Chapter 155 What Riley Decides

Chapter 155 What Riley Decides
POV: Riley
The morning had the quality that mornings had after difficult evenings when sleep had eventually come and the night had done its work on everything the day had left unresolved.

Kai's apartment was warm. He had made coffee before I was fully awake, which was something he did on the mornings when he had been up before me and had needed something to do while he waited for the day to properly begin. I could hear him in the kitchen from where I sat on the edge of the bed, the particular sounds of his morning routine, and I sat with those sounds for a moment before I stood up.

The question was still there.

It had been there through the evening after Marcus's message had arrived and pulled us both back into the situation. It had been there through the conversation with the group about Dominic's arrival on campus and what it meant for the timeline. It had been there while I listened to Ethan describe the legal filing and watched his face manage the specific grief of being threatened by his own brother. It had been present through all of it, underneath everything else, patient in the way that important things were patient when they understood they would eventually be addressed.

I went to the kitchen, Kai was standing at the counter with his back to me when I came in, pouring coffee into two cups with the unhurried movement of someone who had been awake long enough to be properly settled into the morning. He heard me and looked over his shoulder.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," I said.

He handed me the cup and I sat at the kitchen table and he sat across from me and for a moment we were just two people at a table in the morning with coffee between them and the city outside the window doing its ordinary thing.

"The question," I said.

He looked at me.

"You asked me something in the changing room corridor and Marcus's message arrived before I could answer it," I said. "I want to answer it now."

He put his cup down.

He gave me his full attention in the way he gave full attention to things that mattered, settling into it, becoming still in the particular way that communicated he was present and would remain present for however long the answer took.

"You asked if I would come to Boston," I said. "Not immediately. Eventually. If the things that needed to be finished were finished." I held his gaze. "Yes. I would come."

He did not say anything immediately.

I continued because I wanted him to have the complete version rather than the headline.

"Not because I am making your career my priority over mine," I said. "Not because I am placing your future above my own or performing a sacrifice I have not chosen freely. But because the version of my future that I actually want, when I am honest about what I want, is one that includes you in it geographically. Not just in theory. Not just in the good intentions of two people who care about each other and exist in different cities." I paused. "I want the same city eventually. That is the honest answer."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Say it again," he said quietly.

"I would come to Boston," I said. "Eventually, when the things here are finished, I would come."

He reached across the table and put his hand over mine.

He did not say anything for a moment and I understood that the silence was not absence but the opposite of absence, the particular fullness of someone receiving something they had not been certain they would receive and were sitting with the reality of it.

"Thank you," he said finally.

"Don't thank me for honesty," I said. "That's your line."

Something moved in his face. The almost-smile he had when something landed in the right place.

"I want you to know something," he said. "The question I asked was not a test and it was not conditional. I was not asking so that your answer could change my decision. I was asking because I needed to know the full picture before I moved forward with anything, and you were part of the full picture that I did not yet have clearly."

"I know," I said.

"Good." He looked at the table for a moment. "There is something I need to tell you about last night. After the game."

I had been waiting for this. He had showed me Reeves's card the previous evening but the timing had been wrong for a full conversation about it, the group situation taking everything available, and I had held the information overnight without pressing it.

"Tell me," I said.

He told me about the corridor outside the changing room. The waiting figure in the good coat. The conversation about the four games and what Reeves had said about the overtime goal and the decision that had produced it. He told me about the terms that differed significantly from Boston and what differed specifically.

"Sixty minutes from here," I said.

"Yes."

"No relocation for the first season."

"Yes."

I looked at him. "What are you thinking?"

He was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when he was being careful to give me the honest version rather than the managed one.

"I am thinking that two weeks ago I had one contract on the table and a four-week deadline and a decision that felt like it required sacrificing one part of my life to access another," he said. "And now I have a second option that does not require that sacrifice, at least not immediately, and I need to decide whether I am choosing it because it is genuinely right or because it is more comfortable." He paused. "Those are different reasons and I need to be honest about which one is driving it."

"And which one is driving it?" I said.

He looked at me.

"Both," he said. "Which is either fine or a problem and I have not decided which."

I held my coffee cup in both hands.

"When do you need to decide?" I said.

He looked at the table.

"I called Reeves this morning," he said. "At seven. The conversation lasted forty minutes." He looked up at me. "I need to make a decision by Friday. And there is something he told me in that conversation that I need to tell you before I make it."