Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Alycia
It’s been a few weeks, but the building still feels like it remembers the moment everything cracked.
The charity skate is long over, yet the fallout refuses to die down.
My desk is a graveyard of empty cups, scribbled notes, and printouts of articles that picked apart the charity event like it was game tape instead of a night I’m still trying to crawl out of.
I’ve read every headline three times: speculation spun into story, footage looped and slowed and screenshot.
Everyone has an opinion about the way we smiled, the way we stood, the way he walked away.
I keep telling myself it’s only optics, something I can counter with carefully crafted copy and distraction campaigns.
That if I just keep rearranging narratives like puzzle pieces, I can hold the whole thing together long enough for the world to lose interest. I try to believe it.
I try to sink into the comfort of strategy and structure and clean, controllable lines because that’s the only place where things make sense.
In the neat, curated world of PR, feelings are optional. Mess is optional. Pain is optional.
But I’m not in that world tonight. Tonight, every headline hits like a bruise I can’t protect, every comment feels like someone pressing a thumb into a wound I didn’t realize was still open, and every paused video frame is another reminder that I’m losing the illusion faster than I can rebuild it.
I keep refreshing feeds even though I already know what’s there.
I draft statements I’ll never send, trying to find a version of the truth that doesn’t feel like a betrayal to either of us.
I hate that it matters this much. It shouldn’t.
This should be easy. Something I can box up and slide onto a back shelf in the part of my brain that knows how to compartmentalize.
But the more I fight it, the more it spills out in ways I can’t contain.
There’s a pressure building beneath my ribs, something hot and frustrated and aching, and every time I blink, I see the moment he turned from me on the ice.
The way I felt before I understood it, and the silence that followed.
I tell myself I’m only upset because the narrative is slipping, and I don’t want to lose control. I remind myself that this is what I’m good at—holding the line, shaping perception, keeping my heart out of reach—but none of it is working.
The longer I sit here, the more the truth pushes up through the cracks I’ve been pretending aren’t there.
It’s not the press that’s getting to me or the speculation.
It’s him. It’s the way I keep leaning forward at the faintest sound in the hallway, ridiculously hoping that maybe he’ll be there.
I replay every conversation, every moment we might have done differently, trying to figure out where this all broke, even though I already know.
My eyes burn from staring at my screen too long, from watching and rewatching the same thirty-second clip until I can feel the energy in his shoulders just before he cuts away. That moment when the press smile cracks and the hurt slips through.
I did that.
My fingers hover over the trackpad, then I finally force myself to close the window before I spiral again. My reflection flickers faintly on the dark screen, skin dull under fluorescent light, lipstick smudged, hair frizzing out of its twist. I look like I’ve been holding my breath for days.
Maybe I have.
I gather my things with movements that feel clumsy in the quiet.
Phone. Badge. Keys. The familiar weight of my bag on my shoulder.
Every part of the routine is muscle memory, comfort in the repetition.
I pull the office door closed behind me and stand for a moment in the empty hallway, letting the hush sink in.
I haven’t seen Kyle in person since that day at the rink.
Not up close, anyway. I’ve seen him on screens, in photos, in video sessions where I pretended my pulse didn’t spike every time someone hit play.
I’ve heard his name in meetings, listened to people talk about him like a brand I’m responsible for, a problem to manage, a narrative to redirect.
He hasn’t come by my office, and I haven’t sought him out. We’re orbiting each other as if something went wrong with gravity, and neither of us trusts what will happen if we get close enough to collide again.
I head toward the elevators, the ache under my ribs settling into a familiar, unwelcome weight.
I could take the stairs, adding an extra few minutes of purposeless movement between here and my car.
But my heels already dig at the backs of my ankles, and my brain is too fried to pretend this is about anything other than wanting the fastest route out of the building.
I press the call button and watch it glow orange beneath my thumb.
A soft mechanical hum stirs above as the car moves.
My mind can’t help but drift to the first time Kyle and I met in the elevator.
How he’d stepped in like a spark dropped into dry kindling, all confidence and heat, with a grin that made the air feel too thin.
I’d pretended he was nothing but a cocky rookie with a pleasant smile and worse lines, but something in me had reacted before I could build a wall around it.
A pull I didn’t want. A curiosity I had no business feeling.
A shiver of awareness I tried to bury under irritation and professionalism, but he’d seen me in a way no one had in years, and it rattled something loose inside me that night, something I’ve been trying to hold steady ever since.
I’d been so careful not to let that show.
Now I’m not sure how much I’m hiding and how much I’ve already dropped on the ground between us like broken glass.
The light above the elevator ticks down a floor before the doors slide open with a tired little sigh of hydraulics.
Kyle stands at the back of the car like a ghost I haven’t earned the right to see again.
His shoulders sag against the mirrored wall, the set of his spine exhausted in a way he can’t disguise.
His hands are shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, knuckles tense, jaw locked tight, as if the muscle there has forgotten how to unclench.
The shadows beneath his eyes are darker than I remember, and the sight of him hits me square in the chest, sharp enough to steal breath.
After all this time, it shouldn’t still be an ache I’ve been trying to pretend isn’t hollowing me out.
For one wild, cowardly second, I think about stepping back and letting the doors close.
I can easily spin around and take the stairs, pretending I’m someone who can walk away cleanly instead of someone who doesn’t trust her own heartbeat around him.
My feet hurt, sure, but they hurt less than the idea of being trapped with him in eight square feet of recycled air where every unspoken thing between us will have nowhere to hide.
His gaze flicks up, and I see a flicker of surprise carving the smallest widening at the edges of his eyes before he schools it away. But I see it, and something in my chest twists hard, because he looks just as unprepared for this moment as I am.
The doors drift shut, and my hand moves before my fear can make the choice for me.
Instinct, longing, stupidity—whatever it is, it pushes me forward.
I cross the threshold, and the doors whisper closed behind me with a soft, decisive click that feels nothing like machinery and everything like inevitability.
The elevator is smaller than I remember, or maybe it’s just that the air feels crowded by everything we haven’t said.
I press the button for the parking level, and the car gives a faint lurch as it begins its descent.
A slow slide downward that feels dangerously out of sync with the way my pulse climbs, sharp and staggering, beneath my skin.
We stand side by side yet not quite aligned, my shoulder angled ever so slightly away, his weight pressed back into the wall like he’s trying to keep a measured distance. Our reflections peer back at us from the mirrored panel, double versions of our stiffness and strain.
He fixes his gaze on the floor, his relaxed posture replaced with layers of hurt that don’t fade, no matter how many hours of sleep or pretending you stack on top of it.
He’s still carrying the wound I gave him.
I grip the strap of my bag a little harder, trying to anchor myself, because seeing him like this makes something inside me tilt dangerously. For long seconds, neither of us speaks.
I try to steady myself with logic—the thing I always reach for when emotion threatens to swallow me—but logic has nothing to offer right now.
Not with his presence pulling every raw, unguarded part of me to the surface.
The moment he lifts his eyes, the world narrows to the space between us.
His expression is guarded at first glance, but there’s something beneath it that looks like he’s been trying not to break in front of anyone.
It looks like he’s exhausted from holding himself together.
His voice, when it comes, is rough around the edges. “I guess avoiding me was easier when I wasn’t standing two feet from you.”
The words slice clean through whatever flimsy composure I thought I had left. They aren’t cruel, but they’re honest, and honesty from him has always been the thing that unsettles me most.
I swallow, throat tight, and manage, “I wasn’t avoiding you.”
“We haven’t spoken in weeks.” His gaze drifts over my face, painfully unconvinced. “That feels like avoidance.”
“You didn’t reach out either.”
“I didn’t want to make things harder for you,” he says, the words slipping out before he can temper them. “I didn’t want to show up where I wasn’t wanted.”