15. Cyaire #4
“You’ve gone quiet,” he says, breaking the silence between us.
I lean my head against the cool glass of the window, watching the Seattle skyline slide past outside, the lights smearing soft and watercolor against the dark. “Yeah.”
“You okay?” His hand finds my thigh, giving it a quick, grounding squeeze, and the touch pulls my attention back from the glass, back into the car, back into the present moment with him.
I think about lying. About telling him I’m tired, or that I’ve simply had a long day, because saying either of those things would be so much easier than admitting what’s really sitting in my chest right now.
The truth is messier. Somewhere between the fireworks and Jamie’s mother holding my face in her hands, I stopped thinking about this as a bubble we could keep living inside indefinitely.
I started thinking about what happens when it finally bursts, and whether what we’ve found between us is strong enough to survive everything waiting outside of it.
“I don’t want to lose this,” I confess, finally stopping myself from protecting both of us from the conversation we’ve been avoiding.
Jamie’s hand tightens almost imperceptibly on the steering wheel, but he doesn’t fill the space I’ve opened up. He only chances a quick glance across at me, his eyes carrying the full weight of his concern, before his attention returns to the road ahead.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, Jamie.
” I let out a slow breath, watching the lights continue to dissolve against the glass.
“Neither of us can just walk away from our careers. You’re heading into training camp, and by the time summer is over I’ll probably be halfway across the world filming again.
We haven’t talked about any of it, because pretending it didn’t exist was easier than facing it head on. ”
A short, humorless laugh escapes me.
“Social media has apparently decided we’re together before we’ve defined what this is ourselves.”
Silence fills the car while I search for the right words to explain what I’m feeling.
“We’ve been living inside this little bubble,” I continue, keeping my voice low, almost like I’m afraid of disturbing something fragile.
“I think I’ve been terrified of bursting it, because the moment we do, we have to face reality.
All of it. Schedules and distance and cameras and everything else that comes with both of our lives. ”
Jamie’s hand lifts briefly from the steering wheel before settling over mine across the center console, his fingers threading through mine in the same unhurried, natural way they always do, like they’ve always belonged exactly there.
“I don’t have the answers either,” he finally says, the words quiet and honest and entirely like him. His thumb moves in a slow, steady arc across the back of my hand. “I just know I don’t want to lose you again.”
The emotion catches in my throat before I’m ready for it, sudden and sharp.
The need to cry, for the second time tonight, presses hard behind my eyes and I don’t bother fighting it the way I might have once.
I’m not someone afraid of his own feelings.
I don’t want to hide any of this from Jamie.
I want him to understand exactly what is at stake for me, how much weight this moment carries.
He’s not a summer distraction dressed up in good light and social media speculation.
He’s not a rumor or a headline or something casual that I can let go of cleanly when September comes.
He is so much more than any of that, and I need him to know it.
“So, what do we do?” I manage, wiping a stray tear from my cheek with my free hand.
Jamie doesn’t answer immediately. The silence inside the truck stretches long and considered, filled only with the steady hum of tires rolling against warm asphalt and the low, half-forgotten music still drifting quietly through the speakers.
Finally, he speaks. “We stop pretending this conversation can wait.”
I stare down at our joined hands, squeezing tight, like I can anchor myself to him and let everything else fall away.
“And then?”
A small smile pulls at the corner of his mouth, visible even in profile, though his eyes stay fixed ahead on the road.
“We figure it out.”
“How?” I press, needing more than that, needing something I can hold onto.
“One conversation at a time.”
I let those words move through me slowly until the knot beneath my ribs begins to ease.
Maybe there is no clean answer waiting at the end of all this.
Maybe there never will be, but maybe the answer was never supposed to be clean.
Maybe it was only ever supposed to be honest, and willing, and chosen over and over again by two people who refuse to pretend it isn’t worth the effort.
I lift Jamie’s hand and press my lips against his knuckles, letting them linger there longer than I need to.
“We’ll figure it out.”
When he smiles this time, it reaches all the way to his eyes.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “We will.”