SHE NEEDS SPACE

KAI~

I didn’t sleep after I left her office.

I drove home with my hands locked on the wheel and her voice still in my head, that quiet *I am trying so hard to do the right thing* sitting in my chest like a bruise. I kept seeing her hands on my shirt. I kept feeling how close my mouth had gotten to hers before Cole turned that handle and wrecked the only honest minute we’d had all week.

The night before last was still sitting there too. After I left her place in Kitsilano, after I sent that text, someone nearly took my front door off the hinges.

Bang. Bang.

I had jerked up in bed thinking the building was coming down. It was Reed from the third line, drunk off his ass, pounding because he’d seen my truck in the garage and decided midnight was a good time to ask why I skipped the rookies’ bar run. I had stood there after he left and thought the universe had a sick sense of timing, scaring me like that when the only person I wanted at my door was the one who had already told me to leave.

But tonight felt worse.

I sat in my truck in the arena lot until the lot lights clicked over and the rain started tapping the windshield. I almost texted her. I typed it and deleted it three times because she had asked for professionalism inside those walls and I had lasted exactly one day before I put my hands on her.

***

It was morning already after freshening up.

I skated first, stayed late in the weight room, and I did not walk toward the nutrition wing even though every part of me knew the exact sound her office door made when it opened. I told myself that was distance. But It felt like starving.

I lasted until 11:40.

She was in the hallway outside the kitchen with a case of recovery shakes against her hip, talking to one of the interns like the intern was the most important person in the building. I should have kept walking. I didn’t.

“Sienna.”

She didn’t look at me at first. She finished her sentence, handed the intern the clipboard, and only then turned her head, and the look she gave me was so flat it almost felt practiced.

“What do you need, Rivera.”

Not Kai. Rivera. Like I was a name on a meal plan.

“I need to talk to you about last night,” I said. “ I need two minutes. That’s all—”

“You don’t get two minutes.” She cut me off as she shifted the case higher and started walking. “You get whatever I send through Cole, and you stay out of my office unless you have an actual nutrition question in writing. Are we clear.”

I fell into step with her anyway because I am an idiot and because the sound of her voice, even mean, still did something stupid to my pulse.

“I am trying to give you space,” I said. “I am also not going to stand here and let you talk to me like I groped you in a bar. Nothing happened.”

She stopped so fast I almost ran into her. When she looked up at me, there was no heat left in her face. Just anger, clean and sharp.

“Something almost happened,” she said. “And if you think that distinction is going to save either of us, you have not been paying attention. Stay away from my office. Do not text me. Do not show up at my house. Do not look at me like you did last night. I am done explaining this to you.”

“You didn’t explain it,” I said. “You listed reasons last night and then you—.”

Her jaw flexed. “That was a mistake. It will not happen again. If you come into my office after hours one more time, I will document it and I will send it upstairs. I am not losing my job and I am not losing my dog because you cannot take a fucking hint.”

The dog. Bear. She went there on purpose.

“I heard you,” I said. “I am giving you the distance you asked for. I just need you to stop acting like I am the only one who was in that room.”

She started walking again. “You are the one who touched me. You are the twenty-two-year-old rookie who thinks wanting something is the same as being allowed to have it. I am not doing this with you, Kai. Not today. Not ever. Go ice your shoulder and leave me alone.”

She pushed through the kitchen door before I could answer. The intern was still standing there pretending she hadn’t heard a word. I stood in the hallway like an idiot with my hands empty and my chest tight and I let her go.

That was the distance.

It felt like swallowing glass.

***

I found Cole in the treatment room twenty minutes later. He had a veteran face-down on the table and a look that said he already knew why I was there. He finished the stretch, told the guy to hydrate, and pointed me toward the small office off the side without saying my name out loud.

He shut the door.

“Sit down before you do something even dumber than last night,” he said.

I didn’t sit.

“You were half a second from kissing the team nutritionist in a building full of recording devices. You want to tell me what your plan was after that, or are we just going to pretend you have one.”

I dragged a hand over my face. “I wasn’t thinking about cameras.”

“That is obvious.” He leaned against the desk and folded his arms. “Kai, I like you. You work hard. You don’t complain. You are not the usual rookie headache. But you are circling a woman who has already survived one public mess and you are doing it in the one place she cannot afford to look sloppy. You need to hear that from someone who is not her and is not your sister.”

“I am trying to stay away,” I said. “She just made that very clear.”

Cole was quiet for a second. Then he nodded once, slow.

“Good,” he said. “Let her. If she needs to be mean to keep her hands to herself, let her be mean. You do not get to decide when she is ready, and you do not get to stand in her office after hours and test how far she will bend for you. I know you've always liked your sister's best friend and that was why you even accepted the contract in the first place but then she needs space Kai.”

“I have been in love with her since I was sixteen and you know it,” The words came out flatter than I meant them to. “I am not testing her. I am trying not to lose my mind every time she walks past me like I am furniture.”

“Then lose your mind somewhere else.” Cole’s voice stayed even. “Go home. Sleep. Show up tomorrow and treat her like staff. If this is real, it will still be real when the season is not hanging over both of your heads and her ex is not using a golden retriever as a legal weapon. If you push her right now, you do not look devoted. You look like the exact story he wants to sell.”

I hated that he was right.

I hated it more because I could still feel her wrist under my fingers.

Cole’s expression didn’t change much, but his voice dropped.

“Then you stay visible and boring,” he said “Can you do that, or do I need to make it an official recovery restriction so you have an excuse to keep your distance?”

I laughed once, with no humor in it. “You would actually put that on paper?”

“I would put it on paper today,” he said. “Because I watched you almost wreck two careers in six seconds and I am not in the mood to watch the league office finish the job. Give her the space she asked for. If she wants you after that, she will say it with her whole chest. Until then, you skate, you eat what she tells you to eat, and you keep your hands in your pockets. That is the advice. Take it.”

I stood there for a long second and then I nodded.

“I’ll take it,” I said. “I don’t like it. I am still going to take it.”

Cole opened the door. “Good. Now get out of my room before somebody walks by and decides we are having a secret meeting about the thing we are absolutely not having a secret meeting about.”

I left.

I did not go near her office for the rest of the day. I saw her once, late, crossing the far end of the hall with her bag on her shoulder and her phone in her hand. She looked at me. She looked through me. Then she turned the corner without slowing down.

I stood there like a man who had been told to wait six years and then told to wait again.

I could do distance. I could look like I was doing distance.

I just could not stop wanting her for a single second of it.