18. Jamie #3
“I actually thought about asking if you two wanted to come,” he says instead, his eyes drifting toward the trailer door. “Then I remembered there’s only one place he’d rather be tonight.”
I smile, because Cyaire is coming home with me. I don’t want to share him with anyone else tonight.
Before I can answer, the trailer door swings open.
Blue steps outside, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, the long day visible in the fatigue softening his features. The second he spots me, a smile spreads across his face. “There you are.”
“Here I am,” I say closing the distance between us, and he doesn’t hesitate. He leans in and steals a quick kiss, soft and unhurried, familiar in the way that still catches me off guard every time because I haven’t fully gotten used to something this easy being mine.
Behind us, Cameron lets out an exaggerated groan that echoes off the corridor walls.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” He pinches the bridge of his nose with the expression of a man who has been dealing with this for longer than he signed up for. “You two really are incapable of keeping your hands off each other, aren’t you?”
Blue grins without a single trace of shame. “I thought that’s what a bodyguard was for. You know, protecting me while I romance my man.”
“I signed up to dodge paparazzi,” Cameron shoots back, already pushing off the trailer wall. “Nobody mentioned I’d be third-wheeling a rom-com for the foreseeable future.”
I laugh, shaking my head, as Blue slips his hand into mine.
“Come on,” Cameron says, already heading toward the exit with the long-suffering efficiency of a man who has made his peace with his situation. “Let’s get you lovebirds home.”
The service corridor is almost unnervingly quiet after the constant motion inside the arena, the noise of twelve hours of filming and several hundred extras reduced to the distant sound of equipment being broken down and loaded out.
Crew members drift off in every direction, already deep in conversations about tomorrow’s call sheet, their radios crackling with end-of-day updates.
Cameron leads us toward the players’ exit without breaking stride, and for a moment it’s almost peaceful back here, the three of us moving through the low hum of a long day winding down.
The second the security doors swing open, everything changes.
Flashes explode from behind the barricades, bright enough to make me blink against the sudden white, my eyes adjusting too slowly as photographers lean over one another, cameras firing in rapid succession, the sound of shutters overlapping into something close to continuous.
“They’re coming out!” someone shouts.
“Cyaire!”
“Jamie!”
Questions fly from every direction at once, voices cutting across each other, everyone trying to land theirs first.
“How did filming go?”
“When does the movie come out?”
“Cyaire, over here!”
Cameron never breaks stride, guiding us toward my SUV while security holds the photographers firmly behind the barriers.
Blue’s fingers tighten around mine as we walk, and I give his hand a quiet squeeze back. We’re maybe ten feet from the car when it comes, cutting clean through the rest of the noise.
“Jamie! Are you and Cyaire together?”
Everything around me seems to slow down slightly, as everyone waits for us to either ignore them or give them something to talk about.
I turn toward Blue, finding him already looking at me. We don’t exchange a single word, because we don’t need to. There’s nothing to decide. He simply lifts our joined hands between us and presses a slow, deliberate kiss against the back of mine, his eyes still on my face while he does it.
The reaction is immediate and absolute.
Camera shutters erupt into another frenzy, reporters shout over one another, everyone desperate to be heard.
Their words dissolve into meaningless noise somewhere beneath the sound of my own heartbeat, steady and loud in my ears.
All I can feel are Blue’s lips against my skin, the warmth of his fingers laced through mine, and the particular, uncomplicated certainty that neither of us is hiding anymore.
That whatever comes next, we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
Cameron opens the passenger door with timing that suggests he’s been anticipating this moment and has decided the best response is logistical.
“Well,” he says dryly, his voice carrying the exact flatness of a man who has accepted the inevitable, “I think tomorrow’s headlines just wrote themselves.”
Blue laughs as he slides into the seat, “I’d say so.”
I climb in after him and the door swings shut, cutting off the flashes and the shouting almost instantly. The noise outside is still there, muffled through the glass, but it feels distant now, belonging to some other world that we’ve temporarily stepped out of.
Cyaire reaches across the center console, his fingers finding mine again, and brings my hand to his lips for another soft kiss, unhurried this time, with nobody watching and nothing to prove.
“Home?” he asks quietly, his voice lower without the crowd around it.
I smile, squeezing his hand. “Home.”