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“Don’t move. You look comfortable.”

I cross the room and drop onto the other end of the couch. And then—before I can talk myself out of it, before the rational part of my brain can file an objection—I lift her bare feet and set them in my lap.

I need to touch her. After two days of nothing but a screen and a voice through a speaker, I need something real.

She doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t tense. She watches me over the rim of her wine glass, and when I press my thumb into the arch of her foot, her eyelids drop to half-mast.

“That feels really nice,” she murmurs.

I keep going. Slow circles. Firm pressure. My thumbs working the ball of her foot, the arch, the tension she carries there from standing all day. She lets out a long exhale and sinks deeper into the cushions, and I think I could do this for hours. Just this. Just her feet in my lap and the quiet and the city lights.

“Did you watch the game?” I ask, keeping my voice easy.

Her eyes open. Focus on mine. “Every minute.”

“Yeah?”

“You were incredible, Alexei.”

I shake my head. “I played like—”

“No,” she cuts me off, sitting up a little. “You were confident. Physical. Like you owned the field.” A pause. Her gaze drops, then comes back up. “It was, um.”

“It was what?”

Pink creeps up her cheeks. She takes a sip of wine—a stalling tactic. “It was hot,” she says quietly.

My hands go still on her foot.

The apartment is very quiet. Just the muted flicker of the TV and the distant hum of the city, and Ryleigh looking at me with wine-flushed cheeks and an expression that’s half embarrassed and half something else entirely.

“Glad you enjoyed it,” I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.

She nods, her gaze snagging on my mouth before bouncing back up.

“I only had one complaint,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“I wished they’d shown more of you.”

I laugh—the tension breaking just enough to let me breathe. “I’m a linebacker, not the quarterback. They get all the coverage.”

“Well, I preferred watching you.” She says it simply, looking right at me, and it lands like something heavier than the words should weigh.

I move to her other foot. Give my hands something to do. She settles back against the cushions, but the energy in the room has shifted—this low, humming current between us, like the air before a storm.

“Can I be honest about something?” I ask.

“Always.”

I set her foot down. Shift closer on the couch. Close enough now that I can see the flecks of darker blue in her irises, the faint freckles across the bridge of her nose.

“I missed you,” I say. “Both of you, but . . . you. That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.”

She holds my gaze. “I missed you too.” A beat. “And I tried really hard not to, for the record. I told myself it was just about having help with Ella. That I missed the extra pair of hands.”

“And?”