I kissed her because language failed. Because my body knew what my mouth couldn’t say.
And now she wanted nothing to do withme.
The photo said one thing. Her mouth on mine, her fingers on my shoulders, pulling me closer. And her voice said another. Nothing more.
I kept turning both over in my head, the image and the words, trying to make them fit together. They didn’t. Either she kissed me like that and felt nothing, which meant I’dfundamentally misunderstood what a kiss means. Or she kissed me like that and felt something and the "nothing more" was a lie she told because the truth scared her more than the lie did.
I didn’t know which was worse. Both left me in the same place. Alone in my office with a solved cube and no algorithm for this.
Miles returned, his expression still grim. He closed the door behind him and stood there for a second, reading my face the way he’d been reading it since we were children.
"How is it?" I asked.
"Honestly? It’s a mess." He sat across from me and loosened his tie. "Our legal team sent cease-and-desist letters to the original outlets but the image has been reposted, screenshotted, and embedded in a hundred articles already. I can slow it down. But I can’t make it disappear."
"Make it disappear, Miles."
"That’s not how the internet works."
"I don’t care how the internet works. I care that her face is on it without her consent. Fix it."
He looked at me for a long moment. "Are you okay?"
"I’m fine," I said.
He looked as if he was about to say something, then changed his mind. "I’ll handle the press. You handle her."
After Miles left, I went looking for her.
She wasn’t at her desk. Her bag was there, her computer on, the sanitizer bottle beside her monitor, the indoor shoes tucked neatly under the chair. All the things she’d arranged for me. All the accommodations she’d made so that I could walk past her workspace without my skin crawling.
She wasn’t in the break room. She wasn’t on the dev floor or in the conference rooms or any of the places she normally existed during a workday.
I asked Priya, who directed me to the balcony off the executive floor.
She was leaning against the railing with her arms crossed, staring out at the city. The wind pulled at her hair, dark curls whipping across her face, and from behind she looked small against the Miami skyline.
She turned. Her face was tear-streaked. Something in my chest twisted hard enough to hurt.
"It’s going to be handled," I said.
"No, it won’t." She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Can’t you see? I moved across the country to be invisible, Jace. I left everything I had and everyone I knew and came to Miami because nobody here knew my face. And in one night, one night, you made me front-page news."
"I know. I’m sorry. I should have known better than?—"
"You don’t know." She took a step toward me. Her voice was raw. "You have no idea what this means for me. You don't know what’s at stake."
"Then tell me."
"I shouldn't have to tell you!" Her voice climbed, and the wind caught it and carried it out over the skyline. "I shouldn't have to explain why a woman might not want her face on every gossip site in the country. I shouldn't have to justify wanting to be invisible." She was shaking. Her whole body, hands and shoulders and voice, all of it trembling like everything inside her was too big for her frame to hold steady. "You should've thought about that before you kissed me outside a hotel full of people with cameras."
I wanted to defend it. Wanted to say that the kiss wasn’t calculated, wasn’t planned, that it happened because she’d pulled me out of the dark and my body responded with the only language it had left.
I didn’t say any of it. Because from where she was standing, none of it mattered. She wasn’t asking why I kissed her. She was telling me what it cost.
"I’ll suppress the story," I said. "Whatever it takes. I promise you, Anna. Your face will come down."
She looked at me, eyes red, wind pulling at her hair, and I searched her face for something I could read. I found nothing I recognized. Whatever she was carrying was bigger than that night.
