Page 124 of Cross Ice

“I don’t know.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he turned and walked toward the parking lot.

“Nico—”

“Let’s just go home.” He said it without looking at me, carefully modulated, the voice of someone keeping something very controlled.

The drive back was silent.

Not the comfortable silence we used to share. This was the weighted silence of damage done. Of words that couldn’t be taken back and questions that didn’t have answers yet.

Somewhere around Campbell, my phone buzzed. Danny.

Danny

Did you go to Santa Cruz today?

I opened social media.

The lunch photo had blown up. Three hundred shares, picked up by the same accounts that had run the parking lot photos. Nicolás Briggs and boyfriend spotted in Santa Cruz was already the top result when you searched his name.

I showed him.

He glanced over, then looked back at the road and said nothing.

“This is what I mean,” I said. “We can’t go anywhere without it becoming⁠—”

“Yeah. I got it.” His voice was flat. “You’ve made that clear.”

The accusation was quiet, but it landed. And he wasn’t wrong. I had made it clear—over and over, in different ways, for two weeks. What I hadn’t made clear was what I wanted instead. What I was willing to do. Whether there was a version of this I could actually live with.

I’d given him the problem every time without ever getting close to an answer.

The rest of the drive passed in silence.

Nico pulled into my parking garage just after eight.

There was a car parked two slots away with someone sitting in it, holding a camera.

“Fuck,” Nico said quietly.

“Is that⁠—”

“Paparazzo. Yeah.”

We sat there in his car, both staring at the person who was now obviously photographing us through the windshield.

“They saw the social media posts,” I said. “Figured out when we’d be getting back.”

Nico’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.

“You can’t get out,” I said. “If you do they’ll get photos of that too. It’ll be a whole thing.”

“So I just drop you off and leave?”

“Yeah.”

He stared out the windshield. “I can’t even walk you to your door.”