Page 67 of The Prime-Time Experiment

“I need to go.” His head was spinning trying to figure out what on earth had just happened, as if he’d dreamed it, instead of living it.

“Riles—”

“I have to go.”

She took a step backwards. Declan opened his mouth, although he had absolutely no idea what he was planning to say. Nothing came out in time.

A second later she had turned, crossed the doorway and disappeared entirely. The front door closed somewhere beyond the gym.

Silence settled over the room. Declan remained exactly where he was, his hands were still half-raised from where he’d been about to touch her. Slowly, he lowered them. Then he looked towards the doorway again and let out a breath that felt like it had been trapped in his chest for several minutes.

Because after an entire day of driving himself insane wondering whether dinner had changed something between them, Riley had walked across a room and kissed him. Whatever question he’d been asking himself all day no longer seemed particularly difficult to answer.

Chapter 15

Reoperationalisation

Riley

Riley did not like variables she could not quantify.

It wasn’t a rule she had consciously created. It developed gradually, reinforced through repetition until it became instinctive. Inputs produced outputs, patterns produced predictions. If something could be observed closely enough, it could eventually be understood, and once it was understood, it became manageable.

The problem was that nothing about the last twelve hours felt manageable.

She stood alone in the kitchen, one hand resting lightly against the edge of the counter while an untouched coffee cooled beside her. Morning light filtered through the apartment windows in pale, diffuse bands, illuminating a space that was otherwise unchanged. Everything around her remained familiar and predictable.

The disruption existed entirely within her.

Her thoughts kept returning to the same moment. What happened with Declan didn’t fit into any framework she currently possessed. The sequence itself was simple enough to reconstruct. They finished training, she’d gone to leave, and then she stepped forward and kissed him.

The action itself wasn’t what troubled her, it was the absence of everything she expected to accompany it.

Long before the kiss, she had already reached a conclusion about Declan and deemed him to be safe. Allowing him to touch her was a calculated decision.

She expected discomfort. Not necessarily enough to stop the interaction, but enough that she would need to manage it. That was always the assumption. That all physical contact would require preparation. It always required the quiet, constant monitoring she spent years perfecting so that nobody else would notice the effort involved.

More importantly, she had expected the memories. That was usually what happened. Touch never existed in isolation, it consistently brought with it the smell of alcohol, the scrape of rough stubble against her skin. Physical proximity was always tangled up with those memories, woven so tightly into her nervous system that separating one from the other never seemed possible.

She assumed Declan would trigger the same response. Not because he had done anything wrong. Quite the opposite, he was patient, careful, predictable in ways she valued enormously. But none of that altered the underlying expectation. Her reactions were never determined solely by the person standing in front of her. They belonged to a much older system, one that operated according to rules established long before Declan Montgomery entered her life.

And yet when his hands settled against her waist, nothing happened.

The feeling of her father never appeared. The memory simply failed to surface.

Even now, standing in the kitchen and replaying the interaction for what was probably the hundredth time, Riley found herself returning to that point more than any other. She could understand Declan’s behaviour. She could understand her own decision-making process, at least partially. What she could not understand was the absence.

Because the absence changed everything. Touch had never been neutral before, it had always required something from her.

But when she thought about Declan’s hands against her waist, or the way he had followed her lead rather than taking control of the interaction, the dominant feeling wasn’t discomfort.

It was relief. The thought settled heavily in her chest as she stared down at the counter-top.

By the time she had left his apartment, she had still been trying to understand it. She waited for the delayed reaction she assumed would eventually arrive, convinced that the familiar discomfort was simply running behind schedule. Instead, she found herself standing by the door, looking at him, increasingly aware that the expected response remained absent.

That was when she kissed him, not because she planned to. Not because she consciously decided it was something she wanted.

The truth was significantly less elegant: she had been confused. Confused enough that she needed confirmation.