Reoperationalisation
Riley
Riley did not like variables she could not quantify.
It wasn’t a rule she had consciously created.
It developed gradually, reinforced through repetition until it became instinctive.
Inputs produced outputs, patterns produced predictions.
If something could be observed closely enough, it could eventually be understood, and once it was understood, it became manageable.
The problem was that nothing about the last twelve hours felt manageable.
She stood alone in the kitchen, one hand resting lightly against the edge of the counter while an untouched coffee cooled beside her.
Morning light filtered through the apartment windows in pale, diffuse bands, illuminating a space that was otherwise unchanged.
Everything around her remained familiar and predictable.
The disruption existed entirely within her.
Her thoughts kept returning to the same moment. What happened with Declan didn’t fit into any framework she currently possessed. The sequence itself was simple enough to reconstruct. They finished training, she’d gone to leave, and then she stepped forward and kissed him.
The action itself wasn’t what troubled her, it was the absence of everything she expected to accompany it.
Long before the kiss, she had already reached a conclusion about Declan and deemed him to be safe. Allowing him to touch her was a calculated decision.
She expected discomfort. Not necessarily enough to stop the interaction, but enough that she would need to manage it.
That was always the assumption. That all physical contact would require preparation.
It always required the quiet, constant monitoring she spent years perfecting so that nobody else would notice the effort involved.
More importantly, she had expected the memories.
That was usually what happened. Touch never existed in isolation, it consistently brought with it the smell of alcohol, the scrape of rough stubble against her skin.
Physical proximity was always tangled up with those memories, woven so tightly into her nervous system that separating one from the other never seemed possible.
She assumed Declan would trigger the same response.
Not because he had done anything wrong. Quite the opposite, he was patient, careful, predictable in ways she valued enormously.
But none of that altered the underlying expectation.
Her reactions were never determined solely by the person standing in front of her.
They belonged to a much older system, one that operated according to rules established long before Declan Montgomery entered her life.
And yet when his hands settled against her waist, nothing happened.
The feeling of her father never appeared. The memory simply failed to surface.
Even now, standing in the kitchen and replaying the interaction for what was probably the hundredth time, Riley found herself returning to that point more than any other.
She could understand Declan’s behaviour.
She could understand her own decision-making process, at least partially.
What she could not understand was the absence.
Because the absence changed everything. Touch had never been neutral before, it had always required something from her.
But when she thought about Declan’s hands against her waist, or the way he had followed her lead rather than taking control of the interaction, the dominant feeling wasn’t discomfort.
It was relief. The thought settled heavily in her chest as she stared down at the counter-top.
By the time she had left his apartment, she had still been trying to understand it.
She waited for the delayed reaction she assumed would eventually arrive, convinced that the familiar discomfort was simply running behind schedule.
Instead, she found herself standing by the door, looking at him, increasingly aware that the expected response remained absent.
That was when she kissed him, not because she planned to. Not because she consciously decided it was something she wanted.
The truth was significantly less elegant: she had been confused. Confused enough that she needed confirmation.
If allowing him to touch her hadn’t triggered the response she had expected, then she needed to know whether that was an anomaly or whether the entire system had changed.
So she had stepped forward and closed the distance herself. Even now, remembering it caused her breathing to shift slightly.
Because she knew what she expected to happen next, she had expected the memories to return.
Instead, the opposite happened. For as long as she could remember, every pathway that led toward intimacy eventually intersected with her father.
Every understanding she possessed had been forced to navigate around that reality.
But when she tried to recall the kiss now, it was not her father’s mouth she remembered. It was Declan’s.
And for the first time in her life, she found herself wondering whether the assumptions she built around herself had never been immutable truths at all, but simply conclusions she reached with incomplete information.
“Okay.” Dee’s voice cut through Riley’s thoughts before they could disappear down another path entirely. “You’ve been standing there staring at the coffee machine for so long that I’m starting to think it offended you.”
Riley blinked and looked up. Dee was leaning against the doorway, already dressed for work, her attention fixed entirely on her. “What happened?”
Riley hesitated. There was no gradual way into this conversation, no version that felt less absurd simply because she delayed saying it. “I kissed Declan.”
For a moment, Dee just stared at her. “You... what?”
“I kissed Declan.”
“Voluntarily?”
“Yes.”
A disbelieving laugh escaped her. “Wow.”
She pushed herself away from the doorway and crossed the kitchen, stopping on the other side of the counter. The initial shock lingered on her face for another second before something more thoughtful settled in its place.
“Okay,” she said, drawing the word out slowly. “That is definitely not what I expected to hear this morning.”
Neither had Riley. The silence stretched briefly before Dee tilted her head. “How did it go?”
The question caught Riley off guard. Not what happened, not why. Just how did it go? She looked down at the counter, tracing the edge of it with her fingertips. “That is the issue.”
Immediately, Dee’s expression changed. “Ri.” Concern replaced curiosity so quickly it was almost visible. “What happened?”
Riley shook her head. “No, nothing like that.” The words were difficult to organise because she was still trying to understand them herself. “I expected the usual response.”
Understanding crossed Dee’s face almost instantly, wiping away whatever humour remained. “Oh.”
Riley nodded. Allowing Declan to touch her already felt unusual enough, but add on top the lack of reaction? This was new territory she really had no processing skills for. “He wasn’t there,” she said quietly.
Dee frowned. “Who?”
“My father.”
The room seemed to still around them. For a second, Dee simply looked at her. “What?”
Even now, she wasn’t entirely sure how to explain what that meant.
“Usually when someone gets too close, or when physical contact reaches a certain point, the association happens automatically.” Her fingers tightened slightly against the counter-top.
“I don’t choose it. It just... happens.” Except not this time.
“When he touched me, I kept waiting for it,” she admitted. “I expected it to happen eventually.”
“And it didn’t?”
Riley shook her head. “No.” The answer came immediately. “I was aware of him, I was aware of the contact, but I wasn’t thinking about anything else.”
Dee stared at her. “Ri...”
Riley looked away. “And then I kissed him.” This time Dee didn’t interrupt.
“I think I did it because I was confused,” Riley furrowed her brow.
“I thought maybe it would happen then. I thought maybe that level of proximity would trigger the response if the previous one hadn’t.
” She let out a slow breath. “But it didn’t. ”
The admission settled heavily between them. “When he kissed me back for the second before I pulled away, I wasn’t thinking about my father. I wasn’t thinking about anything that had happened before.” Her throat tightened unexpectedly. “I was only thinking about Declan.”
Neither of them spoke for several seconds. Eventually Dee dragged a hand through her hair and exhaled slowly. “Well.”
Riley looked up. “Well?”
“Well,” Dee repeated, sounding almost overwhelmed herself, “that feels like a pretty significant development.”
Riley couldn’t argue with that. The silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable, both of them seeming to sit with it, trying to understand what had actually changed. Eventually Dee looked at her again.
“What does that mean for you and Declan?”
The question landed somewhere Riley had been carefully avoiding all morning. She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
She didn’t understand was what any of it meant now. After several seconds, she met Dee’s gaze and answered with complete honesty. “I don’t know.” And somehow that uncertainty felt larger than everything else put together.
?
The door opened almost immediately. Declan looked mildly surprised to find her standing there. “Morning, Riles.”
“I would like to kiss you again.”
The words arrived so quickly that they seemed to bypass both of them. Declan blinked. For a moment he simply stared at her. Then he let out a short, disbelieving laugh and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck.
“Right,” he said. “Good morning to you, too.”
Riley frowned slightly. “I considered opening with a greeting first, but that would have delayed the transmission of the more relevant information.”
That only made him laugh again. “Of course it would.”
The amusement lingered for another second before his expression softened. By the look on his face, Riley guessed that he knew her well enough by now to recognise the difference between Riley being direct and Riley being nervous.
“What happened?” he asked quietly.
Riley looked down briefly before meeting his eyes again. “When you touched me yesterday, I expected to experience distress.”
The shift in him was immediate. The humour disappeared, replaced by the kind of careful attention he always gave her when something mattered. “Okay.”
“I expected the interaction to produce the same response physical contact usually produces.”
Declan remained silent, waiting. Riley took a breath. “Physical proximity generally reminds me of my father.” His jaw tightened. “I anticipated that outcome before I came to your house,” she continued. “I assumed it would occur eventually and accounted for it as part of the interaction.”
“And it didn’t?”
The question was quiet. Riley shook her head. “No.” The word felt heavier spoken aloud than it had in her head. “I kept waiting for it. I was aware of the contact. I was aware of you. I expected the association to happen eventually.” Her fingers shifted slightly at her sides. “It never did.”
Something moved across Declan’s face then, something she couldn’t immediately categorise. “And the kiss?”
Riley’s attention sharpened. “The kiss is the part I am attempting to understand” Declan didn’t interrupt. “When I kissed you, the association stopped completely.”
For the first time since the conversation began, he looked genuinely startled.
Riley continued before she lost the thread of it, “I am not suggesting it has been resolved permanently. The memories still exist. The underlying experiences remain unchanged,” she paused briefly, organising the thought as precisely as possible, “However, during the interaction itself, they were absent.”
The admission settled heavily between them. “For those few seconds,” she said more quietly, “I was only thinking about you.”
Declan closed his eyes briefly. When he looked at her again, something in his expression had softened considerably. “Riley...”
“I am not prepared for a relationship,” she said immediately.
The abrupt change of conversation didn’t seem to throw him, he simply nodded.
“I have no framework for whatever this is. I am still attempting to understand my own responses, and I am not comfortable introducing additional variables until I have established greater stability.”
Declan looked her in the eye, serious. “Okay.”
“But,” she continued, her gaze remaining fixed on him, “I would like to continue exploring it.”
His eyebrows lifted slightly. “Exploring it.”
“Yes.”
“And by ‘it’, you mean...”
“I mean I would like to kiss you again.” She waited patiently, clearly expecting an answer.
Declan stared at her for another second before shaking his head, a smile finally breaking through despite himself. “Jesus Christ, Riley.”
Her expression didn’t change. “Is that a no?”
The smile widened. “No,” he said. “That’s very much not a no.” He stepped back from the doorway, holding it open for her. “How about you come inside before we end up making out like teenagers on the front porch?”