Page 20 of The Prime-Time Experiment

“I am not fine,” Riley said, her voice strained now beneath her own hands. “None of this is resolving.”

Declan blinked at her, something uncertain flickering briefly across his expression before it disappeared again beneath disbelief. “Riles,” he said carefully, “all I’m asking you to do is a squat.”

The nickname flattened everything, reduced it to something that sounded small and ridiculous. Her hands dropped abruptly from her ears. “You are not listening to me.”

“Riley—”

“No.”

The word snapped out sharper than intended. Several people nearby glanced over. Declan’s expression shifted fully then, the teasing ease dropping away for the first time all day. Concern replaced it too late to matter.

“You’re being dramatic—”

“I am not,” she said immediately, louder now. “I am responding to a system that is fundamentally flawed.”

Her breathing lost its balance. Too fast, too shallow, each inhale catching before it completed.

Still, the words kept forcing themselves out. “You altered variables across every session today without technically violating the contract,” she continued, the logic pushing through faster now. “You prevented baseline stabilisation while maintaining plausible compliance, and now you’ve added overlapping sensory interference and expect accurate performance output—”

Her voice fractured slightly on the last word. The gym felt too close. Everything pressed inward: the lights, the movement, the cameras, his attention, the awareness of people watching. Her thoughts stopped sequencing correctly. External input collapsed together into something dense and unusable.

There was no pattern anymore, nothing stable enough to hold onto.

“I agreed to structured application,” she said, but the sentence lost coherence halfway through. “This is not—”

Her breath caught enough to cut the words off completely. For one horrible second, nothing reset properly after it. Air stopped reaching where it needed to. Her lungs kept trying to pull more in, quick and shallow, but each breath snagged before it could settle. Her fingers twitched once at her sides, useless and unsteady, her thoughts collapsing into fractured, incomplete pieces.

Too much. Too loud. She needed out.

“I’m done.”

The words came quieter this time, but they carried something far more final than anger. She turned immediately.

“Riley—”

She kept walking.

“Riles—”

The name barely registered now beneath the pressure building inside her skull.

Her steps came too fast against the floor, uneven enough she nearly clipped the edge of a bench turning toward the exit. She wasn’t tracking the environment anymore. She was just moving through it.

The gym followed anyway. Noise clung to her, heat clung to her. Her breathing kept shortening no matter how hard she tried to slow it.

“Riley.”

Closer this time. His voice sounded different now, no teasing left in it at all. She couldn’t stop long enough to process that either.

The exit doors burst open beneath the force of her hands.

Cold air hit her hard enough to interrupt the spiral of her breathing for half a second, enough that the next inhale finally reached deeper into her lungs instead of catching painfully high in her chest.

Riley kept walking.

The gym still clung to her in fragments; the phantom sensations of movement and music flickering at the edges of her awareness. Her pulse refused to settle properly. Every breath arrived a fraction uneven, her body still trying and failing to recalibrate from the overload.

But out here, the pressure no longer felt immediate. It wasn’t pressing against her from every direction anymore.