Page 86 of The Prime-Time Experiment

“Why?”

He tilted his head slightly, studying her like the answer should be obvious, even if he knew it wasn’t for her.

“Because I like being near you,” he said.

Riley felt the response before she could categorise it: a slight tightening in her chest, not unpleasant. Familiar now, but still without a definition.

“… That is consistent with my own recent behaviour,” she said.

That got a real reaction.

Declan’s head dipped briefly, like he was trying to contain it, a quiet exhale leaving him that sounded dangerously close to a laugh.

“Jesus, Riley,” he muttered under his breath, more to himself than to her.

She frowned slightly. “What did I say?”

He shook his head, still smiling. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just… Keep talking like that and I’m going to forget we’re in public.”

Riley processed that.

Then, very deliberately, she leaned a fraction closer. Not enough to draw attention, enough to be intentionally in his space.

“I do not believe that would be advisable,” she said quietly.

Declan went very still beside her.

Her gaze held his for a moment longer, the space between them different, charged in a way she was only just beginning to recognise.

Then a touch. Light.

Riley’s entire focus snapped sideways.

Ebony’s hand rested lightly against her thigh beneath the table, just enough pressure to get her attention.

Riley looked at her immediately.

Ebony’s gaze didn’t match the rest of her earlier curiosity. It was sharper now. Focused in a different way—not on Riley, but past her.

Riley followed it across the table. The air at the table shifted. Riley felt it before she processed it, a sharp tightening in her chest as her attention locked onto the interaction in front of her.

Tyler’s posture had completely tensed, especially in his shoulders, his attention fixed more narrowly on Dee. When he spoke, his tone was different. He wasn’t angry, Riley could tell that much, but she’d never seen him like this, so reactionary.

“It’s not your place to decide that.”

Dee stilled for half a second, her spine straightening in a way Riley recognised instantly, not defensiveness, but a line being drawn in Dee’s metaphorical sand.

“If someone’s not being supported properly, I’m allowed to say something,” she said evenly.

Tyler’s jaw tightened. “You don’t know the full situation. You don’t get to walk in and decide what’s right for people you’ve just met.”

At some point, Declan’s hand found hers beneath the table. She hadn’t noticed when, only the warmth of it now, grounding and steady. Her thumb moved faintly against his hand without thinking. The noise from the function seemed to compress inward instead of outward. Commentary echoed faintly from the projectors, glasses clinked somewhere behind her, chairs scraped against the floor, bursts of laughter cutting through conversations too sharply. Underneath it all, a high ringing slowly threaded through her ears.

Subtle at first, then louder. The function room suddenly felt smaller.

Tyler leaned forward slightly as he spoke, and Riley became acutely aware of the space between all of them, how close everyone was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder around the crowded table, how bodies kept brushing past behind her carrying drinks and plates. There was nowhere for her attention to go that didn’t feel crowded.

Dee didn’t pull back. “If someone is being impacted, I don’t need the full history to recognise that,” she said. “That’s literally my job.”