Elena reaches out, pulling my hands away from my face and holding them tight. Her grip is the only solid thing in the apartment. "Toni, look at me."
I lift my gaze, my vision swimming with tears.
"Do you want your career to be saved if it means sitting alone in a dark car every night?" she asks gently.
"No," I whisper, the truth of it hollow and terrifying. "No, I don't. I've spent three weeks pretending. Every morning I look him in the eye and call him Mr. Stevens. I give him spreadsheets. I lecture him on lateral movement during film review while my heart is trying to kick its way out of my chest just to be near him. I act like I hate him because it's safer than admitting how terrified I am that I can'tlive without him."
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, but the image of Max turning around in the flickering light of the parking structure is burned into my eyelids.
"I'm stuck, El. If I cross that line, my dad will never look at me the same way. The league will think I'm a joke. But if I stay on this side..." My voice breaks completely. "If I stay on this side, I have to watch the only man who has ever truly looked at me walk away because I forced him to. I can't keep pretending I don't want him. It's killing me. It's literally killing me."
Elena doesn't offer a platitude. She doesn't tell me it'll be fine, because we both know fine is a word people use when they're entirely out of options. Instead, she just steps forward, wraps her arms around my shoulders, and pulls me into her chest.
I bury my face in the soft cotton of her sweatshirt and let myself totally fall apart, the quiet apartment echoing with the sound of a woman who has finally run out of reasons to stay inside the walls she built.
"I don't know how to stop," I say into the fabric of her sweater. "I know how to choose correctly. I know how to protect things. I learned how to build a schedule and fill it so there isn't space for anything I can't control." Everything aches. Specific and deep. The kind of ache that has been there for three weeks disguised as discipline. "I don't know how to just want something without making a case against it."
Elena holds on. She is warm and solid and she smells like the lemon candle she burns regardless of season and she has beenmy most reliable person since before Max Stevens existed in my life and she does not try to fix this. She just holds it with me.
"He was twenty feet away," I say. "And he turned around because I asked him to."
"Yes," she says.
I press my eyes shut. "That's the thing. That's the part I can't file. He's doing exactly what I asked and it's making everything worse."
Elena pulls back. Not all the way. She holds my shoulders and looks at me with green eyes that miss nothing and have missed nothing since the night she arrived at my apartment with wine and waited for me to say his name.
"What do you want?" she asks directly. No tempering of the question.
I know the answer.
I've known it since I watched his taillights reach the garage exit and disappear. Since I sat with my forehead against the steering wheel in an empty parking structure and felt the specific shape of what I'd been calling the responsible choice.
"Him," I say. The word sits there, plainly. No qualifier attached. No case built around it. "I want him.”
Elena's expression does something I've only seen it do twice before. It goes completely still with relief. The specific relief of a woman who has been waiting for someone to stop fighting the truth and finally say it out loud.
"Okay," she says.
"It's not—" I start.
"Okay," she says again. Firmer this time.
I look at her.
"You've been afraid of wanting things since I've known you," she says. "You dress it up as discipline. You call it professionalism. You make it look so much like strength that you almost convinced me." She holds my gaze. "But you've been afraid."
I automatically clench my muscles. "My father?—"
"Your father is a person who loves you and makes mistakes like every other person who loves someone." Precise. Not unkind. "He is not the last word on what you deserve."
I don't answer. Because she's right and I've known she's right for months and knowing it and living by it are two different architectures entirely.
"What are you going to do?" she asks.
The thing is — I know this answer too. I've known it since the parking garage. Since watching him respect the space I asked for so thoroughly that it became the most honest thing he'd ever shown me. A man who could have come. Who had every reason to come. Who stood twenty feet from a woman he wanted and walked away instead because she needed him to.
That's not performance. That's who he is.
