20. February 19, Saturday
Chapter twenty
Ilya
The weight room hummed around Ilya in its usual early-afternoon rhythm—bars clanking into racks, the muted thud of medicine balls against rubber, the occasional bark of a trainer.
He lay back on a bench, hands wrapping the bar, and pressed it up and down like his body had piloted through this exact set a thousand times.
Because it had.
Muscles fired when he told them to. Bar up, bar down. Breathe in, breathe out. Someone dropped a dumbbell two stations over, but he barely registered it. Heard the distant echo of laughter outside the gym. None of it felt real.
What did feel real was the phantom heat of Zoey’s mouth under his.
His hands tightened around the bar. On the next rep, the metal wobbled, one end dipping. He corrected instinctively and finished the set, re-racking with a hollow clang.
He stared up at the ceiling, chest rising and falling a little too fast for the amount of weight he’d just moved. The fluorescent strip above him blurred for a second, then snapped back into focus.
He’d actually kissed her.
Not almost. Not a shared breath on a terrace with his heart in his throat and her nose brushing his. Not something he could file away as bad lighting and imagination.
He’d leaned in. Deliberate. Measured. He’d said fuck it and actually pressed his mouth to Zoey Williams’s, and she’d kissed him back, fingers curling in his hoodie, making that tiny, broken sound when he pulled her closer.
Jason’s voice from last night chose that moment to flash across his mind like a neon sign. You’re out there drooling over your best friend’s ex.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, the rasp of his stubble grounding. The kiss replayed anyway in clean, cruel detail. The way she’d wet her lips and swayed into him like it was the most natural thing in the world.
He’d spent years telling himself that if anything ever did happen, it would shatter everything. Now that it had, the world stubbornly refused to explode.
Everything and everyone around him kept moving.
He sat up slowly. The floor rolled for a second, then leveled.
This wasn’t the plan. If you could call Bobby’s bullshit pep talk a plan, but it had been simple.
If Zoey acted like she wanted some flirting, then flirt back, carefully.
Remind Zoey that she was still…her. Gorgeous, funny, wanted.
Give her some low-stakes attention from someone she trusted after years of being background décor in Mitch’s life.
Bobby’s logic had been obnoxiously sound: flirting as care. As medicine, almost. Nothing physical. Nothing that would light up Mitch’s radar from three time zones away.
Instead, Ilya backed her against her car and kissed her like he hadn’t spent a decade convincing himself he was fine without it.
He pushed to his feet and grabbed his water bottle. The plastic crackled under his grip.
The whole thing had been a perfect storm; adrenaline from the clinic, the hopelessness when they didn’t find Fido, the way she’d rubbed the grease off his face, and the way she told him he’d be a good dad, like she believed it with every fiber of her being.
Just the memory of her body pushed tight against his had his pulse spiking but he fought it back. It was simple hormones. A long drought. Two red-blooded people who both had too long between sexual partners.
He took a long pull from the bottle and set it down harder than necessary.
He could call the kiss a one-off. A moment. A mistake.
If he decided it didn’t mean anything going forward—if he built a little wall around it, slapped on a date and time, and pretended it was just a blip—maybe he could shrink it back down. Manage it. That was where he excelled.
He managed things—minutes, egos, games. Feelings. Especially his own.
The trouble was, every time he tried to mentally shove the kiss into a box marked contained, his brain rejected the label. Because it had not felt containable.
He grabbed his towel and headed for the hallway, muscles loose and useless from a workout he couldn’t remember. Workout on autopilot. Voices swelled as he neared the locker room; Tommy laughing at something Ian said, Ty teasing Christian about getting dangled by a six-year-old at the clinic.
Just another day.
He stepped into the locker room and the hum shifted around him, a dozen conversations bending, briefly, toward the captain. It always happened. It still unsettled him.
He nodded, answered a couple of chirps, then dropped onto the bench in front of his stall. Gear hung from hooks above his head, familiar sounds and smells; sweat, rubber, a hint of that disinfectant the trainers pretended didn’t smell like death.
His phone buzzed against the wood. Without thinking, he picked it up.
Zoey’s name lit the screen.
Zoey: Still grinning like an idiot. Hope you’re okay after rescuing a damsel and not a semi-feral dog. Talk later? You can tell me more about how exquisite I am.
His mouth pulled into a smile before he could stop it. Chest went weirdly light. She was okay. She was…happy. That counted for something.
He thumbed the reply window open. The first words that came wanted to be something teasing and flirty:
Can’t stop thinking about you. About how that dress looked pressed up against my car. About the way you…
He deleted it and stared at the blinking cursor. Typed, erased, typed again.
How were you supposed to text your best friend’s ex-wife after kissing her in a parking garage and telling her she was exquisite?
He locked his phone and dropped it on the shelf like it burned him.
Wait. He just needed to wait. Give his brain time to come up with the right sentence. Something that acknowledged the moment without…flooding them both.
Something casual. Controlled. That was the word. Controlled.
If he answered now, he’d say too much.
And if there was one thing he couldn’t afford, it was too much.
He forced his shoulders to relax, peeled off his T-shirt, and started pulling on his compression gear. Around him, the buzz of the room swelled and receded; guys swapping updates, trainers moving through with tape and questions.
He latched onto the noise like it could drown out the memory of her fingers in his hair.
You almost had it, he told himself. The balance. Tease a little, hold back a lot. Flirt enough that she felt seen, not so much that it turned into something you couldn’t walk away from.
But then she’d licked her lips like she felt exactly the same way he did.
And he’d proven, conclusively, that his self-control had limits.
“Everything okay over there?” Bobby asked mildly from the next stall, not looking up from taping his stick.
“Fine,” Ilya said, because that was the script.
“Sure.” Bobby’s tone made it clear he didn’t buy it, but he didn’t push.
Ilya didn’t deserve the reprieve.
He bent to lace his skates, fingers finding the familiar rhythm: cross, pull, tighten. The motion steadied him a little.
Pulling back wasn’t cowardice. It was necessary. For her.
If this thing—their thing—slid into something real, it had consequences for Zoey, not just him.
Her foster process wasn’t some abstract long-term dream anymore.
Ilya had no idea how close she was to being placed with a kid, but he knew she wasn’t letting moss grow on her rolling stone.
He’d heard her talk about dates, the classes, the jargon.
She had her home visit, background checks, the works.
She was on the track now. Maybe she’d start getting overnight placements within a year.
If some caseworker decided she was impulsive or entangled in a messy thing with a player, with headlines attached?
That could be enough to nudge her file into the “maybe later” pile.
Systems like that were unforgiving; he knew from group home visits how tightly they policed even simple things like photos.
Foster kids weren’t supposed to get their faces on socials, PR drilled that into them weekly.
That was all theoretical because it would have to be in a magical world where Mitch wasn’t still clearly in love with his ex-wife. If the late-night texts and sad memes from Mitch were any indication, then clearly his friend was regretting his divorce, still loved Zoey, and was pining for her.
Guess what, bro? Join the fucking club.
He’d tied the laces too loosely on his left skate and had to undo the knot so he could pull the waxed laces tighter.
If management decided she was a distraction, they could make her life at work much harder. Subtle at first. Fewer assignments, colder praise. Maybe a budget cut that just happened to affect her programs more than anyone else’s. Or maybe they’d fire her completely.
She just clawed her way out of being “Mitch Collins’s wife” in the public eye. If people saw her with him now, it wouldn’t be a clean narrative. It would be a joke. A headline. A social media hashtag.
His stomach churned.
He couldn’t be the reason anyone looked twice at her file. He couldn’t be the reason Nina sighed and said, “Optics, Sergechev,” and used Zoey’s name in a sentence with risk.
He could handle getting burned. He’d been handling it most of his life.
Her? She deserved a clean slate.
The more he thought about it, the more it felt less like running and more like a choice.
If he stepped back now—softened the edges, made sure everything between them stayed technically deniable—he could keep her future intact. Her job, the kids she could help, her peace.
He could be the wall that took the hit.
He exhaled sharply through his nose. Fine. That was the line, then. He’d draw it and hold it. For her.
He would smile; he would tease; he would be available, but he would keep his hands to himself.
Behind him, a familiar voice cut through the din. “You gonna scowl that thing into behaving, or just crush it with your mind?”
Ilya blinked, not even realizing his gaze had drifted back to the shelf where his phone sat.
Tommy dropped onto the bench next to him, already in half his gear, his wild hair pulled into a messy knot at the base of his skull. His eyes tracked from the phone to Ilya’s face.