Ellery
By evening, the foundation office looked like a war zone—boxes stacked on every surface, centerpieces half-assembled, ribbons tangled in donation bins.
The printer kept jamming, the event schedule was still wrong, and half the volunteers had already slipped out with sympathetic smiles and muttered excuses.
I was still at my desk, hair in a lopsided bun, eyes burning from staring at spreadsheets for too long. The glow of the screen made everything feel harsher—too bright, too sterile. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, but I couldn’t remember what I’d been typing.
It was supposed to feel exciting. All this chaos, the rush, the buildup before the biggest night of the year. But it didn’t feel exciting anymore. It felt like survival.
Naomi appeared beside me, balancing another stack of papers that looked suspiciously like defeat. She dropped them on my desk with a sigh. “You need to eat something that isn’t coffee.”
I gave a weak smile without looking up. “After I solve world peace.”
She groaned. “You mean after you print the name tags for the gala.”
That got a laugh out of both of us, though it sounded hollow, scraped thin from exhaustion. She slumped into the chair across from me, propping her chin on her palm. “You realize normal people would’ve gone home by now, right?”
“Normal people don’t run foundations on caffeine and miracles,” I said, tugging at a jammed sheet of cardstock. It tore in half. I swore under my breath.
Naomi reached over and gently pried the rest of the paper loose, her tone softening. “You’re going to burn out before this thing even starts.”
I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that I was fine, that this was just what hard work looked like—but the words wouldn’t come. The truth sat heavy in my chest.
“I can’t stop,” I admitted quietly. “Not when everything depends on this.”
Naomi gave me a look—half worry, half affection. “You’ve already done enough to make this a success, El.”
I shook my head. “Enough isn’t the same as done.”
Silence settled between us, broken only by the hum of the fluorescent lights and the faint whir of the printer restarting.
She sighed and stood, stretching her arms. “Fine. I’m getting us takeout. Don’t move.”
“I’ll just be right here, single-handedly preventing the collapse of civilization,” I said, forcing another grin.
She snorted. “At least civilization will have perfectly aligned centerpieces when it goes down.”
When the door shut behind her, the quiet hit harder than I expected.
I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. For a moment, the weight of everything pressed down—expectations, deadlines, promises I’d made to kids who believed in me. My heart ached with a mix of pride and exhaustion.
I rubbed my temples and whispered to the empty room, “Just make it through the week.”
The printer beeped again, spitting out another sheet. I stared at it, then laughed softly to myself.
Maybe that was all survival really was—one jammed page at a time.
The door creaked open, breaking the hum of the printer and the clatter of my typing. I looked up just in time to see Beckett leaning against the doorframe, still in his training gear—sweat-damp hair, T-shirt clinging to his chest, that infuriatingly calm smirk already in place.
“You’re still here,” he said, voice low and teasing, like he’d caught me doing something illegal.
I didn’t even bother looking up from my screen. “So are you.”
“Fair,” he said, stepping into the room. “Coach kicked us out early. You, on the other hand, look like you’ve fought a paper monster and lost.”
I exhaled a half-laugh. “I think the paper monster won hours ago.”
He glanced around, taking in the chaos—half-empty coffee cups, stacks of boxes labeled donor gifts, ribbons draped over the back of chairs, and one very tired Naomi pretending to be alive across the room.
“You two need security guards or something?” he asked.
Naomi groaned without lifting her head. “We need sleep. Which I plan on achieving immediately. You have fun supervising her, Beckett.”
“Wait—Naomi,” I started, but she was already gathering her things.
“Don’t wait up,” she said with a grin that was far too knowing for someone half-asleep. “Maybe he can get you that takeout, huh?”
The door closed behind her, leaving the faint smell of her vanilla latte and a silence that suddenly felt too loud.
Beckett crossed the room slowly, hands in his pockets, eyes scanning the cluttered tables like he was trying to figure out how one person could possibly generate this much chaos.
“So this is where the magic happens,” he said.
“If by magic you mean spreadsheets and panic attacks, then yes,” I replied.
He chuckled, that low, easy sound that somehow managed to irritate and calm me at the same time.
“You don’t have to stay this late,” he said, leaning a hip against my desk. “You’ve got, what, a dozen people helping with this event?”
I looked up at him, tired but stubborn. “They helped. Past tense. The rest is my problem.”
He frowned slightly. “You always do that—act like the weight of the world’s yours to carry.”
“It’s my foundation, Beckett. It kind of is.”
He tilted his head. “Still doesn’t mean you have to break yourself doing it.”
Something in the way he said it—quiet, steady—made me pause. I tried to look away, focus on the glowing spreadsheet on my screen, but my vision blurred from exhaustion.
“I’ll rest when the gala’s over,” I said finally.
He studied me for a beat longer, then sighed. “You said that last week.”
“I meant it last week,” I muttered.
He laughed again, softer this time. “You’re impossible.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “You would know.”
For a moment, the silence that followed wasn’t heavy—it was something else. Familiar. Warm. Like the noise in my head had quieted for the first time all day.
He looked at me, and I hated how easily he could see through me, like the exhaustion, the stress, the act of keeping it together weren’t enough to hide behind.
And then he crossed the room slowly, scanning the chaos like he was walking into a disaster zone.
I didn’t even bother pretending it wasn’t one—papers everywhere, floral foam on the floor, and a printer that had decided to retire halfway through the name tags.
“You always do this,” he said, stopping at my desk. His tone was half amused, half exasperated. “Try to build Rome by yourself.”
I didn’t look up from my laptop. “Rome didn’t have donors with dietary restrictions.”
That got a laugh out of him—low, genuine. “You ever ask for help?”
I arched a brow at him. “I just did. You brought sarcasm instead.”
He grinned, the corner of his mouth tilting up like he was proud of himself. “Sarcasm’s free. Manual labor costs.”
“Lucky for me, I’m broke,” I said dryly.
Before I could tell him to leave, he reached for a clipboard and started flipping through it like he actually knew what he was looking at. “All right, where do you want these centerpieces? And don’t say ‘on the tables’ because I might take that too literally.”
I blinked, caught completely off guard. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
He shrugged, already lifting one of the boxes like it weighed nothing. “Good thing I’m bad at rules.”
I leaned back in my chair, arms crossed. “Beckett—”
“Relax, princess,” he said, using that nickname he knew drove me crazy. “I’m just stacking boxes. Not rewriting your spreadsheets.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
I opened my mouth, ready to snap back with something clever, but the words got tangled somewhere between my throat and the knot forming in my chest. The truth was, I didn’t know what the point was.
Maybe it was the way he looked at me—steady, unbothered, like all the chaos in this room didn’t scare him off.
He set the box down and wiped his hands on his shorts, glancing at me over his shoulder. “You ever stop to think maybe you don’t have to do everything alone?”
“I don’t have time to stop,” I muttered, focusing too hard on aligning my papers.
He smiled—small, knowing. “You just proved my point.”
I wanted to roll my eyes, to tell him I didn’t need saving. But watching him move around the office, stacking boxes with this casual ease, something inside me loosened just a little.
The hum of the fluorescent lights faded into background noise. His quiet presence filled the space where panic usually lived.
“Why are you even doing this?” I asked finally. “Don’t you have practice or fans to sign things for?”
He looked up at me, grin softening. “Maybe I just like seeing you stop frowning for five seconds.”
That earned him a glare I didn’t really mean. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But you’re smiling.”
I wasn’t. Not really. But I felt it—a small curve threatening to give me away.
He turned back to the boxes like nothing happened, but I could feel the shift in the air, the unspoken warmth beneath the teasing.
For a while, we worked in the kind of silence that didn’t need to be filled.
The office hummed with faint noises—the buzz of the overhead lights, the rhythmic snip of scissors, the soft rip of tape as Beckett hung banners across the far wall.
I sat at my desk, sorting through name tags in neat little stacks, pretending I didn’t notice how easily he’d slipped into the space beside me.
Every now and then, he’d hum under his breath—some song I didn’t recognize—and the sound somehow made the chaos feel manageable. Comfortable, even.
He broke the quiet first. “You talk to Kyle today?”
The question landed like a pebble in a still pond, rippling through the fragile calm I’d built for myself.
I didn’t look up. “He called between drills.” I slid another name tag into the correct pile. “Promised he’ll be there Saturday.”
“Hmm.” Beckett’s tone was neutral, but not empty. Just enough sound to tell me he was listening. He adjusted a corner of the banner that didn’t need adjusting.
A few seconds passed before he asked, quietly, “You believe him?”
The hesitation stretched between us. I stared at the tag in my hand like it had the answer written on it.