Chapter 9 #3
“I met someone who makes me want to feel things I’ve spent my entire life learning not to feel.
And I don’t know how to do that. Nobody gave me instructions for letting someone in.
I was given instructions for keeping everyone out, and I followed them perfectly, and they worked, and they cost me everything. ”
The light above me hummed. The silence held.
“That’s my truth.”
Backstage was a geography of careful distances — people giving me the wide berth reserved for anyone who’s just cracked open two decades of silence in a public space.
Mason touched my shoulder as I passed, one second of contact that carried the weight of understanding that sometimes the kindest thing you can do is acknowledge someone’s damage without trying to clean it up.
Derek studied me with an expression I couldn’t read and didn’t try to.
Sloane found me in the hallway near the garden entrance, the same corridor where our conversations used to generate enough heat to power a small city.
She was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and her face stripped of the Queen mask, and when I stopped in front of her she didn’t say anything for a long time.
Just looked at me — really looked, with the focus that comes from understanding the difference between seeing and watching — and in the silence I felt my shoulders drop by two inches, as if her gaze had located the tension and applied the calculated counterpressure to release it.
“I’m glad you let me see behind,” she said. Low. Quiet. Not a whisper — a chosen volume, the vocal equivalent of a room built for two.
She reached up and put her hand on my chest. Her palm settled flat over my sternum with the same no-nonsense certainty she brought to everything — no hesitation, no checking my reaction, just her hand on me like she’d decided my heartbeat was a rhythm she was entitled to feel and wasn’t going to apologize for the presumption.
Each of her fingers registered through the cotton, five distinct points of contact that my nervous system registered with such excruciating specificity that I was briefly convinced I could count her pulse through her fingertips.
The almost-smile happened before I could stop it.
The one Declan called “your defective human expression” — impossible to produce on command, appearing now as a response to her palm and her words that weren’t comfort and weren’t pity but were simply acknowledgment.
She’d seen behind the walls. She was confirming that what she’d found there had been worth the door.
“Captain would have liked you,” I said, and I had no idea where the sentence came from — it arrived fully formed, bypassing every checkpoint — but the moment it existed in the air I knew it was the truest thing I’d said all day, including the confession.
Because Captain had liked gentle things and kind things and people who took up space without apologizing for it, and Sloane was all of those, and the boy on the kitchen floor would have been glad.
Fiercely, nonsensically glad — to know that twenty-two years later, the person who finally cracked his windows open would be someone his dog would have adored.
Her hand was still on my chest. She smiled — a real one, unproduced, the kind that did something dangerous to the corners of her mouth. “I would have liked Captain.”
We stood there. Her palm, my heartbeat, and a corridor with bad camera angles.
The crew was still breaking down the Truth Test stage, and in the temporary pocket of semi-privacy we existed in a version of reality that felt almost normal — almost like two people standing close together by choice, without production value or competitive dynamics or the weight of an audience.
Her fingers curled once against my shirt, a half-inch gathering of fabric she might not have even been aware of, and my entire body catalogued it desperately, like someone starving who had just been handed something to keep.
Tessa’s voice cut through the corridor with the efficiency of a fire alarm: “Attention, everyone. Tomorrow’s challenge has been posted.”
She appeared around the corner, clipboard in hand, wearing the professional smile that meant she was about to create excellent television and terrible personal boundaries. Behind her, a PA wheeled a monitor into the hallway, and on it, in clean white text against a dark background:
THE PROXIMITY TEST 24 hours. Complete isolation. One partner assigned.
And underneath, in smaller text that might as well have been printed in neon:
Rhys Callahan & Sloane Mitchell. One room. Shared quarters. Cameras in all areas except bathroom.
The contestants reacted — murmurs, exchanged glances, someone muttering “ratings gold” — but I was doing mental math with all the accuracy and none of the calm I brought to professional calculations.
Twenty-four hours. One room. Shared quarters.
With a woman who’d held my face last night while I asked her to call me a good boy.
With cameras recording every breath, every glance, every moment that my body decided to broadcast what my mouth was trained to deny.
Sloane’s hand had dropped when Tessa appeared, but I could still feel it — a thermal imprint — five phantom points of pressure that my skin was refusing to let go of.
She stood beside me reading the monitor with the composed expression of a veteran reality television producer who was not going to let a room assignment undo her professionally, but I was near enough to notice the pulse in her throat.
It was faster than her face suggested. By a lot.
I’d spent the last hour telling strangers about the worst day of my childhood. I’d cracked open a lifetime of silence and let it pour through a microphone into the permanent record.
That had been the easy part.
Because tomorrow I was sharing a room with Sloane, and the distance between our bodies would be measured in inches instead of camera angles, and the truth I’d told today about my father and my dog and my boarded-up windows was nothing.
Nothing — compared to the truth my body was going to tell all night long while she slept near enough to count her breaths.
I’d survived the confession. I was about to discover that proximity was the real test.