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“Thank you,” I say, eventually.

“For what?”

“For not telling me it’s going to be fine.” I turn to look at him. “Everyone always tells me it’s going to be fine. You just told me the actual thing that’s wrong and how to fix it.”

“Fine doesn’t fix anything.” He shrugs. “Foot position does.”

I laugh — the real one, wet at the edges from the day’s frustration finally letting go — and I kiss him, and it doesn’t stay just a kiss. Some nights that’s what we need more than talking. My whole body’s been holding tension since Friday’s first bad rep, and there’s a version of letting it go that isn’t words at all — just his hands and his mouth and the specific way he takes his time with me until the day stops living in my shoulders. After, curled against him with my heart rate finally settling, I feel more like myself than I have all week.

For a while neither of us says anything else at all.

Two nights later it’s his turn.

He doesn’t come to me with it directly. Theo never comes to anything directly. But I catch the specific quality of his silence when I let myself into his room around ten — the way he’s sitting on the edge of the bed with his laptop closed and his phone face-down. Both signs that something’s been sitting in his head long enough to need containing.

“Hey,” I say, sitting beside him.

“Hey.”

“Talk to me.”

He’s quiet for a second. Long enough that I don’t push. I just wait, the way he waits for me when it’s my turn to be the one working something loose.

“The Dan Reiss thing,” he says, eventually. “It’s — I keep running it in my head. Second round. Development plan built around me specifically.” He rubs a hand over his jaw. “What if I don’t hold up my end of it? What if this season’s the peak and I regress instead of getting better?”

“You won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you.” I echo his own line back at him, deliberately, and watch it land. “You don’t coast on anything. You’ve never once relaxed into a good result and stayed there. That’s not who you are.”

“It’s a lot of pressure.”

“It is.” I don’t try to talk him out of the pressure being real, because it is real, and pretending otherwise would just be its own kind of lie. “But you’ve been carrying pressure your whole life. The Tab. Your mom. The draft, before it was even a real conversation. You’ve been training for this specific weight since you were seventeen. You’re not new at this.”

He looks at me. Something in his shoulders drops half an inch.

“That’s a good point,” he admits.

“I have those occasionally.”

“Occasionally.” The corner of his mouth moves. “Generous.”

“Careful.” I bump his shoulder. “I could still be talking you off a ledge right now. Don’t test me.”

He huffs something almost like a laugh. I keep going, because I can tell there’s more underneath this and he’s not going to volunteer the rest of it unprompted.

“What else?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer right away.

“What else, Theo?”

“If I get to twenty-two and it doesn’t happen —” He stops. Starts again. “My whole plan’s been the draft. Pay off my dad. Get my mom out of that house. If it slips, if I get hurt, if the development plan doesn’t hold —”

“Then you’ll figure out the next plan.” I say it plainly, because plain is what he needs right now, not comfort dressed up as something bigger. “You’ve built your whole life out of contingency plans, Theo. You had a backup for the backup before you even had a scout watching you. You’ll be fine either way. Not because it’s guaranteed. Because you’re the kind of person who makes himself fine.”

“That’s a lot of confidence in me.”