Chapter 30 #3
“I’m fine,” I said automatically, though the lie sounded thin even to me.
We continued toward the Arch of Peace while crowds moved around us beneath banners and Olympic flags snapping sharply in the cold wind. Somewhere farther down the boulevard the Olympic flame burned against the darkening afternoon sky.
For several hours I existed simply as myself.
Not Velkarya’s polished representative. Not half of a federation-approved partnership designed for cameras and sponsorships. Just Luka, walking through Milan with people who liked me without requiring performance in return.
And beside me walked the man who had unknowingly shown me how small my life had become before this. Who had somehow made this new version of myself feel possible.
By the time we returned toward the Village entrance, dusk had settled over the city.
Nobody appeared eager for the afternoon to end.
Noah and Nathan still argued about gelato with astonishing commitment.
Keisha had somehow acquired an Olympic volunteer hoodie despite possessing absolutely no legitimate reason to own one.
Donna stood close beside Mila with their hands hidden together beneath the sleeve of Mila’s coat, the gesture so instinctive by now neither of them appeared aware of it anymore.
Across from me, Dean shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and watched me with an expression I could not safely examine too closely.
“I’m glad you came,” he said.
They were simple words with no pressure attached to them, no attempt to revisit our conversation from two nights earlier. Yet hearing them tightened my throat anyway because I understood exactly what remained unspoken beneath the surface.
I’m glad you came back at all.
For one reckless moment I wanted to close the distance between us regardless of who might see. Then reality returned all at once: federation offices, my father’s careful voice over the phone, every invisible boundary waiting for me beyond Milan.
I swallowed hard.
“So am I,” I admitted.
Warmth crossed his face so quickly I had to look away before the sight damaged whatever fragile composure I still possessed.
Ahead of us, Ethan called loudly, “Okay, if you two stare any harder we’re gonna need emotional supervision.”
“Shut up, Ethan,” Brooke said with a groan.
Dean laughed under his breath, and the familiarity of that sound hit unexpectedly hard because my mind had already begun imagining impossible things around it: hearing it across a kitchen, across years, across a life no longer built around fear.
Nearby, Donna squeezed Mila’s hand before reluctantly stepping back. “Tonight?”
Mila met her eyes directly. “Yes.”
The ease of it stunned me every time. There was no hesitation, no coded language, no instinctive retreat from honesty.
I wanted that more than I knew how to admit aloud.
Dean looked at me again then, and I realized with painful certainty that he would let me walk away permanently if he believed staying beside him would destroy my life.
That knowledge lodged somewhere beneath my ribs and stayed there.
“We have practice tomorrow morning,” I said eventually because practical details felt safer than anything else available to me.
“Yeah.”
Neither of us moved.
Then Noah shouted from several yards ahead, “If we leave Ethan unsupervised any longer, he’s absolutely marrying an Italian stranger.”
“I deserve romance!” Ethan yelled back.
Mila rolled her eyes and headed toward the entrance. I followed automatically, resisting the urge to look over my shoulder because I already knew Dean would still be standing there watching me leave.
The laughter and movement from the day faded behind us, and we stood together, waiting for the elevator. Mila glanced at me but said nothing.
The elevator ride passed in silence. Mila waited until we reached our floor before speaking.
“You understand what today really was, yes?”
I did. The hours with Dean and the others had not been about sightseeing or distraction, but proof that another version of life existed beyond the narrow one I had spent years forcing myself to accept.
Mila squeezed my arm once before disappearing into her room.
I stood alone in the corridor afterward longer than necessary because the thought of returning to my room suddenly filled me with a bleakness I could not ignore anymore. Hours earlier I could still pretend the life I wanted belonged entirely to fantasy.
Now I had walked through it.
I unlocked my door and stepped inside. My reflection stared back at me from the mirror across the room: same face, same posture, same carefully maintained composure.
Yet none of it fit quite the same anymore.
Images from the afternoon kept returning whether I invited them or not. Donna holding Mila’s hand openly in the middle of Milan. Pride flags rippling over crowded streets. Dean beside me through all of it, never asking me to become anybody except myself.
I stood there for a very long time before the truth finally surfaced plainly enough that I could no longer hide from it.
I do not want to spend the rest of my life surviving.