Riley didn’t say don’t. She said be careful. I’m starting to understand those aren’t the same thing.
A door bangs open somewhere down the hall. Brody’s voice carrying — loud, cheerful, constitutionally incapable of reading a room he isn’t in. I glance that direction. Back to him.
“We need to be careful,” I say again.
Like I’m trying to convince myself this time.
“You said that already.”
“You needed to hear it twice.”
He looks at me. “Did it work?”
Something moves across my face. Quick. I pull it back before it becomes anything.
He sees it anyway.
I leave first.
The parking lot is full sun. Florida morning, already hot. My phone has been going since six AM. I was awake at five.
The photo is everywhere.
There’s no way to read it wrong. It looks exactly like it felt. That’s the problem.
I’ve seen it enough times now that I should be used to it. I’m not.
The second kiss — the slow, deliberate one that was a choice and now looks like one. I sit in my car and open it again. I told myself I wasn’t going to do that. I did it anyway.
The second I didn’t pull back. The part where neither of us did.
The angle of it makes my stomach turn over. Not because it’s blurry. Not because it can be misread. Because it can’t. It catches exactly what happened. Like it meant something. Like he knew it meant something.
No ambiguity. No space to pretend it was anything else.
Just me in an empty parking lot gripping his jacket like I forgot who I was for a second and didn’t particularly care.
My stomach does something sharp and immediate.
I ignore it. Keep looking.
A stranger took this. Someone far enough away to watch without being seen, close enough to catch the exact second where neither of us was pretending anymore. There’s something specifically awful about that — not just that it exists, but that it exists outside of me now. Outside of him.
I lock my phone. Unlock it again. Look at the photo one more time.
Then I put it face down in the passenger seat and stare through the windshield like that is a normal thing people do when they are absolutely fine.
Sixty seconds.
I need sixty seconds of not being somewhere that requires me to be a professional.
I let the minute run.
Then I go in.
My editor texted at seven.Call me when you can.I know what that means.
I set up. Recorder. Notebook. Backup pen. All the rituals. All the small pieces of competence I can stack between me and the fact that I am about to spend the day in the same building as the man whose mouth was on mine twelve hours ago.