Everything in me stilled.
The air turned heavy, wrong in a way that pressed against my lungs and demanded stillness in return, and I felt the moment lock into place around us, sealing itself shut with a finality I understood without ever being taught.
The space collapsed without warning, folding inward until there wasn’t enough room left to stand inside my own body. His presence filled everything, pressing in from all sides, leaving no air that didn’t belong to him. The smell hit harder—hot breath, sour and thick, too close, too real—filling my lungs before I could stop it, settling there, heavy andwrong. I swallowed it down on instinct, throat burning, my body locking in place before I had to tell it to.
My fingers coiled at my sides, nails pressing into my palms, sharp enough to anchor me, not sharp enough to stop anything that was already happening.
I lifted my head.
I shouldn’t have.
His eyes met mine without resistance, without reaction, without anything I could take hold of and turn into something better. There was no anger there, no sharp edge I could work around, no opening I could step into and fix. Anger I understood. Anger had shape. Anger meant I had done something. This—this was absence.
My tiny rib cage tightened, the pressure building slow and deep until I couldn’t tell if I was breathing or if something inside me had started to give way.
I tried again anyway.
Because I didn’t know how not to.
“I played good,” I stammered, the words spilling faster, uneven. “Coach said I—I can do it again. I can be better. I can?—”
The effort collapsed under its own weight.
There was nowhere for it to land.
He didn’t interrupt.
Didn’t engage.
He looked through me, past me.
The silence stretched until it filled every part of me, until it pressed against the inside of my ribs and demanded something in return. My throat tightened around it, the words forming before I could stop them, before I could decide if they were allowed to exist.
“Do you—” My voice faltered, catching on the blade’s edge of my father’s eyes snapping to mine. I swallowed hard,forcing it through, because stopping now would make it worse, because not asking would leave it there, unfinished, waiting. “Do you love me?”
The question left me and hung there, thin and unprotected, something small placed in a space that had never been built to hold it. For a second—just one—everything stilled around it. Suspended in a silence that didn’t bend.
I felt it then, before he said anything. The answer.
His hand lifted, not to touch, not to reach, just to exist between us, a quiet boundary drawn without explanation, a line I had already crossed by asking.
“You don’t deserve my love.”
My lungs seized,the breath tearing halfway in before it locked, caught as if the space inside me had never learned how to open fully in the first place, as if it had been built too small and never corrected. I came up hard into it, dragged forward by a body that had outgrown the moment it was still trapped inside, ribs expanding against memory that refused to release its hold.
I wasn’t fully awake.
I wasn’t out.
For a second—stretched and suspended—I was still there, still standing on cold floorboards that no longer existed, still twelve, still waiting, the question sitting raw and exposed in my throat with nowhere to go, no movement allowed. It lived in the dark corner of my heart like it had never left, like it had never stopped asking, like it had been carried forward intact, growing with me without ever changing shape.
My lungs pulled for air that wasn’t sour, wasn’t stale, wasn’t already used up before it reached me, but the instinct stayed the same—tight, controlled, careful not to take morethan I was allowed, careful not to draw attention to the fact that I needed it at all.
There was no clean break between then and now, no line I could step across and leave it behind, just the echo of it still thundering inside my mind.
Every muscle was already engaged, already braced, already wound tight around an impact that never landed, my shoulders set, my jaw locked, my hands half-curled as if there should have been resistance there to meet them.
There wasn’t. The tension had nowhere to go. It held.