Love
Riley
The message sat open on her screen for almost twenty minutes before she sent it.
Riley reread it over and over, not because the wording was wrong, but because this time the words carried weight she couldn’t organise into something safer. There was no structure underneath it, an explanation or a carefully reasoned justification she could hide inside.
Would you be willing to talk?
It felt painfully incomplete by her standards. Too exposed, too human. Normally, she would have rewritten it. Added context, reduced the possibility of misunderstanding before it ever had the chance to exist.
This time, she didn’t.
Her chest felt tight as she stared at the message, her breathing uneven in a way she stopped trying to correct several minutes ago. The instinct to retreat surfaced automatically, sharpen the wording, make it less vulnerable, less obvious that it mattered.
But she already knew he would understand what she actually meant. Before she could lose her nerve, before she could rebuild the distance she had spent weeks forcing between them, she pressed send.
The message disappeared instantly from the screen, shifting from draft to action, and something in her stomach dropped with it, sharp and immediate, like stepping forward before confirming the ground beneath her would hold.
She stared at the conversation thread without blinking. The reply came less than a minute later.
Yeah. When?
Riley’s breath caught. He hadn’t hesitated. Hadn’t asked why she’d changed her mind or what had happened. There was no caution with it, just yes.
Something in her chest loosened painfully around the edges. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard before she typed again, slower this time.
There’s a café near my apartment. I’ve been going there a lot lately. I think you’d like it.
She sent it before she could overthink that too. The typing indicator appeared almost immediately, vanished, then returned again.
Tell me when.
Riley stared at the words longer than she meant to.
He wasn’t taking control of it, wasn’t attempting to fill the silence because it made him uncomfortable. He was leaving the decision with her completely, meeting her exactly where she was instead of forcing her where he wanted her to be.
Waiting for her. The thought settled somewhere deep in her chest, heavy enough to hurt.
Her grip shifted slightly against the phone as something unfamiliar moved through her, not relief exactly, but the terrifying realisation that maybe she wasn’t doing this alone anymore.
This time, when she typed her response, she didn’t stop to analyse it first. She just answered.
?
She arrived early.
The café had become familiar over the past two and a half weeks.
Not predictable exactly, but familiar enough that her body no longer treated it like something to brace against. The low hum of conversation stayed at a manageable level, cups knocking softly against saucers in uneven but tolerable rhythms. Colin greeted her from behind the counter when she walked in, another person near the register lifted a hand in acknowledgement.
Riley returned both automatically now, small interactions that no longer felt impossible to navigate.
She chose the table by the window.
Outside gave her something steady to look at when her thoughts became too loud.
People moved in loose patterns along the footpath, stopping at crossings, weaving around each other, continuing on.
Nothing required anything from her there.
Inside, the warmth of the coffee cup settled between her palms, grounding enough that she could feel where her body ended and the rest of the room began.
Usually, that helped.
Today, it didn’t.
Her attention kept dragging back to the door. Every time it opened, something inside her reacted before she could stop it, her focus snapping up automatically, breath catching and releasing in small uneven rhythms she couldn’t fully regulate.
Waiting.
When he finally walked in, she felt him before she properly saw him. Something in her awareness narrowed instantly, sharp and immediate, her focus pulling toward him like the rest of the room had quietly fallen out of alignment.
Then she looked up fully. Declan. For a second, everything else blurred around the edges.
He looked the same. The same broad shoulders, the same steady way of moving through a space. The same face she had spent the last two and a half weeks trying very unsuccessfully not to think about every waking second.
And suddenly, she could breathe.
The inhale hit her hard enough to make her almost dizzy with it, deep and automatic and real, filling her lungs fully for what felt like the first time in weeks.
Riley stilled slightly at the sensation, disoriented by the immediate relief of it.
She hadn’t realised how tightly she’d been holding herself together until now, how carefully she’d been existing around the absence of him.
Seeing him loosened something instantly.
Declan started toward her. Riley tracked all of it automatically, the tension held along his jaw. The brief flex of his hands at his sides before they stilled again. The fact his eyes never left hers for a single second as he crossed the café.
He stopped across from her table. “Hey,” he said.
The word landed warm and familiar, settling somewhere deep inside her before she could protect herself from it.
“Hi,” Riley answered softly. Her voice sounded different to her own ears, thinner around the edges. Emotional in a way she usually would have corrected immediately.
Declan sat down carefully, leaving space between them instead of assuming he could close it himself. The gesture hit harder than she expected. Even now, after everything, he was still giving her room, still letting her decide what happens next.
The silence that settled between them wasn’t awkward. It was too full for that. It carried the weight of the past few weeks, the distance she had forced between them, the confusion, the hurt, the things she had left unsaid because she hadn’t known how to survive saying them out loud.
Riley felt the familiar instinct to structure it before she spoke, to organise every thought into something logical before she handed it over. But she was exhausted by that version of herself. So instead, she inhaled shakily and spoke before she could retreat back behind it.
“I have a lot to say,” she admitted, her voice quieter now, honest. “And I don’t think it’s going to come out properly.” Her fingers curled lightly against her jeans beneath the table. “But I need you to hear it anyway.”
For a second, Declan just looked at her. “Okay,” he said finally, calm and certain. “I’m here.”
The words landed somewhere deep enough to hurt, because he still was. After everything she put him through, he still was.
Riley nodded once, more to herself than to him, and then she began.
“Ebony told me you didn’t stop the experiment,” she said, her voice gaining steadiness as she moved into something she could anchor to. “She said you continued to send the videos, that she has been taking the notes.”
Declan’s expression didn’t change much, but something softened in it. He exhaled quietly, his gaze dropping for a moment before returning to hers. “It mattered to you,” he said.
The simplicity of it pressed into her chest in a way that didn’t resolve cleanly. Riley swallowed, her throat tightening as she moved past it, needing to get it all off of her chest. “Thank you for that.” She took a breath and started unravelling her thoughts in real time.
“I removed you from my life not because you did something wrong, but because I believed I was preventing instability.” Her gaze dropped briefly, then lifted again, holding his. “I now know I was wrong.”
Riley looked at him for a long moment, her chest tight enough that breathing properly still felt unfamiliar. Then she took a breath anyway, gathered what little courage she had left and began again.
“When I was younger,” she said, slower now, the words seeming to come from somewhere deeper than the place in her head that usually organised them, “I did not think I was capable of being loved.”
Her throat tightened, but she kept going.
“My mother died when I was born from complications with my birth. My parents had both been foster children, so my father had no other family, it left him alone.” Her fingers curled once against her own arm, then loosened again.
“He never really recovered from losing her.”
Declan’s posture changed, tightening through his shoulder, his jaw locking hard as he forced himself to keep still and let her say it.
“He drank a lot,” Riley said quietly. “And when he did, he blamed me for her death.”
The words sat heavily in the air between them. What she had told Ebony earlier had been true, but it had not been the whole story of it. Riley drew in a breath that trembled slightly at the edges.
“For most of my childhood, it was neglect. A mix of physical violence and emotional abuse.” Her voice wavered once, then steadied by force.
“But as I got older, it changed.” She swallowed hard, her fingers pressing into her arm hard enough to ground herself through the sting of it.
“I started to look like her,” she said carefully.
“Enough that sometimes he would forget I wasn’t. ”
Her breath faltered. “He’d come into my room,” she continued, the words coming out weaker than she’d hoped.
“Or find me hiding somewhere in the house and touch me like I was—” She stopped.
For one horrible second, she felt like she should retreat from it again, but she forced herself to say it plainly.
“He sexually assaulted me.” The words landed heavy and absolute between them. Declan went completely still.