Miles's apartment building has never looked this intimidating. Which is saying something, because the elevator once trapped me for forty minutes with a man who explained his cryptocurrency portfolio in exhaustive detail.
I knock before courage abandons me entirely.
He answers looking like sleep has filed a restraining order against him. Dark circles, rumpled shirt, hair achieving new dimensions of chaos. His eyes widen slightly when he sees me, and something flickers across his face—hope, maybe, or just the recognition that I've shown up uninvited again.
"Can we talk?" My voice comes out steadier than expected. "Really talk. Not the careful circling we've been doing where we both pretend everything's fine while internally combusting."
Miles steps aside without a word, letting me into the space that's witnessed too many of our almost-moments. The apartment smells like coffee that's been reheated too many times and the particular desperation of someone who's been overthinking for days.
We settle on opposite ends of his couch—the same couch where I've cried about exes, celebrated wins, and apparently developed an inability to communicate like a functioning adult. The distance between us feels intentional, calculated. Two people who've been too close and are now overcompensating with geometry.
"I need to apologize," I start, and he opens his mouth to interrupt. "Not for what I said to the board. For saying it there first." I force myself to hold his gaze.
"I made you a public statement before you were ever a private conversation. I declared you to a room full of strangers without ever actually telling you what you mean to me. That was wrong, Miles. Spectacularly, catastrophically wrong."
He's quiet for a long moment, jaw working like he's chewing on words he's not sure he wants to swallow. When he finally speaks, his voice is rough, scraped raw from too many sleepless hours.
"I've been thinking about the elevator. About why I walked away." He stares at his hands like they contain answers to questions he's been avoiding.
"I've spent years being your supporting character, Rae. The backup plan. The safe option you never had to choose because I was just always there, ready to catch whatever you threw, fix whatever broke, stay when everyone else left."
My chest constricts. "Miles—"
"And then suddenly you're standing in front of a boardroom declaring me to a dozen people, and I don't know if that's real or just another performance." His eyes meet mine, wounded and searching.
"Another strategic move in the game you're playing. Because you've done that before. Used me as a prop when it was convenient. Kissed me on a golf course to prove a point. And I went along with it because being your fake boyfriend was better than being nothing at all."
The words land like surgical strikes, each one precise and devastating. Because he's not wrong. I have used him—maybe not intentionally, maybe not maliciously, but the result is the same. He's spent years performing a role I never officially cast him in, and I've given him no reason to believe this is different.
"It wasn't a performance." My voice cracks on the admission. "What I said to that board—it came from somewhere real, somewhere I've been too scared to look at directly. But I understand why you can't tell the difference anymore.”
I take a deep breath, but admitting feels like relief rather than damnation. Surprisingly. “I've given you zero reasons to believe me. Approximately negative seventeen reasons, actually, if we're counting the times I've run away or pretended something real was just an act."
Miles laughs, but it's the hollow kind that echoes in empty spaces. "You're remarkably good at quantifying emotional damage."
"I minored in self-destruction. It came with a certificate." I shift closer, though the distance still feels infinite. "What do you need from me? Not what makes strategic sense, not what the board expects. What would make this feel real to you?"
He looks at me for a long moment—really looks, like he's cataloging every expression, every micro-movement, trying to calculate whether this is another false start. His jaw tightens, and when he speaks, his voice has that quiet intensity that always undoes me.
"I need you to choose me when no one's watching. When there's no board to impress, no inheritance on the line, no strategic benefit to being here." His hand gestures vaguely at the space between us.
"Just me. Just because you want to. Not because the timing's convenient or the scandal requires damage control or you're running from something else."
The request is simple and impossible and exactly right. Because that's what I haven't given him—not really. Every moment between us has been tangled with external pressures, family obligations, inheritance timelines. Even tonight, I'm here because the board votes tomorrow and everything feels urgent.
But he's asking for something that has nothing to do with any of that.
"I'm here now." I reach across the couch and take his hand, feeling his fingers tense before slowly intertwining with mine. His skin is warm, familiar, achingly real.
"No audience. No agenda. No grandmother timing this with a stopwatch. Just me, showing up at your door because I couldn't stay away. Because being apart from you feels like trying to breathe underwater."
Miles stares at our intertwined fingers like he's trying to solve an equation that refuses to balance. His thumb moves across my knuckles—slow, uncertain, testing whether this is actually happening.
"Is that enough?" I ask, and my voice is smaller than I'd like. "I know I've made this impossible. I know I've spent months making you doubt everything between us. But I'm here, Miles. I'm choosing to be here."
He doesn't answer. The silence stretches between us, filled with everything we've said and everything we haven't. I watch him process, watch the war between hope and self-preservation play out across his features.
"I don't know," he finally admits. "I don't know if it's enough. I've spent years pretending that proximity was the same as partnership, that being essential meant being wanted.”
He takes a deep breath that echoes painfully in my chest. “And now you're offering me what I've always wanted, and I'm terrified it'll disappear the moment the board votes or the scandal dies down or something more convenient comes along."
"That's fair." I squeeze his hand. "I've earned that fear. Every bit of it."
"You have." But his fingers tighten around mine, holding on despite himself. "God, you really have."
We sit there, connected by clasped hands and years of history, and something feels different. Not resolved—nothing's resolved, nothing's tied up with a neat bow. But the questions have changed. We're no longer asking whether this is real or performance. We're asking whether we're brave enough to find out.
I don't have answers. Neither does he.
But for the first time, we're asking the right questions together.
When I finally leave, neither of us makes promises. He walks me to the door, hand still holding mine until the last possible moment. Our eyes meet, and there's something fragile and fierce in his expression—the look of someone standing at the edge of a cliff, deciding whether to jump.
Tomorrow, the board votes.
Tonight, I've finally stopped running.
It's not everything. But it might be a start.