Misattribution of Intent #3
Silence stretched for a second too long. Across from her, Dee didn’t move, but Riley could feel the shift in her attention, the quiet expectation. Waiting, watching to see what Riley would do with it.
Riley looked down at the wool in her hands, at the knots she had already loosened and the ones still too tight to pull without care.
She couldn’t tell if he was being serious, but his tone had changed.
It had dropped, lost the lightness she had come to associate with him.
It was steadier now, more deliberate. She could almost picture it, his brows drawn slightly together, attention fully engaged in a way she hadn’t actually seen from him before.
It didn’t align with anything she had observed, which made it all the harder to dismiss.
“You were introducing additional variables,” she said finally. “Unnecessarily.”
A quiet huff of breath came through the phone. Amusement, unsubtle but softer than before. “Alright,” he said. “That might be fair.”
“Might be?”
He let out a low chuckle. “I was seeing how you’d respond, Riles.”
The words struck clean, too clean. Riley’s fingers stilled completely.
“If you were wanting to test a hypothesis about me, that was not an appropriate method of assessment.”
“No,” he said, and this time there was no easy agreement in it, just a quiet exhale, like he already knew that. “Yeah. I know.”
A brief pause followed, but it didn’t feel controlled. It felt like he was thinking in real time.
“I just—” he started, then stopped, like he was trying to find a version of this that didn’t make him sound like a complete idiot. “You’re so locked into structure all the time, and I wanted to see what happened when it wasn’t there.”
Riley’s grip tightened slightly around the phone. “You interfered with the conditions to the point of dysfunction,” she said. “That invalidates any outcome.”
“I didn’t think it would break like that,” he said, quicker now. “I thought you’d push through it. Or adjust. Or—” He exhaled again, sharper this time. “I don’t know. I misread it.”
Riley’s expression didn’t change, but something in her posture jolted. “That was an assumption,” she said. “Not an assessment.”
“Yeah,” he said again, softer now. “I know that. I saw you getting overwhelmed,” he added, more quietly. “I just didn’t realise how bad it was. I thought you were just getting frustrated with me, which I must admit was my intention.”
Riley’s eyes widened in disbelief. “I indicated to you that the environment was not manageable,” she said.
“You did,” he said immediately. At least he wasn’t being defensive. “You did. I just didn’t…” Another pause, heavier this time. “I didn’t listen properly.”
She was surprised that for once, she agreed with him. Riley didn’t respond.
“I should’ve stopped,” he went on, voice lower now, the edges of it losing that usual ease. “Or changed something. All I know is that I shouldn’t have kept pushing like that.”
A small breath came through the line. “And I shouldn’t have made it about you not handling it,” he added. “That was—” He cut himself off, then corrected, more firmly. “That was on me.”
Silence stretched, but it didn’t feel tense in the same way. It felt like new territory for them.
Then, quieter, no humour, no deflection. “I’m sorry, Riley.”
The apology hung between them without Declan’s accustomed padding of bickering. Riley blinked at how direct it had been. For a moment, she didn’t respond, because getting an apology of any type was so unfamiliar.
Her grip on the phone loosened slightly as her attention shifted inward, trying to place the interaction somewhere within her existing framework. Usually, in Riley’s experience, she was the one required to apologise.
She missed things, misjudged thresholds.
Overstepped without realising it until it had already happened.
And when it did, Dee would step in quietly to guide her back, help her reconstruct what had gone wrong so that she could correct it.
It was a pattern she had come to recognise, even rely on, despite the discomfort that came with it.
But this, someone else identifying the fault? Someone else naming it, and apologising without being prompted?
It didn’t fit.
She glanced up briefly, meeting Dee’s gaze. Dee didn’t say anything, but her expression softened, something quieter and more knowing settling there, like she understood exactly what Riley was processing.
Riley looked back down. “You do not typically apologise,” she said finally, the observation slipping out before she could filter it.
There was the faintest pause on the other end. “…I do,” he said. “Just not when I think I’m right.”
Riley’s resisted the urge to roll her eyes, her fingers tightening once again. “And you think you were wrong?”
Another pause sounded over the line. “Yeah,” he said. “On that? Yeah.”
Riley exhaled slowly, the breath more controlled than before, though her thoughts still hadn’t fully settled.
“I hope you’re aware that this means I won’t do it again.” The certainty in his tone disrupted her processing more than the apology had. Riley frowned slightly, her thoughts catching, attempting to reorder around the change of attitude.
“You cannot guarantee that without defined parameters,” she said.
“Then define them for me.” Riley looked up without meaning to, her gaze landing on Dee, who was still watching her with that same quiet, expectant look. Something in Riley’s posture shifted.
“You don’t get to just—” she stopped, processing her thoughts mid-sentence, before realising what she was doing and pulling the words back into something more thoughtful. “This is not how a formal agreement operates.”
“Then make it one,” Declan said. There was no hesitation this time, no humour. “Set the rules and I promise you I’ll follow them,” he added as an aside. “I’m good at doing what I’m told.”
Across the counter, Dee went very still for half a second before lifting her hand and fanning herself slowly, like the air suddenly shifted temperature.
Riley’s gaze flicked toward the open window.
There was a brief pause as she registered the airflow: cool and unchanged.
She couldn’t identify any environmental shift that would warrant Dee’s reaction.
She lowered her gaze again, attention sharpening almost instantly as her thoughts shifted back into analysis. Across from her, Dee let out a quiet breath that sounded suspiciously like a suppressed laugh.
Riley didn’t look up. She could feel Declan’s attention through the phone now, not diffuse like it had been earlier, focused. Waiting. She adjusted one knot, then another, more deliberately this time, before speaking again.
“I cannot return to that environment,” she said. She inhaled deeply, before continuing. “The current gym layout introduces too many uncontrolled variables. It is not adaptable to the level of consistency required for my experiment.”
There was a pause on the other end as Declan considered the request. “Alright,” he said. Riley noticed her legs, which had been bouncing up and down seemingly without her awareness had suddenly stilled.