Chapter 11
Under the Spotlight
Riley
Gossip moves like a weather system in the tunnel—low pressure, rising heat, a front of whispers sweeping ahead of me in hissed syllables that tangle in the cinderblock.
Camera lenses hang off necks like extra eyes.
I keep my head down and do math: four steps inhale, six steps exhale.
Four—six. Four—six. If I count I don’t look up, and if I don’t look up maybe I’m invisible.
The concrete smells like wet rubber and victory dried into fabric. A boom mic ghosts over my shoulder and then aborts when I angle my clipboard to make myself boring. Be a hallway. Be a door. Be anything but a story.
“Riley! Over here—Riley!” a voice singsongs from the mouth of the tunnel where security has set up a human dam.
I don’t turn. I catalog instead: left hand tight on the clipboard (white knuckles—loosen), shoulders down (don’t square, it looks combative), chin neutral (not defiant, not ashamed).
I’m a trainer walking to the room. That’s all.
A cluster of players barrels past, damp and loud and oblivious in the way only men covered in ice shavings can be.
One of them notices me and softens the shoulder he’s about to slam into me with, which is generosity on a good day and grace on a bad one.
“’Scuse me, Lane,” he mutters. The courtesy steadies me more than I want it to.
The rumors ride the air anyway. “—bench photo—” “—compliance—” “—ship name—” Ship name. I would laugh if my lungs weren’t busy pretending to be normal.
Four—six. Four—six. I pass the media scrum and feel their attention like a sunburn. A lens tips, recalculates: no badge lanyard? no comment. Good. Let them eat someone else’s moment.
My phone pings in my pocket, a little electric bite through the fabric.
PR. I don’t look yet; I will not give a camera the satisfaction of catching me mid-flinch.
I keep moving, sneakers squeaking at a seam in the floor where one expansion joint meets another.
I catalog the squeak and not the way my heart climbs my throat because the next forty feet of tunnel is a documented “camera zone,” and the feeds love nothing more than b-roll of staff in flight.
A reporter steps out with a smile like a hook. “Riley, quick one—”
Before she finishes, Sophie appears at my flank like she’s been launched.
She hip-checks the mic holder back a clean step, smiling sweetly enough to rot teeth.
“Medical staff don’t comment during active recovery,” she chirps, which is departmental policy and also code for back off before I staple your lanyard to your blouse.
The mic hovers, then retreats. Gratitude flashes hot behind my sternum, so fast it turns into guilt before it finishes forming. I keep lying to my best friend by omission; she keeps building me walls anyway.
“Left,” Sophie murmurs, steering me around a camera tripod I didn’t clock. Her hand is firm at my elbow, then gone. We move like a practiced drill: she takes the impact, I take the opening. The tunnel widens; the noise doesn’t.
My phone pings again. I risk a glance. PR: No contact with Maddox on premises. The words glare up at me like hazard tape. Four—six. I lock the screen and slide the phone away. The directive lives in my bones and I still feel the pull like gravity in the wrong direction.
At the end of the tunnel, night presses against the glass door in a sheet of black-blue.
I push into it and the cold finds my damp collarbones fast, clean.
The air tastes like metal and city. I breathe for real for the first time in hours and try not to think about the bench two lights down and the shadow of a man I know sitting there with his shoulders bowed.
Cold slaps the sweat right off my skin. The door sighs shut behind me and turns the tunnel noise into aquarium hum. Out here the parking lot lights buzz like tired bees. A streetlight two benches down flickers, steadies, hums—a halo with stage fright.
He’s exactly where I knew he’d be: hood up, elbows on knees, hands steepled over a mouth I’ve kissed and a jaw I’ve taped, shoulders bowed like he’s trying to keep the night from reading him.
Jason’s outline is physics I don’t have new math for.
My phone’s directive burns like a brand against my hip: No contact with Maddox on premises.
I exhale a fog I can count and imagine it’s enough distance to make this not a contact.
I hover at the edge of the glass awning and let the air tell me the truth: wind off the river, oil and snow in the same breath, the metallic bite of winter and the stale sweetness of a nearby vent.
Somewhere a siren dopplers and fades. My heartbeat tries to race it; I throttle it back to four-six.
He doesn’t look up, but I see the shift—the tiniest tilt of his head like he can feel the shape of me in the cold. The awareness pulls a thread I should cut. I follow it anyway.
Rule one of optics: do not create new angles. Rule two: if you’re going to break rule one, own the angle. I walk the twenty feet like I mean to, not like I’m sneaking. Each step is a decision. Each breath is a memo to my future self: You chose this.
I sit.
The bench is iron under the thin cushion, cold leaching through cheap vinyl.
We leave a precise inch of space like it’s measured.
Warmth finds the seam where our thighs almost meet, a heat that travels faster than reason.
I fold my hands over my clipboard to keep from fidgeting and pretend the tremor I feel is the wind and not the gravity of his body pulling every needle in me to point toward Jason.
Silence is a living thing between us. It’s not empty; it’s full of last night and the hallway and all the things I won’t let myself replay frame by frame.
I listen instead: the neon hum, the far-off clatter of a rolling cart, the soft drag of his breath when the cold bites his throat.
His gloves sit on the bench between us like a truce.
I could slide one closer and call it an accident. I don’t.
My phone vibrates once. I fish it out, thumb ready to obey.
Another PR ping stacks over the first: Reminder: Avoid areas where players congregate.
An animated dot pulses like judgment. I lock the screen without answering and tuck the phone under my thigh like it needs warming.
I look at my hands and count the crescent moons my nails pressed into my palm and think: I am allowed to be a person who cares.
I am also a professional who is very bad at pretending those aren’t the same thing.
He shifts, not much, but enough that the inch between us becomes a half.
Heat spills into that new geography. I can feel the outline of his thigh through denim and the memory of muscle under my hands from every time I’ve told him to breathe through a stretch and he’s listened.
I stare straight ahead at the cone of light on the asphalt and let my peripheral vision admit what my mouth can’t.
I break the silence first because somebody has to. “Five minutes,” I say, soft, like I’m scheduling an ice bath. “Then we both go inside and pretend we remembered how policies work.”
The corner of his mouth tips under the hood, not a smile, exactly—recognition. Of me. Of the line I drew and the step I took anyway. He nods once, and even that small motion sends a ridiculous relief through me that has nothing to do with medicine.
My knee knocks the bench leg. The clang is small but rude, and it startles a laugh out of me that feels like it escaped.
It turns into a breath that fogs and dissolves, and I let myself have one inch of happiness that no camera can caption: sitting beside the exact problem I keep choosing, in the cold, on purpose.
Jason’s hood angles toward me, then down, like he’s deciding which part of himself to show. When he speaks, the sound is rough enough to snag. “Don’t go.”
Two words. They find the soft place under my ribs I keep pretending is armor.
“I gave us five,” I say, keeping my eyes on the cone of light on the asphalt like it’s a compass rose. “Four now.” I hear the trainer in my voice, calm and measured. I also hear the woman who stopped counting when his mouth found mine in a hallway.
His hands slide off each other and drop to his knees. The movement sends a ripple through the bench I feel in my teeth. He doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t need to. The gravity between us does the work it always does, tugging at every loose thread I have.
“You shouldn’t be out here,” he says, as if saying it might make me safer by retroactive logic. “PR—”
“I know what PR says,” I cut in, softer than it reads. “I also know what my job requires. Sometimes those aren’t the same list.”
“You shouldn’t have to pay for me,” he says, and it’s almost a whisper. “Not again.”
The word again lights up every old scar. I inhale, count six, and let the air out slow so my voice doesn’t shake. “Then don’t make me the receipt.”
Silence again. The hum of the light above us is a thin thread. I wrap it around my finger in my head so I don’t wrap my actual fingers around his sleeve.
“I’m trying,” he says. “I’m trying to be boring for you.” It should be funny. It isn’t. It’s devastating in a way that has nothing to do with fireworks and everything to do with steady hands.
“I don’t need you to be for me,” I say, and mean it even as the lie nips at the edge. “I need you to be for you. And for the kid you were before anyone taught you to love being a headline.”
A huff that might be a laugh, might be a wound. He scrubs a palm over his jaw beneath the hood and the stubble rasp is so familiar my throat tightens. I stare at the pool of light and the moth dancing in it like the only witness who won’t talk.