrapped around the two of you like the moment had been built for exactly this.

You felt nothing.

Okay, not nothing-nothing—you registered the warmth of him, the care in it, the fact that someone good and kind and uncomplicated was kissing you like you mattered. But underneath all of that, where something should have sparked, where some version of the thing that happened every single time James so much as looked at you too long, there was just quiet. Pleasant, polite quiet, the feeling you'd feel for a friend, not the flame in your stomach that had kept you awake at one in the morning replaying a sentence for a week straight.

You pulled back first.

"Hey," Macklin murmured, soft, searching your face. "You okay?"

"Yeah." You weren't. "Yeah, I'm okay."

He studied you for a second, and some emotion flew across his face. It was not hurt exactly, more like a confirmation of something he'd already half-suspected. "That wasn't a yeah-I'm-okay face."

"Macklin—"

"It's fine." He picked his ice cream back up, giving you space with the same easy grace he gave everything, no show of wounded pride in it at all, which somehow made you feel worse than if he'd been upset. "I had to try. I'm not mad I tried."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. You didn't do anything." He shrugged. A small, genuine smile found its way back despite everything, looking back out at the river instead of at you. "I figured, honestly, somewhere around the bookstore. You laugh different with me than you do with him. Lighter. But it's not the same kind of laugh, if that makes sense. I noticed it and I told myself I was wrong because I wanted to be wrong. And I think you’re really cool."

You didn't say anything to that, because there wasn't anything you could say that wouldn't make it worse.

"For what it's worth," he went on, quieter now, "whoever has the rest of you—I hope he knows what he's got. Because it's a lot. And I don't think he's earned all of it yet, but I think you'd let him try anyway, which is sort of the most honest thing about you."

"That's a generous way to put it."

"I'm a generous guy." He bumped his shoulder lightly against yours, no weight in it, already finding his way back to easy. "Doesn't mean I'm not going to be a little sad about it for, like, the rest of today specifically. I'll be fine by Monday."

"Macklin."

"I'm kidding. Mostly." He stood, brushing off his jeans, picking the gift bag back up. "Come on. I'll walk you to your car. We can workshop whether the Legos were actually the right call or if I should've trusted my gut and gotten the dinosaur shirt too."

"The Legos were the right call."

"See, that's the assertiveness I need in my life."

He walked you back to your car eventually. It was easy and unbothered the way he always was, bag of nine-year-old gifts still swinging from his wrist, narrating an entirely unnecessary debate about whether his brother would prefer the Lego set assembled or in pieces, and said goodbye like nothing had changed at all, even though everything had—not between you and him, but in you. It was in the quiet, undeniable certainty you were left holding once you were alone behind the wheel.

You'd just kissed someone good. Someone uncomplicated. Someone who would have been, by every reasonable measure, the easier choice, on the sort of afternoon you'd have written for yourself if anyone had ever asked what you actually wanted—no confusion or reading between the fucking lines. It was just a person who made you laugh and meant it and never once made you feel like you were being filed away for later analysis.

And you'd felt nothing, because apparently your body had already decided, sometime in the last four months without consulting you, exactly who it wanted, and it wasn't going to be talked out of it just because the other option made more sense on paper, just because the other option was kind and easy and entirely uncomplicated in every single way the real answer wasn't.

You sat in your car outside the apartment for a long time before you drove anywhere, hands on the wheel, not moving, and the entire time, all you could think about was a hand at your waistband in a closet that smelled like rubber mats, and a voice in the dark asking if he was better than this, and the sick, certain knowledge that the answer had never actually been close.

𝑽𝑰𝑰𝑰.

It happened on a Tuesday morning, early enough that the rink still had that pre-dawn hush to it, frost fogging the lower corners of the glass before the building's heating caught up with itself.

You weren't there yet. This was the part Lia would never tell you about in full, not because she was hiding it exactly, but because some things made more sense staying between the two people who lived them.

James was running her through a transition she'd been fighting for a week, and for once it was actually working—his hand at her hip correcting the angle, voice low and even, the kind of teaching he did without performing patience because he didn't need to perform it with her. She liked training with him. She'd liked it for weeks now, in the easy, low-stakes way that hadn't asked anything of either of them.

She wasn’t at a level where you were at. She knew she never would. But there was a certain thrill in knowing that she had a part of him that you didn’t. 

Even if it was for an hour and forty five minutes and his brain was still running images of you. 

"There," he said, stepping back to check the line. "That's it. Hold that."

She held it, glanced over her shoulder at him to check she'd gotten it right, and something about the angle—him close behind her, breath visible in the cold, his attention fully on her for once instead of somewhere else—made her turn the rest of the way before she'd fully decided to.

She leaned in.

He flinched back. It was not dramatically. Of course, nothing that would've embarrassed her in front of anyone else watching, just a small, immediate retreat, his weight shifting off his front foot like his body had answered before his head caught up. It was over in under a second. It was also unmistakable.

She didn't move for a moment, skates still in the position he'd corrected, face doing something complicated before it settled into something flatter.

"Lia—"

"James, don't." She straightened up, putting real distance between them now, arms crossing over her chest. "I'm not going to pretend that didn't just happen, and I'm not going to let you smooth it over so neither of us has to feel weird about it."

"I wasn't going to smooth it over."

"You were absolutely going to smooth it over." She exhaled, and when she spoke again her voice had lost the edge, replaced by something more tired. "Can I say something? And you actually let me finish it?"

He didn't say anything, which she took as permission.

"I've known her longer than you have," she said. "Since before any of you walked into this rink. And I've watched the two of you for months now, pushing at something neither of you will name, acting like it doesn't touch anyone else because you've decided it's not real. It seems pretty real to anyone with eyes, James."

His jaw tightened, but he let her keep going. He ran a hand through his hair and took a breath.

"I'm not telling you this because I'm hurt, or not only because of that. I'm telling you because I actually like her, and I actually like you, and watching both of you lie to yourselves constantly is exhausting. You think you're contained. You've never once been contained. Everyone at this rink has noticed it except possibly the two of you."

"That's not—" He stopped himself. He started over but quieter. "That's not fair to either of us."

"It's not about fair." She held his gaze, steady now, the rehearsed part of this finally surfacing. "I'm not asking you to choose me. I want that really clear, because I don't think you would, and I'd rather know it now than keep finding out in smaller, worse ways. I just need you to stop being vague at my expense. If it's her, be honest about that. With her. And with me, so I stop reading something into a kindness that was never going to go anywhere."

He was quiet for a long moment. She could tell he was choosing words with more care than usual rather than avoiding the question.

"It's not vague to me," he said finally. "I've known what it is for a while. I haven't said it because saying it changes something neither of us agreed to change."

"That's still not an answer."

"It's her." Flat. Final. Like a fact he'd been carrying around and setting down somewhere private until right now forced his hand. "Since the first night. I didn't ask for it and I don't fully know what to do with it. But it's her."

Lia nodded slowly, like she'd already known and only needed to hear it out loud to make it real enough to act on. There was hurt somewhere in her face, brief, before she decided not to let him watch it sit there.

"Okay," she said. "Then go fix whatever you broke. Because she's been miserable for three weeks and you've been miserable for three weeks and watching two emotionally constipated athletes orbit each other without saying anything is its own kind of unbearable to witness from the outside."

That pulled the smallest, most reluctant huff of something close to a laugh out of him. "I don't actually know what I broke."

"Then ask her. For real this time, not the version where you've already decided you know the answer before she opens her mouth." She picked her bag back up off the bench, done, already turning toward her own warmup. Then, almost as an afterthought, light enough that it could've meant nothing except it didn't: "And James. The night at the restaurant. I drank out of your glass. I knew what it meant to her and that wasn't a kind thing for me to do, and I'm not going to pretend it was."

He stared at her. "Why would you—"

"Because I wanted to know if she actually cared enough about something that small." She shrugged one shoulder, already skating backward toward center ice, putting the conversation behind her with the same efficiency she'd opened it. "She did. So now you know that too."

James stood at the boards for a long moment after she'd gone, turning that over. It was slow but it had felt like a piece had clicked into a gap he hadn't known was empty.

𝑰𝑿. the offer

Some things fall into your lap exactly when you've stopped expecting them to. When you’ve gotten comfortable with settling instead of striving for more. Which was probably the only reason it managed to catch you so completely off guard. 

The email came in on a Wednesday afternoon while you were still in your wet hair and compression socks, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the locker room with your phone propped against your bag, scrolling through nothing in particular because your body was too tired to do anything more demanding than that. You almost swiped past it. The sender name didn't register at first, some federation contact buried three folders deep in your inbox, an address that usually meant scheduling logistics or a reminder about doping paperwork.

You opened it because you had nothing better to do with your hands. Purely by chance.

It took you two full read-throughs to understand what you were looking at. A relocation offer, formal and carefully worded in the specific bloodless language federations used when they wanted something to sound like an opportunity instead of an uprooting—a senior development slot at the national training center, full-time, starting in March, built around exactly the resources and coaching staff you'd spent your whole career being told you'd need eventually if you wanted to actually compete at the level you kept insisting you belonged at. It wasn't a maybe. It was a yes-or-no, with a deadline attached that gave you eleven days to decide your whole life.

You read it a third time, slower, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less enormous if you gave them enough chances.

It would mean leaving Toronto. It would mean leaving the rink, the residency, the auxiliary ice and the vending machine with the bad light and every single thing you'd built into a shape you hadn't let yourself name yet, all of it gone inside of a month, traded for a city you'd visited exactly twice and a training group you didn't know and a version of your career that finally matched the ambition you'd been carrying since you were small enough to need someone to lace your skates for you.

You sat there on the locker room floor for a long time without moving, phone screen dimming twice before you tapped it awake again, your coach's name already half-typed into a text you hadn't sent.

You thought, with a clarity that embarrassed you a little, about James finding out the residency had an end date that had nothing to do with his.

You told your coach first, because that felt like the responsible order of operations, the version of this where you were a serious athlete making a serious decision instead of a girl who'd spent the last twenty minutes staring at her phone trying to figure out how to explain an opportunity she actually wanted without sounding like she was looking for permission to be scared of it.

Your coach's reaction was immediate and uncomplicated in a way that made the whole thing feel both more real and more impossible at once. She didn't hesitate, didn't weigh pros and cons out loud the way you'd braced for—she just looked at the offer on your phone, read it twice with the same focus she gave a competitor's scorecard, and told you, plainly, that you'd be out of your mind not to take it.

"This is what you've been working toward since you were nine," she reminded you, like you needed reminding, like the last decade of your life hadn't been one long, continuous argument for exactly this chance. "You don't say no to this because of a schedule you like."

You didn't tell her it wasn't about a schedule. You let her assume it was logistics, inertia, the ordinary reluctance anyone might feel about uprooting a life they'd gotten comfortable inside of, and she didn't push past that assumption, mostly because she had no reason to suspect there was a hockey player underneath it who'd somehow become load-bearing in ways you'd been actively avoiding examining for five months.

You didn't tell Lia either, not at first, though she could tell something was wrong within an hour of running into you at the boards, your face apparently doing something she recognized even through the version of composure you'd been practicing in the locker room mirror before you came out.

"You look like you got bad news and good news at the same time and haven't decided which one's true yet," she observed, dropping her bag beside yours with the easy familiarity of someone who'd stopped asking permission to sit with you weeks ago.

"That's annoyingly accurate."

"I have a gift." She studied you for a second longer, waiting, and when you didn't immediately fill the silence she let it sit instead of forcing it, which was new for her, a patience you hadn't seen from her before nationals. "You don't have to tell me. I just want you to know I noticed, in case that matters."

It mattered more than you expected it to. You told her anyway, eventually, the whole thing spilling out in a rush somewhere around the second hour of off-ice conditioning, the offer and the deadline and the specific, humiliating fact that the first feeling you'd had reading it wasn't excitement, it was dread, because excitement would've meant the decision was simple and dread meant you already knew exactly what was complicating it.

Lia listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which took visible effort on her part, and when you finally ran out of words she didn't immediately offer an opinion. She just sat there for a moment, turning something over, before she said, carefully, like she was choosing each word with more weight than she usually bothered with:

"You have to take it."

"I know." But did you? You didn’t even know if Lia really wanted the best for you or just wanted James all to herself and her perfectly manicured nails and her perfectly healthy mindset.

"I mean it. Not because I think you should leave him, though I do think that's a separate conversation you're going to have to have at some point. I mean you have to take it because if you don't, some part of you is going to spend the next five years wondering what would've happened if you had, and that wondering rots a person from the inside in a way that's much worse than just being sad about a boy for a while."

You didn't have a response to that. You sat with it instead, the truth of it settling somewhere uncomfortable, because she wasn't wrong, and you'd known she wasn't wrong before she'd even finished the sentence.

"Does he know yet," she asked, gentler now.

"No."

"Are you going to tell him before you decide, or after?"

You didn't have an answer to that either, and the not-having of it sat in your chest for the rest of the afternoon, heavier than the offer itself, heavier than the deadline, heavier than anything except the specific, sinking knowledge that whatever you decided, you were going to have to look at James while you said it out loud, and you had no idea what his face was going to do when you did.

𝑿. everything at once

You hadn't planned on telling him at the rink. You'd built a version of this conversation in your head three different ways over four days, none of them set on B-level under fluorescent lighting with your skates still half-laced, but plans had a way of dissolving the second James actually looked at you, and Thursday arrived before you'd managed to assemble anything better.

He knew something was wrong before you said a word. That had always been the unfair part of being known by someone this thoroughly—he read it off you in the doorway, in the particular way you weren't quite meeting his eyes, and his whole body went still in the way it did when he was bracing for something he couldn't yet name.

"What happened?" he asked, not even bothering with a softer opening.

"Nothing happened."

"Don't do that." His voice had an edge already, worn thin from weeks of almost-conversations that never finished. "You've got the face. The one from December. Just tell me."

You told him. You hadn't meant to do it standing in the middle of the rink with your bag still over your shoulder, hadn't meant for it to come out as flat and clinical as it did, but once you started you couldn't find a gentler shape for it, so you just said the words—the offer, the training center, the deadline that had already eaten four of its eleven days while you'd been busy not telling him.

He didn't say anything for a long moment. The rink hummed around you, the overhead lights doing their low electric buzz, and you watched something move behind his eyes that you recognized instantly, because you'd spent months learning the specific architecture of his face when he was recalculating something faster than he could speak it.

"When were you going to tell me," he finally asked. It was quietly and you quickly realized that it was worse than if he'd shouted.

"I'm telling you now."

"Four days in. Out of eleven." His jaw tightened. "You told your coach. You told Lia. I know you told Lia, because she's been weird as shit with me all week and now I understand why. I'm finding out from you directly only because you ran out of road."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" He took a step closer, and for the first time in weeks there was nothing careful left in how he was looking at you, no contained version standing between you and whatever he actually felt. "You've been pulling away from me since nationals. I've spent six weeks trying to figure out what I did, asking you straight out more than once, and you kept telling me nothing, and the whole time you've apparently had a reason. A real one. You just decided I didn't get to know it."

"I didn't decide that to hurt you."

"I don't care what you decided it to do. I care what it did." His voice cracked slightly on the last word, the first real fracture you'd heard in him since the bathroom at the dinner, and it landed somewhere in your chest you weren't prepared for. "Say the actual reason. Not the offer. The other thing. That started all of this.”

You scoffed. “What thing? James, what are you even talking about?”

"What have you been so upset with for ages that you shut me out while I let you all the way in?" he pressed, when you didn't answer fast enough. "Tell me the real reason."

You didn't want to say it. Now that you were actually being asked to put it into words, standing here with your whole chest exposed and your face hot, it sounded so small—the dumbest possible thing to have let live in you for this long. A pair of headphones, a stupid pair of headphones, ages ago now, and you'd carried it through nationals and through Macklin and through every single one of the last six weeks like it had earned the weight you'd given it.

"God, I'm tired of you being scared of your own feelings—"

"It was the headphones."

He stopped in his tracks.

"What?" His brow furrowed, genuinely thrown, like the sentence hadn't landed anywhere he'd been braced for. "Use your words."

"You let her use your fucking AirPod Maxes." It came out of you in a rush, too fast, too loud for how small it actually sounded once it was finally airborne. "You wanted me nowhere near them. You took them out of my hands like I was going to break something. You said you don't share, you said it's calibrated to how you listen, you made it sound like the one thing in your whole apartment that actually meant something—and then you just handed it to her like it was nothing. Like what you said never existed. Like I made the whole thing up in my head. Or that she was some exception."

He stared at you, something working behind his face that hadn't fully arrived yet.

"You've never said it," he went on, relentless now, like something in him had finally run out of patience for managing this carefully. "Not once. Lia told me what actually happened with the glass, by the way—she drank from mine to see what you'd do with it. And you never said a word to me about what you felt about it. Not the stupid headphones, not the glass, not whatever you saw between me and her. You just went quiet and let me guess, for months, like guessing was supposed to be enough."

"Because saying it out loud would mean admitting I had any right to be upset in the first place." The words came out of you faster and louder than you meant them to, finally breaking something you'd been holding shut since December. "We said this wasn't real, James. Day one. Both of us. If I get to be furious that you let Lia touch something you wouldn't let me touch, that means it's not what we agreed it was, and neither of us has ever been brave enough to say that out loud, so I just—I sat on it. Because saying it meant admitting I wanted something from you that you never promised me."

"I would've given it to you." 

His voice dropped, raw now, none of the calculation left in it. "I would’ve given anything to you.” 

Your heart plummeted down to your stomach and all of a sudden, it felt a hundred degrees more freezing in this room.

“Fuck, if you'd asked. If you'd said any of this five weeks ago instead of changing your schedule and answering me in one-word texts and letting me think I'd done something so unforgivable you couldn't even name it—I would've told you the headphones thing was never about Lia. She just borrowed them for an interview. It was never about anyone. It was about you being the only person who's ever touched something of mine and made me want to let you keep touching it. I didn't even understand that until I was standing in a hallway watching you not react to anything I said for a week straight."

You felt your throat tighten, the fight draining out of your volume even as everything underneath it stayed exactly as loud.

"And now you're telling me you might be in a different city in three weeks," he continued, "and I'm finding out on a Thursday because you ran out of time to keep avoiding it. So forgive me if I don't know whether to be angry that you didn't tell me sooner or just—" He stopped, dragged a hand through his hair, the gesture more unsteady than you'd ever seen it. "Just sad that apparently even now, with eleven days on the clock, your first instinct was still to handle it alone."

"What was I supposed to do, James? Tell you and then ask you to talk me out of the best opportunity I've ever been offered, so you could have a reason to be upset with me instead of just losing me to a city instead of to nothing?”

"I'm not asking you to turn it down. I wouldn’t do that—God."

"Then what are you asking?"

"I'm asking why you didn't think I deserved to know while you were still deciding." His eyes hadn't left yours this whole time, dark and unflinching in exactly the way that used to undo you in the alcove, except now it just felt like an accusation you couldn't argue your way out of. "You've spent five months teaching me how to let someone in, and the second something actually mattered enough to threaten this, you went right back to handling it the way you always have. Alone. Robotic. Like asking for help, or even just asking to be considered, makes you weak instead of human."

"That's not fair either."

"Maybe not. But it's true, and you know it's true, which is exactly why you're not actually arguing with me about it." He exhaled hard, and for a moment neither of you said anything, the rink humming around you, both of you breathing like you'd run something neither of you had trained for. "I told Lia it was you. Weeks ago. I told her there was never going to be a version of this where it wasn't you, and I meant it, and I've been waiting for some sign you meant any of it back, and instead I get an offer letter you sat on for four days and a fight in the middle of an empty rink."

"I do mean it." Your voice broke on it, finally, the thing you'd been refusing to say out loud since November arriving all at once with nowhere left to hide. "That's the whole problem. I mean it so much that an actual future somewhere else terrifies me less than telling you it might cost me you."

He went very still.

"Say that again," he said, low.

"I don't want to lose this," you admitted, and it came out smaller than you meant it to, all the architecture you'd spent months building finally cracking open in the middle of an empty rink at eleven o'clock on a Thursday. "Whatever this is. I don't want eleven days to be the reason I find out what it actually was, after it's already too late to do anything about it."

Neither of you moved for a long moment. The overhead lights kept humming. Somewhere above you, on the main rink, another session was running, the faint sound of blades carrying down through the ceiling the same way it always had, indifferent to the fact that something between you had just been said out loud for the first time, too late and too honest and with no clean way left to take any of it back.

𝑿𝑰.

The movie had been on for forty minutes and neither of you could have said what it was about.

It played low against the far wall, light shifting across the apartment in slow blue pulses, and you were tucked into James' side the way you'd been tucked into his side a hundred times before—except every other time had come with the assumption that there'd be another one after it, and this one didn't have that anymore. Five days left. You hadn't said the number out loud since the rink, but it sat in the room with you regardless, taking up its own share of the couch.

His hand was at your shoulder, slow, absent in the way it got when his mind had wandered somewhere he wasn't going to name. You had your cheek against his chest, the same spot you always found, his heartbeat doing the thing where it dropped pace and stopped being something you tracked and just became the sound of the room.

"Do you think you've changed in the last six months?" you asked, not looking up.

You felt him go still—not guarded-still, just thinking-still, the kind where his whole body slowed down to give the question the room it needed.

"Yeah," he said eventually. "A lot."

"How."

"I used to think watching people was the same as knowing them." His hand kept its slow movement at your shoulder, unbothered, like the conversation wasn't costing him anything even though you could feel that it was. "I was good at it. Reading a room, figuring out where I fit by figuring out everyone else first. It worked, mostly. Kept me out of a lot of situations that would've gone bad."

"And now?"

"Now I know the difference between watching someone and actually being known by them, and I don't think I can go back to just the first one." He said it plainly, no performance in it, the way he said things he'd actually sat with before he let them out. "Which is inconvenient, considering everything."

You didn't say anything to that. You kept your eyes on the screen, on whatever was happening there that neither of you had followed in twenty minutes, and let the sentence settle into your chest the way his sentences had been doing for months now—landing somewhere lower and heavier than you wanted them to.

"What about you," he asked. "Same question."

You thought about it honestly, instead of giving him the fast answer. "I used to think being good at something was the whole point. Like if I just kept being good enough, none of the rest of it would matter—who I let in, what I let myself want, any of it." You traced a loose thread on the hem of your sleeve, not quite looking at him yet. "I don't actually believe that anymore. I just haven't figured out what to do instead."

"That's fair."

"It's not an answer."

"I didn't say it was an answer. I said it was fair."

You almost laughed at that, the small, worn-down kind of laugh that came out when something was sad and also exactly like him at the same time. You lifted your head off his chest to look at him properly, and he was already looking back, the blue light from the screen moving slow across the side of his face, and for a second neither of you said anything else at all.

It was the kind of look that usually got interrupted—by a comment, by him saying something dry to cut the weight of it, by you looking away first because looking too long always cost you something. Tonight neither of you did that. You held it, and he let you, and the movie kept playing to no one.

You reached up without entirely deciding to and traced the line of his eyebrow with one finger, slow, like you were trying to memorize the geometry of it before you ran out of nights to do that in. He didn't flinch away the way he had with Lia at the boards. He just watched your face while you did it, very still, the same stillness he had when he was choosing to let something happen instead of managing it.

You moved to the small scar above his eyebrow next—the one you'd never asked about, the one you'd cataloged months ago and decided didn't need an explanation to matter to you. Your finger followed the line of it, then down along his cheekbone, the sharp angle of it that had been unfair on one person since the day you met him.

"What are you doing?" he said, quiet, not stopping you.

"Looking at you."

"You look at me all the time."

"Not like this." Your thumb found his jaw, traced the tension that lived there even now, even soft like this. "I'm trying to remember it. In case I need to later."

Something moved across his face at that. It was not quite pain, something adjacent to it, the specific flinch of a person hearing the thing they'd been avoiding said out loud without warning.

"You haven't decided yet," he said.

"I know."

"But you're already memorizing me."

"I'm allowed to do both." Your finger reached the corner of his mouth, the place where his almost-smile usually started, and you traced it even though it wasn't doing anything right now, just resting there, serious and open in a way it almost never let itself be. "I can not know what I'm going to do and still want to remember exactly what your face looks like right now. Those aren't in conflict."

He caught your hand before you could pull it back, not stopping the touch, just holding it there against his jaw, his palm warm over the back of your fingers. "I don't want you to memorize me like I'm already gone."

"I'm not saying you're gone."

"It feels like you're saying that."

"I'm saying I don't know." Your voice came out smaller than you meant it to, all the toughness finally gone out of it. "I don't know what happens if I take it. I don't know what happens if I don't. I just know that right now, tonight, I wanted to actually look at you instead of just... being here."

He was quiet for a long moment, his hand still over yours at his jaw, his thumb moving once, slow, along your knuckles.

"Six months ago I would've let you do this and said nothing," he said finally. "Moved on like it didn't cost me anything to let you."

"And now?"

"Now it's costing me something and I'm still letting you." He turned his head slightly, just enough to press his mouth to your palm, brief, almost absent, like the gesture had escaped before he'd fully decided to make it. "That's the whole six months, I think. Same data. Different conclusions."

"Now it's costing me something and... I'm still letting you." He turned his head slightly, just enough to press his mouth to your palm, brief, almost absent, like the gesture had escaped before he'd fully decided to make it. "That's the whole six months, I think. Same data. Different conclusions."

And in this moment—with your hand holding his face up like it would break apart if it wasn't there—you realized this was the most vulnerable he had ever looked. It felt like a window into all the skeletons in his closet, all the colors you'd never once seen on him before tonight, every part of him he usually kept filed somewhere you couldn't reach. 

You thought about the first night at the rink, the way he'd stood at the boards with his arms crossed and his expression so carefully blank you'd genuinely wondered, for a second, if he was even capable of anything else—that contained, assessing stillness, the boy who watched everyone like a problem he'd already half-solved and had no intention of letting you see the workings of. You'd built an entire opinion of him off that stillness, back then. You'd been so sure it was all there was to find.

This was not that face. 

This was a face that had stopped doing the math, stopped analyzing, stopped deciding in advance how much of itself was safe to hand over. The jaw that used to hold tension like armor now just looked tired, open in a way that had nothing performed in it, his eyes doing the thing they only did this late, when the version of him built for the rest of the world had been set down somewhere near the door and hadn't been picked back up.

You thought about how long it must have taken him to let you see exactly this—not the version that noticed things about you and used it as a kind of currency, not the version that corrected your shoulder drop and made it sound clinical, but this one. Raw and unguarded and a little bit frightened, like he knew exactly what he was risking by letting you hold his face like that and had decided to risk it anyway.

You let your hand drop from his face slowly, reluctant in a way you didn't bother hiding anymore, and rested your forehead against his jaw instead, breathing him in, the movie still running its blue light across both of you like neither of you mattered to it at all.

"I kissed Macklin," you said, quiet, into his collarbone.

You felt him go still again, a different kind of still than before. It wasn’t hurt-still, you didn't think, more like he was waiting to find out what he was supposed to feel before he committed to feeling it.

"I'm not telling you to start something," you added, before he could say anything. "I just don't want there to be anything else you don't know. Not after everything. I kissed him a few weeks ago. At the overlook by the river. It was nice. It didn't mean anything, not the way it was supposed to, and I didn't tell you because I didn't know how to say it without it turning into a whole thing, and I'm tired of doing that. The not-saying. So. Now you know."

He was quiet long enough that you lifted your head to look at him, bracing for the jaw tension, the careful voice, some version of the bathroom fight starting up all over again. It didn't come. His face had something more curious in it than angry, something almost amused at the edges, like he'd already done the math on this a while ago and was just now getting confirmation of an answer he'd suspected.

"What was it like?" he asked.

You blinked. "That's it? That's what you want to know?"

"I'm asking a question."

"You're not even a little mad."

"Should I be?" He said it without heat, watching you with that same unhurried patience he'd had at the boards the very first night, like there was nowhere else he needed to be and no reason to rush an answer out of either of you. "You're here. You came back here, tonight, five days before you might be on a plane to somewhere else entirely, and you told me about it instead of letting me find out some other way. That doesn't sound like someone who wanted it to mean anything. That sounds like someone making sure I had the whole truth before she left." His thumb moved once against your shoulder, slow, certain. "I think I know what it means that you're still here. I don't need to be mad about some kiss to believe that. Especially with a golden retriever."

"So you're not going to answer me."

"I asked first." His mouth tipped, almost a smirk, that infuriating, familiar shape of it. "What was it like?"

"It was fine," you admitted, feeling your face heat despite yourself. "Nice. He's good at it, probably. I wouldn't know, comparatively, because I felt nothing. Which was the whole problem."

"Nothing."

"Nothing."

James didn't say anything else for a second, just looked at you with an expression that had gone soft and a little smug at the same time, the particular combination that only he could pull off without it being obnoxious. "Good," he said finally. Simple, like the word covered everything he meant by it and didn't need any decoration. Then, softer, more to himself than to you: "I knew you were mine. I just needed you to be the one who said it."

"I have to decide by Friday," you murmured.

"I know."

"I don't want to talk about it tonight."

"I know that too." His arm tightened around you, just slightly, just enough to register. "We don't have to."

You stayed like that for a long time, the movie eventually ending and neither of you getting up to put on another one, the room going quiet except for the low hum of the apartment settling around you. At some point your eyes started to close, his heartbeat steady under your ear again, and you let yourself have it—the not-deciding, the not-talking, just the fact of him, solid and warm and right there, for however many nights you still had left to call this normal.

It was close to midnight when you finally got up to leave, and he walked you to the door the way he always did, leaning in the frame while you got your shoes on, watching you with that quiet, specific attention that you'd stopped being able to call anything but exactly what it was.

"Hey," he said, when your hand was already on the door.

You looked back.

"If you end up going," he said, and his voice had gone careful again, controlled, the version of him that used technical language because the real language was too much to risk, "don't drop your shoulder in front of the people who actually count. You've been doing it less. Don't let a new rink make you forget that."

You felt something in your chest pull tight and warm at the same time, the absurd, specific tenderness of being told to take care of yourself through a coaching note instead of a sentence that actually said what he meant.

"You first," you said. "You still go wide on the shots that matter. Don't choke just because New Jersey's the one watching instead of me."

The corner of his mouth moved—not quite a smile, but close enough, the almost-version you'd spent months learning to read as the real thing.

"Noted," he said.

"Noted," you echoed.

Neither of you moved for a second. His hand found yours where it had dropped to your side, fingers slotting through yours without either of you deciding to let it happen, the way the easiest things between you always seemed to arrive—not asked for, just suddenly there. You looked down at it. Then, mostly to keep yourself from saying something you couldn't take back, you slid your free hand out of his stick bag where it leaned against the wall by the door, gripped it like you actually knew what you were doing, and took a slow, deliberately exaggerated wrist shot at nothing, following through with your whole arm the way you'd watched him do it a hundred times from the boards.

He stared at you.

"Six months ago," he said, "I would've assumed your evil twin did that. That was genuinely unhinged. Where did that even come from."

"I've been paying attention."

"Clearly. Put my stick down."

"Make me."

He took the stick out of your hand instead, easy, unbothered, and leaned it back against the wall without breaking eye contact, and the corner of his mouth was doing more than the almost-version now, something close to a real smile, the kind that only ever showed up for you and maybe the four boys and nobody else in the entire world.

You weren't ready for what came after the smile faded.

He reached for you the way he always did before a kiss—one hand finding the small of your back first, settling there with that same deliberate weight, fingers spreading slightly like he was bracing you for something, and you felt the specific shift you'd memorized months ago without meaning to, the way his thumb pressed in just slightly harder right before his mouth found yours, like the kiss needed a foundation before it could start.

His other hand went to your neck, the way it always did, cradling rather than holding, his fingers sliding into the hair at your nape with the same unhurried care he'd used in a hallway on the wrong floor four months ago, like nothing about this had ever once been careless.

The kiss itself was slow in a way that hurt more than the rushed ones ever had. You felt every separate piece of it—the drag of his mouth against yours, the brief catch of his breath when you pressed closer, the hand at your back tightening, gripping harder, the way it always did when he meant something and didn't have the words left to say it instead. You'd learned that months ago and never told him you'd learned it: that his grip giving out meant the same thing every time, a tell as reliable as the shoulder drop he was always catching you on. Tonight it tightened until you could feel each of his fingers individually, distinct points of pressure along your spine, like he was trying to leave an imprint that would still be there after you'd gone.

You kissed him back with your whole hand fisted in the front of his shirt, memorizing this too—the exact way he smelled up close, the same now as it had been since November, something clean and a little like the cold rink air that never seemed to fully leave him no matter how long he'd been inside, underneath that the warmer, more specific thing that was just him, the thing you'd learned to find in a crowded room with your eyes closed if you had to.

When he finally pulled back, both of you were breathing like the kiss had cost something physical, his forehead dropping to yours, his hand still curved at your neck, thumb moving once along your jaw in that same absent, cataloging way he had, like even now some part of him was still taking notes he didn't know what to do with.

"Five days," he said quietly, not a question.

"Five days," you agreed.

Neither of you said anything else. You stepped back first, his hand sliding from your neck slow and reluctant, and you opened the door and let the cold from the hallway in around your ankles the way it always did, and you walked out without either of you saying the rest of it, because there wasn't a version of the rest of it that fit inside one more goodnight at his door—just his hand lifting once behind you, not quite a wave, more like he couldn't decide whether letting you go required some kind of gesture at all.

It wasn't supposed to be a goodbye. You hadn't decided anything yet, you kept telling yourself that the entire walk to the elevator, the entire drive home with the heat barely warming the car before you pulled into your own driveway. It wasn't supposed to be a goodbye.

So why did it feel like one?

lovhyeon © 2026

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You looked amazing, covered in hickeys and bruised from the night before The only thing you were wearing was a black, satin tie, and there was nothing but mischief in your eyes.

The second he tried to move, he could feel the tug on his wrists. The sound of the metal handcuffs rattling against the bars of his bedpost.

“Howdy there big boy, where do you think you’re going?” You teased.

“Untie me.” He simply said, entirely unamused.

“Now where’s the fun in that?” You asked, not planning on giving in so soon. 

“Fun huh? Well if that’s what you’re looking for, sweetheart, all you had to do was ask.”

“Not today, Captain. Because today, I’m in charge.” You stated with a proud smile.

“You realize I can easily just break these silly cuffs and bend you over my lap, right?” He said, already fed up with your games.

“Go ahead and try.” You dared him.

Steve felt the slightest bit of worry mixed with curiosity in his stomach as he stared up at you.

He chuckled before tugging hard on the cuffs, expecting them to snap at the movement. To his surprise, they didn’t budge.

“Vibranium.” You said, answering the question you knew lingered on his lips.

“I had Shuri make them for me a while ago. Been waiting for the perfect moment to break them in, although you and I both know, they won’t actually break, will they?”

Oh he was fuming.

“Get me out of these fucking cuffs!” He yelled.

“Oh would you relax, you big baby!” You chuckled, leaning down to press a kiss to his bearded cheek.

“You remember your safeword?” You asked, using the same tone he always used on you.

“This isn’t fucking funny,”

“Yeah well I’m not fucking laughing, am I? Now watch your language before I spank you.”

He only growled in response.

Although he was being grumpy, you knew he would use the safeword if you actually pushed him too far out of his comfort zone.

Giving him a lighthearted smile, you moved to press slow kisses all over his frown.

A deep sigh escaped through Steves nose. The way you peppered sweet kisses all over his face put him at ease.

“Fine.” He breathed. “What do you have in store for me, huh? Are you gonna use my body as you please? Come all over Captain’s cock?”

“Stop that.” You warned, swatting his chest.

“What?”

“Stop taking control! You’re tied up. I’m on top. My rules.” You argued.

“So you keep saying” he chuckled. “What exactly are ‘your rules’?”

Taking a second to think about his question, you huffed out in frustration.

“Cut me some slack, I’m not used to this” you whined, dropping your head on his chest.

The fabric of his cotton shirt felt heavenly against your skin. It was all soft and comfortable, and it smelled like him.

“You’re comfy.” You said. “Just give me a minute and I’ll figure out what to do next.”

His heart melted. You were like a cat, snuggling into his shirt. It did feel really nice, but he’d be damned if he’d just admit that to you.

“So you tied me to the bed, to cuddle?” He raised his brow, giving you an amused look.

“Maybe I did”

You wrapped your arms around his torso and nuzzled against his beard.

“Hmm, you smell good.” You hummed, pressing light kisses up his neck.

“You’re a horrible dom.” Steve raised his brow.

You shushed him and pressed your lips against his. Your hands slid over his shoulders to his hair, fingers tangling in his dark golden locks.

Your hips started grinding against his, cock rubbing against the growing bulge hidden in his pants.

Pulling your lips from his, you sat up straight, still grinding into him, slowly.

“I’m going to give you a lesson in patience.”

“You?” He straight up laughed in your face. “You’re the one begging for me to fuck you every time I so much as breath too close to you.”

Your face turned red. You didn’t even know if it was anger or embarrassment, but you were starting to get pissed.

This wasn’t going to work, not like this.

“Fine.” You huffed, stopping your movements. “You’re right, I do want Captain to fuck me.”

Your voice was sultry, silky smooth. Just how he liked it. Never breaking eye contact with Steve, you slowly slithered down his body, leaving teasing pecks all over his cotton covered chest and stomach until your face was right in front of his painfully hard cock.

Pulling up his shirt slightly, you pressed more kisses on his abdomen, above his hips, down his happy trail. Fingers eagerly tugging on his waistband before finally pulling out his fat dick.

Steve didn’t say a word, he just watched you intently. Registering your every move. He watched as you licked a long, firm stripe up the base of his length, all the way to his tip before circling it with your tongue.

“Oh fuck” he breathed. “There you go, just like that, good boy.”

Your tongue swirled over his slit, tasting the single drop of precum. But instead of taking him in your mouth, you just kept teasing him.

Pressing light kisses up and down his shaft. Fondling with his balls, until he groaned, bucking his hips into nothing.

“Ah ah,…patience.” You teased. “That shouldn’t be hard for you, right Captain?”

Steve growled, but it quickly turned into a whine as you latched your mouth around his dripping tip.

You hummed in delight, wanting to hear that sound again. And you weren’t disappointed, the vibrations of your moans against him made him loose his mind.

“Oh FUCK” he nearly screamed. Trying to get you to take him deeper, but you just pulled back every time he got too far.

This would usually be the part where he gripped your hair, forcing himself down your throat until you gagged around him.

Before you met Steve, you often opted for more…vanilla sex. Simply because no one you ever met did rough sex right.

Steve did. Oh he SO did. He respected you, you know he did. Which is exactly why it was so easy to give yourself to him, completely and entirely.

Sex with Steve is easily the best sex you’ve ever had. It was nice to have someone take over control when you needed it. Especially in your line of work. But lately you’ve just been wanting to try something new.

Well, not new for you, new for Steve.

A little TLC, if you will. You felt like you both deserved it, after the missions you’ve had.

You pulled away from him entirely. Sitting up as you watched Steve, tugging at the cuffs as he writhed and squirmed on the bed.

“My poor, Stevie.” You cooed, moving to lay beside him.

“When I get out of these damn cuffs-”

“- you’ll ruin me, I know I know.” You finished his sentence. “Don’t get ahead of yourself Captain Rogers. We’ve barely gotten started”

You turned on your side to face him, draping your leg over his, you snuggled against him and kissed his cheek, sweetly brushing your fingers through his hair.

“I wouldn’t have to tie you up if you could just learn to behave.”

He gave you a questioning look.

“Just trust me” you said, your hand travelled down his body, grabbing his still throbbing erection.

“Let me take care of you, Stevie.” You cooed, nibbling on his ear, slowly pumping his shaft

His breathing hitched, it was safe to say that Steve was a little confused.

“You’re going soft on me.” He whispered, making you smirk.

“And you’re getting hard on me.”

You moved to slide off his pants entirely before finally getting on top of him again.

The internal struggle visible in his eyes made you giggle.

“Steve, would you relax?”

“Untie me.” He asked yet again.

“Why?” You raised a brow.

“Because I want to touch you” his voice was softer than before. You could hear how hard he tried to sound stern. How hard he tried not to beg. 

You didn’t reply as you spit in your hand, reaching down to coat Steve's hard cock with your saliva. You reached over to the nightstand to grab the lube, giving him one more soft kiss before squeezing some of the sticky liquid on his cock. You gave him a few more strokes before finally sinking down on him carefully.

His eyes rolled back and he let out a satisfied groan. Even over his shirt, you felt the vibrations rumble in his chest as your fingertips pressed into the soft flesh, making you moan.

You slowly started riding him, slightly raising your hips with every sway, making his hard cock slip halfway out of your asshole every time before plunging back in as your cock rubbed against the patch of hair going up his lower belly.

You were in heaven.

“If I untie you, do you promise you’ll be a good boy?” You questioned. You were a mess, eyes closed and mouth slightly hanging open in pure bliss.

But Steve was stubborn. He kept his mouth shut and watched you ride him.

You groaned impatiently and grabbed his jaw, squeezing his cheeks between your fingers.

“I asked you a question, Steve.”

You squeezed your hole tightly around his throbbing cock, before stilling your movements.

“Are you going to be a good boy?”

Steve tried bucking his hips up in frustration but you didn’t move.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

Steve expected you to lift off him, tease him some more, just like he would do when you were being a brat. But you didn’t.

You kept moving at a slow, sensual pace. You whined as you trailed your hands over his chest, to his neck once more before moving them to your own body. The tingling sensation of his hot skin lingered on your fingers as you ran them over your own chest, imagining it were Steve’s rough hands softly caressing your skin.

As he watched you, and he felt you, Steve realized how handsome you were. Not that he had never noticed before, just not like this. Soft moans and whimpers tumbling from your lips as you moved on top of him, your fingers trailing over your soft skin.

His hands itched, god he would do anything to touch you right now, but he also noticed how being restrained from doing so made everything so much more intense.

It was different from when he had you tied up. You weren’t being as cruel as he would be. You didn’t toy with him as much and you weren’t nearly as mean, quite the opposite actually. You were being so soft and sweet.

That’s when it hit him. You didn’t want control. You just wanted some soft loving.

“Untie me”

“No.”

“Untie me, baby please?”

“Steve” you whined

“Untie me and I’ll give you what you want.”

You tore your eyes open, glaring down at him.

He let out a deep sigh before uttering the words “I’ll be a good boy.”

You couldn’t believe he actually said it. Steve never gave up control. Ever.

“Just let me touch you? Please?” He begged.

Steve Rogers. Captain freaking America, begging you to let him touch you.

He was right, you were a horrible dom.

You moved your hands to the cuffs. The fingerprint scanner Shuri had put in there proved to work perfectly as they clicked open the second your finger pad touched the middle part.

“You can keep the cuffs, just know that they only open with my touch” you said, flinging the piece of vibranium on the floor.

“Good, I don’t plan on using them with anyone else.” Steve breathed, sitting up as his hands flew to your waist.

He put his head against your chest, the side of his face pressed against your sternum.

“Steve” you exhaled. Part of you had expected him to take back control right away, flipping you over and fucking you into the mattress until you came so many times you saw stars (and stripes lol).

Instead, Steve just held you like that for a while. 

This was probably the most intimate moment you had ever shared with Steve. And it made you realize how much you had been longing for this, how much you needed to just…feel him. To let go with him. Not just of control, of everything. Steve owned you. Mind, body and soul. 

The palms of his hands were pressed flat against your back, holding you close against him while your hands played with his hair.

He was still buried deep inside of you, but neither of you moved, just basking in body heat, enjoying each others embrace.

“I’m kinda offended that you feel like you had to tie me up for this.” Steve finally spoke up.

For a split second, you thought you saw hurt flash through his eyes.

“Oh Stevie” you cradled his face, ducking down to press a slow kiss against his lips.

You both moaned into the kiss, suddenly aware of your position, you slowly started moving again.

You both kept each other close as you found a pleasurable pace.

“I’m sorry.” he breathed in between moans.

“W-what for?” You asked hazily.

“For…oh fuck…for making you feel like you…shit…like you couldn’t just…a-ask” he spoke as the pleasure increased with the tempo, his cock hitting your prostate with every move.  

“Oh Steve!” You moaned loudly. Feeling his fingers slide down to stroke your cock.

Your orgasm came over you in waves, drowning everything around you out for a blissful moment as you rode it through, marking Steve's chest with your cum.

The clenching of your asshole and the angelic sounds tumbling over your lips made Steve shudder as he shot his hot load inside of you.

“Oh FUCK, BABY!” He almost crushed your body against his. Grip tightening around you as you felt his warm seed covering the fluttering walls of your asshole.

Steve pressed his lips against yours as you both road out your highs.

Chests heaved against one other. The smell of sex surrounded your sweat and cum covered bodies, but neither of you cared.

When he softly pulled away from the kiss, he leaned his forehead against yours before falling back against the bed, taking you with him.

You stayed on top of him for a second until he finally rolled you over and gently pulled out of you.

“I’ll be right back.” He pressed a chaste kiss against your cheek before disappearing into the bathroom.

His absence only lasted a few minutes, but it gave you time to take off your tie, dropping it on the floor next to the rest of your discarded clothes. 

Steve returned wearing a fresh pair of boxer shorts, carrying a wet washing cloth and a little towel in his hands.  

He only gave you a soft smile. Wordlessly cleaning up the mess between your thighs and on your chest before getting rid of the towel. He gave you one of his clean boxers, fighting off the fresh wave of dirty thoughts that seeing you in his underwear brought on. You quietly put them on, blushing as Steve came to lie down next to you, immediately pulling you close.

“You okay?” You both spoke up at the same time, giggling a little at the slightly awkward moment.

“Yeah, I’m okay.” You said with a smile.

He grinned back at you, “me too.”

A comfortable silence settled in between the two of you. This time you were the one to break it.

“Well…that was…different.”

“Yeah…it was.” Steve replied 

“did you..I mean…was it good different or…or bad different?”

Steve turned to look at you. Studying your face for a moment before leaning in and pressing a sweet kiss against your lips. 

“I don’t ever want anyone else." He said when he pulled back. 

You didn’t know how to reply, so you just looked at him with soft eyes, allowing him to continue.

“I know that this…thing…between us has been… it’s just…I want you to know that it’s more than just blowing off steam or something. And I’m sorry for making you feel like you couldn’t talk to me about…you know…trying to slow it down a little sometimes…”

Trying your best not to burst into tears like a lovesick teenager, you swallowed before speaking again. 

“I know you’ve been through a lot, Steve. I just want you to know that…I’m not going anywhere.”

“Me neither, baby. You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.” he gave you a goofy smile.

“Now who’s going soft on who, rogers?” You teased.