Peyton
Susan McAllister should scare me less after surviving heart surgery.
She does not.
She dozes under a thin hospital blanket, pale and small against the pillows, and still somehow manages to make the entire room orbit around her.
Nurses check her vitals like they expect commentary.
Bill sits beside her like a man guarding a gate.
Ryan stands near the window with his arms crossed, jaw tight, pretending he is not watching the monitor count every beat of her heart.
I sit in the chair Susan assigned me and try to remember how to be something other than a reporter.
“Still here?” Susan asks when her eyes open again.
“Still here.”
“You can go, honey. I know you have work.”
Article due, editor waiting, deadline with teeth.
All the pieces are here, which makes them dangerous.
“It’s quiet here,” I say.
Susan laughs softly and winces. “Quiet never lasts in my house.”
“I noticed.”
“The twins like you.”
“They liked the pancakes.”
“Same thing at ten.”
Ryan’s mouth moves by the window.
I see it.
He sees me catch it.
Susan sees both of us, because apparently anesthesia has not damaged her ability to be terrifying.
“How do you see my son?” Susan asks.
The room changes.
Ryan looks over.
“Mom,” he warns.
“I had heart surgery, Ryan. I didn’t lose my manners.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
Susan smiles at him, then returns those sharp eyes to me.
I could dodge. I should dodge. The off-record rule with Ryan does not apply to his mother, and yet lying to Susan feels like kicking something already bruised.
“I think he is complicated,” I say. “I think people keep trying to make him serve a purpose. The team. The fans. Sometimes even the people who love him.”
Bill’s gaze drops to the floor.
Ryan goes very still.
I keep going because stopping would be worse.
“I think he knows that. I think he hates it. And I think he lets it happen anyway when he believes it protects someone else.”
Susan watches me for a long moment.
“That’s closer than most get.”
Ryan turns back to the window.
His reflection looks hollowed out.
Later, when Bill and Ryan walk down the hall to talk to the doctor, Susan catches my hand. Her skin is warm and papery, her grip weaker than the force of her attention.
“Whatever you write,” Susan says, voice thin but steady, “don’t make him smaller so people can understand him faster.”
My throat tightens.
“I won’t.”
“And don’t go the other way to make me like you.” She almost smiles. “I’d know.”
I smile. “No, ma’am.”
“Susan.”
“Susan,” I correct.
“Good girl.”
The words should annoy me.
They do not.
By afternoon, the doctor says Susan may move to a step-down room in the morning if nothing changes overnight. Bill declares it a victory. Ryan looks like a man who has been handed oxygen and does not trust the tank.
Before they leave, Susan makes Ryan lean close enough to fuss at him without effort.
“Go home, shower, eat something that isn’t coffee.”
“Dad can…”
“Your father will sit here and irritate me in shifts.”
Bill lifts a hand. “I have a system.”
“You have a face,” Susan says. “It hovers.”
I look at the floor to hide my smile.
Susan catches that too. “Don’t encourage him.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
“You would. I can tell.”
Ryan’s eyes find me over the bed. Tired, amused despite himself, too open for the amount of people in the room.
The look lands low in my body before I can convert it into anything professional.
The helicopter waits in the hospital lot.
No cameras. No PR. Just the pilot, the heat, and the thump of rotors turning the air physical.
Ryan comes out last, red-eyed and composed.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
On the flight back, he sits beside me instead of up front with the pilot.
The cabin is too small for everything we are trying not to say.
When the helicopter banks, his thigh presses against mine. Three seconds. Maybe four.
He shifts away.
I stare out the window and feel the absence like his hand had been there.
At the tarmac in San Antonio, he starts toward the lot without waiting.
I catch up halfway across the concrete. “Ryan.”
“Don’t.”
“I just…”
“Whatever you are about to say, don’t.” He turns, and the exhaustion in his face cuts deeper than anger would have. “You got what you came for. My family. My mother in a hospital bed. A nice human angle to make the profile feel expensive.”
“I’m not writing that.”
“Then what are you writing?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Convenient.”
“No. Terrifying.”
That stops him.
I swallow. “I know what they want. I know what Gil expects. I know what would keep access open. I also know some things aren’t stories.”
He swallows.
“You’ll lose access.”
“Probably.”
“They’ll freeze you out.”
“Probably.”
“Then why?”
Because his mother held my hand. Because his father warned me about greed. Because he sat on porch steps like a man coming apart quietly. Because I cannot tell where the story ends and Ryan begins anymore.
I give him the answer that will not break me open in the parking lot.
“Because I don’t want to hate my own byline again.”
Ryan stares at me.
Then he nods once and walks away.
This time, I let him.
My Airbnb feels wrong when I get back. Too quiet. Too temporary. I open the laptop, try to write the lead, and delete every sentence that sounds like betrayal wearing polished shoes.
Gil texts twice.
Draft status?
Deadline’s Tuesday. Do not miss it.
I tell him I will not.
Then I lie on the couch and replay the porch, the hospital, the helicopter, the three seconds of his thigh against mine until I want to crawl out of my own skin.
At nine, someone knocks.
I know before I look.
Ryan stands in the hallway in the same clothes from the helicopter, hair disheveled, face drawn tight like he has spent the last two hours losing an argument with himself.
I open the door. “You cannot be here.”
“I know.”
“If anyone finds out…”
“I know.”
“Ryan.”
“Don’t make me be smart right now.”
That should stop me.
It does the opposite.
He steps inside and shuts the door behind him. The click sounds final.
He is too close. Hospital antiseptic still clings faintly to his shirt beneath the heat of him. His eyes drop to my mouth, then lift.
“There’s no interview tonight,” he says. “No tape. No quote. Nothing you can take back.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I went home and all I could think about was you saying some things aren’t stories.”
My breath catches.
“This is trouble,” I say.
“Yes.”
“It changes everything.”
“Probably.”
“You are my subject.”
“I know what I am.”
His hand comes up, cupping my jaw. His thumb brushes my cheekbone once, rough and careful at the same time.
“Tell me to leave,” he says.
I should.
Instead, I fist my hand in his shirt and pull him down.
The kiss is not soft.
It is hunger and exhaustion and everything Dallas started catching fire all at once. He backs me into the wall, one hand in my hair, the other hard at my hip, and I make a sound into his mouth I cannot blame on anyone but myself.
“Bedroom,” I say.
“Where?”
“Down the hall.”
He walks me backward without breaking the kiss. My knees hit the bed, and then his weight is over me, solid and shaking with the last scraps of discipline he has left.
His mouth finds my throat. Teeth. Heat. The scrape of his jaw against my skin.
“Tell me no,” he says against my neck.
“No.”
He freezes.
I dig my nails into his shoulders. “I mean no, I am not telling you to stop.”
His laugh is rough, frayed, gone almost immediately when I bite his lower lip.
After that, the world shrinks to hands and breath.
Shirts come off. His skin is hot under my palms, all muscle and scar tissue and a heartbeat nowhere near as steady as the rest of him pretends to be. He strips me with less patience than precision, and I like that too much.
His hands on my thighs. His mouth on my ribs. The way he watches my face like learning me matters more than winning.
“This what you want?” he asks, voice rough.
One question.
The only one that matters.
“Yes.”
He reaches for his wallet.
Then he stops.
His hand stays at my hip, not moving, his forehead dropping to mine. For a long moment he just breathes, close enough that I feel the war going on inside him.
“Ryan.”
“I know.”
“Then why…”
“Because if we do this tonight, I will not know which part was you and which part was the worst day of my life.” His voice is wrecked, careful, hating itself. “And you deserve to know I came here for you. Not for the wreckage.”
I should be relieved. I am not. I am furious at him for being right, and furious at myself for the part of me that wanted the wreckage too.
He gets to stop.
Even now — my yes still in the room, his hand still on my hip — he is the one who calls it.
“That,” I manage, “is a deeply inconvenient amount of integrity.”
“I know.”
“I hate it.”
His mouth presses to my temple. “I know that too.”
“One question,” I say. “The quiet kind.”
His mouth stills against my temple.
“Peyton.”
For a second, I think he will say no.
He should say no.
Instead, his fingers flex against my hip. “Ask.”
I swallow, because naked is one thing. This is worse.
“If today had been ordinary,” I ask, “would you have stopped?”
His breath leaves him slowly.
He does not look away. That is how I know the answer will cost him.
“No.”
The word lands between us, heavy and clean.
My pulse trips.
His gaze drops to my mouth, then comes back. “My turn.”
I nod.
“If I ask you to wait until I know the difference,” he says, “will you?”
That one hurts more.
Because it is not a question about sex.
It is a question about whether I can want him without taking from him.
“Yes,” I say.
His eyes close.
Then his forehead rests against mine, and nothing about the room gets easier.
We lie like that with the lamp burning and our clothes half-gone and nothing finished, which is somehow more naked than if we had let it finish.
His hand finds mine at the edge of the blanket.
Not possessive or sweet enough to be safe.
Just his fingers threading through mine while both of us stare at the ceiling and pretend the room has not changed shape around us.
I let my thumb drag once over his knuckles, over the damage there, and feel him go very still beside me.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“Which part?”
I turn my head.
He does not.
It is the closest either of us comes to saying what almost happened.
Then the room comes back.
The laptop on the table. The blank draft. My phone face down beside it with Gil’s deadline waiting inside.
Ryan sits up on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees.
I pull my knees in and reach for my shirt.
“The article still runs Tuesday,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You don’t owe me a softer story.”
The sentence surprises me enough that I look at him.
His back is to me. Broad shoulders. Marks from my nails already rising red on his skin.
“Ryan.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
He finds his shirt and pulls it on.
I do not ask him to stay. Part of me wants to. The smarter part knows he might, and that would make tomorrow worse.
He stops at the door with his hand on the knob.
“Peyton.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t regret it.”
Then he leaves.
I sit in the dark with my arms around my knees and his marks already warming on my skin.
This makes everything harder.
I do not regret it either.
For one ugly second, I wonder if leaving was the point.
If restraint is just another way Ryan McAllister wins.