The equipment room smelled like rubber and old sweat, the particular musk of athletic gear that had been stored too long without proper ventilation.
I'd volunteered for inventory duty because it was mindless work—counting tape rolls and ice packs, checking expiration dates on heat wraps, anything that kept my hands busy and my mind quiet.
Three days had passed since our tea conversation. Three days of avoiding Jay's gaze across the training facility, of finding reasons to be elsewhere whenever he approached, of building walls so fast I could barely keep up with my own construction.
I heard him before I saw him.
"Looking for extra tape," he said from the doorway, his voice carrying that particular casual tone that meant he was lying. "Coach mentioned we were running low."
I didn't turn around, just kept cataloging the contents of the shelf in front of me. "Athletic tape is on the third row, left side. Help yourself."
He didn't move toward the tape. Instead, I heard his footsteps approaching, felt the air shift as he entered the cramped space between the shelving units.
The room was barely large enough for one person to work comfortably—two bodies made it feel claustrophobic, intimate in ways I couldn't afford.
"You've been avoiding me." His voice came much closer than I expected. "Since the tea conversation. Since I promised to stop showing up with fake injuries. I kept my end of the deal, Summer. You're the one who disappeared."
"I haven't been avoiding you." I pulled a clipboard from the shelf, pretended to review the inventory list. "I've been busy. Two jobs, remember? The schedule is demanding."
"Busy." He repeated the word like he was testing its weight. "So busy that you leave rooms the moment I enter them. So busy that you suddenly need to take lunch breaks whenever I'm scheduled for treatment. So busy that you won't even look at me right now."
I kept my eyes on the clipboard, but the words weren't registering. Just shapes on paper, meaningless symbols that couldn't protect me from the conversation I'd been dreading.
"Summer." His hand appeared in my peripheral vision, gently pushing the clipboard down until I had no choice but to meet his gaze. "Talk to me, please. Whatever I did wrong, whatever line I crossed—I need you to tell me. I can't fix something I don't understand."
The sincerity in his expression cracked something in my chest. He genuinely didn't know. Didn't understand why I'd retreated, why the warmth between us had frozen overnight.
"You run," he continued quietly, stepping closer still. The shelves pressed against my back, nowhere to retreat. "Every time things get real between us, every time we start to actually connect—you bolt. And I need to know what you're so afraid of, because I'm starting to think it's not me you're running from. It's something else. Something I can't see."
The words burst out before I could stop them. "Maybe I'm afraid of being another distraction for a man who's already committed elsewhere."
Jay's expression shifted—confusion first, then something darker settling into the lines of his face. "What do you mean, committed elsewhere?"
"Your fiancée." The word tasted bitter on my tongue, acidic and wrong. "Mariana made it very clear when she cornered me at practice. Reminded me that it's not polite to rub shoulders with other people's fiancés. Professional boundaries and all that."
The shock that registered on his face was almost theatrical. His jaw went slack, his eyes widened, and for a moment he looked like someone who'd been struck without warning.
"Mariana told you." It wasn't a question. "Of course she did. Of course she found a way to—" He broke off, ran a hand through his hair with visible frustration. "Summer, it's not… That engagement isn't what you think."
"It's not an engagement?" I kept my voice flat, clinical. "Because from what I understand, it pretty much looks like it. Mariana Voss is certain she’s gonna be your wife."
"It's complicated." The words came out rough, desperate. "It's not something I chose, not something I want. My family… There are reasons I can't just walk away, obligations that don't have anything to do with my feelings. If I could explain—"
"Complicated.That's funny." I laughed, and the sound was hollow even to my own ears. "You know, that's exactly what I’ve already heard before: ‘It's complicated, It's not what you think, just give me time to explain.’"
Jay flinched at the comparison, but I couldn't stop the words from pouring out.
"You're engaged to her, Jay, and you've been chasing me around this facility like I'm some puzzle to solve while she marks her territory and reminds me to stay in my lane."
"I know it’s hard to believe, but…" he kept going, but I'd stopped listening.
The whispered insults that had followed me through high school corridors attacked my mind. The bathroom ambushes. The particular cruelty of a girl who'd decided I was beneath her and spent four years proving it.
And one afternoon behind the bleachers, when she'd pressed a lit cigarette against the inside of my forearm and smiled while I screamed.
Jay couldn’t know. He looked at me and saw a beautiful stranger who'd appeared in his life fully formed, without history or context. He had no idea that his future wife had once burned her hatred into my skin, had made my existence a daily exercise in survival.
If he knew who I really was, if he could connect the woman standing before him to the invisible girl from those hallways, would it change anything? Would he see me differently? Or would he simply add it to the list of complications he was already juggling?
I'd never know. Because telling him would mean admitting I'd been hiding too. That I'd let him chase a version of me that existed only because I'd destroyed the original.
"It doesn't matter," I said, my voice steady despite the chaos churning inside me. "What matters is that you're engaged. And whatever you thought was happening between us can't happen anymore."
"Summer, please." He reached for my arm, and I stepped back so quickly I nearly knocked over a shelf of supplies. "Just let me explain. The engagement isn't real, not in any way that matters. I don't love her, I've never loved her, and if I could find a way out—"
"But you haven't found a way out." The words came out harsher than I intended. "You've had years to find a way out, and you're still engaged, still letting her believe you're going to marry her."
His silence was answer enough.
I gathered my clipboard, my pen, the professional armor I'd been wearing like a second skin. "I need to focus on my work. This job matters to me, and I can't afford to compromise it for whatever this is."
"This isn't nothing." His voice cracked on the words. "What's between us isn't nothing, Summer. You know that."
Maybe I did. Maybe that was exactly the problem.
I moved toward the door, and this time he didn't try to stop me. His expression as I passed was something I'd remember for a long time—devastation and confusion and a desperate need to explain that had nowhere to go.
"Summer." My name in his mouth sounded like a wound. "Please don't do this."
I paused at the threshold, not turning around. "I'm not doing anything, Jay. I'm just finally seeing clearly. Whatever you felt when you looked at me—it was never really about me. It was about the challenge, the chase. And now it’s over."
I left him standing among the shelves, surrounded by athletic tape he'd never actually needed.
My footsteps echoed through the empty corridor, steady and measured, betraying nothing of the fault lines cracking open inside my chest. The old wounds and the new ones blurring together until I couldn't tell where the past ended and the present began.
Jay Callahan was going to marry Mariana Voss. The boy I'd loved from the shadows. The girl who'd burned her cruelty into my skin.
The universe had a sense of humor after all. A dark, devastating sense of humor that left me walking away from something that might have been real, because staying would have destroyed me in ways I'd barely survived the first time.
________________