Page 69 of The Prime-Time Experiment

Neither of them spoke for several seconds. Eventually Dee dragged a hand through her hair and exhaled slowly. “Well.”

Riley looked up. “Well?”

“Well,” Dee repeated, sounding almost overwhelmed herself, “that feels like a pretty significant development.”

Riley couldn’t argue with that. The silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable, both of them seeming to sit with it, trying to understand what had actually changed. Eventually Dee looked at her again.

“What does that mean for you and Declan?”

The question landed somewhere Riley had been carefully avoiding all morning. She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

She didn’t understand was what any of it meant now. After several seconds, she met Dee’s gaze and answered with complete honesty. “I don’t know.” And somehow that uncertainty felt larger than everything else put together.

❈

The door opened almost immediately. Declan looked mildly surprised to find her standing there. “Morning, Riles.”

“I would like to kiss you again.”

The words arrived so quickly that they seemed to bypass both of them. Declan blinked. For a moment he simply stared at her. Then he let out a short, disbelieving laugh and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck.

“Right,” he said. “Good morning to you, too.”

Riley frowned slightly. “I considered opening with a greeting first, but that would have delayed the transmission of the more relevant information.”

That only made him laugh again. “Of course it would.”

The amusement lingered for another second before his expression softened. By the look on his face, Riley guessed that he knew her well enough by now to recognise the difference between Riley being direct and Riley being nervous.

“What happened?” he asked quietly.

Riley looked down briefly before meeting his eyes again. “When you touched me yesterday, I expected to experience distress.”

The shift in him was immediate. The humour disappeared, replaced by the kind of careful attention he always gave her when something mattered. “Okay.”

“I expected the interaction to produce the same response physical contact usually produces.”

Declan remained silent, waiting. Riley took a breath. “Physical proximity generally reminds me of my father.” His jaw tightened. “I anticipated that outcome before I came to your house,” she continued. “I assumed it would occur eventually and accounted for it as part of the interaction.”

“And it didn’t?”

The question was quiet. Riley shook her head. “No.” The word felt heavier spoken aloud than it had in her head. “I kept waiting for it. I was aware of the contact. I was aware of you. I expected the association to happen eventually.” Her fingers shifted slightly at her sides. “It never did.”

Something moved across Declan’s face then, something she couldn’t immediately categorise. “And the kiss?”

Riley’s attention sharpened. “The kiss is the part I am attempting to understand” Declan didn’t interrupt. “When I kissed you, the association stopped completely.”

For the first time since the conversation began, he looked genuinely startled. Riley continued before she lost the thread of it, “I am not suggesting it has been resolved permanently. The memories still exist. The underlying experiences remain unchanged,” she paused briefly, organising the thought as precisely as possible, “However, during the interaction itself, they were absent.”

The admission settled heavily between them. “For those few seconds,” she said more quietly, “I was only thinking about you.”

Declan closed his eyes briefly. When he looked at her again, something in his expression had softened considerably. “Riley...”

“I am not prepared for a relationship,” she said immediately. The abrupt change of conversation didn’t seem to throw him, he simply nodded. “I have no framework for whatever this is. I am still attempting to understand my own responses, and I am not comfortable introducing additional variables until I have established greater stability.”

Declan looked her in the eye, serious. “Okay.”

“But,” she continued, her gaze remaining fixed on him, “I would like to continue exploring it.”