Chapter 10: The Weight of Silence
The taste of peaches was a lie.
Eli woke to the flat, sterile tang of his own mouth and the relentless white light of a Monday morning cutting across his ceiling. He was alone in the king-size bed, the sheets cool on her side. For a delirious second, he’d forgotten she’d never been in it at all. The memory of the back room, of her mouth under his, hit him like a physical blow to the chest. Vivid. Untouchable.
His apartment was silent. A monument to clean lines and empty space. The single gardenia from last week sat browned and curled in its glass on the coffee table, a dead thing amongst the whiskey glasses. He’d kept it. He didn’t know why.
He showered, the water scalding. He dressed mechanically in training gear. He made coffee he didn’t taste. His phone sat face-down on the kitchen island, a black slab of potential ruin.
An hour passed. He stared at the phone, his knuckles white around his mug. The team’s group chat buzzed twice with mindless banter. His agent had sent a clipped email about an endorsement negotiation. The world was proceeding, loud and indifferent, on the other side of that screen.
He picked it up. His thumb hovered over her name—just ‘Hadley’ in his contacts, no emoji, no last name. A secret.
He typed three different sentences and deleted them. They were all too much, or not enough. He was twenty-eight years old and had faced down penalty kicks in world cup finals with more calm.
Finally, he just let the raw truth, pared down to its barest bones, fall from his fingers.
I don't know how to do this. But I want to try.
He put the phone down like it was live ordnance and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window. The city stretched below, a puzzle of motion and glass. He felt profoundly stupid. He was Elias Bedfield. He didn’t send hesitant texts. He gave orders. He made statements. He didn’t admit not knowing how to do things.
The buzz of a reply was instant. It vibrated through the quartz countertop.
His heart stalled. He forced himself to turn, to walk back, to look.
Okay. So try. Come over after your training? I’ll make tea. The non-poisonous kind.
A breath he didn’t know he was holding rushed out of him. He read the message four times. The slight tease, the open door. It was a lifeline.
Okay, he typed back. After 4.
Training was a blur of grating noise and aggressive physicality. He welcomed it. The roar of the indoor facility, the brutal thud of a tackle, the coach’s shouted critiques. It was a language he understood. A performance he could lose himself in. For two hours, he didn’t think. He just was: a body in motion, a weapon pointed at a target.
But in the quiet of the locker room afterwards, under the spray of the shower, the silence rushed back in. The memory of her hands in his shirt. The scent of drying lavender. Try.
He showed up at The Petal Pit just after four, his hair still damp at the nape of his neck, a faint ache in his muscles from the session. The ‘Open’ sign was flipped. A customer was at the counter, a woman cooing over a bouquet of pink roses. Hadley was wrapping them, her hands swift and sure with the paper. She looked up, saw him, and her rhythm didn’t even stutter. But her eyes held his for a half-second too long. A private current in the public space.
He wandered the aisles, pretending to look at succulents, feeling like an oversized intruder. The customer left, the bell jingling.
“You’re early,” Hadley said, wiping her hands on her apron.
“You’re busy.”
“It comes in waves.” She came out from behind the counter. She was wearing a simple green dress, the color of moss. No paint stains today. “Tea’s in the back. Come on.”
The back room was neater now, the inventory mostly put away. The spoon they’d used for the preserves was washed and drying on a rack. The space felt charged, every ordinary object humming with the ghost of yesterday.
She filled a kettle at the small sink. “How was getting kicked in the shins for a living?”
“Therapeutic,” he said, leaning against the workbench. “You get to hit people back.”
She smiled, a real one, as she set two mismatched mugs on the bench. “What kind of tea? I’ve got about fifteen.”
“You pick.”
She chose a simple black tea, dropping the bags in. When the kettle whistled, she poured the water. The steam rose between them, carrying the earthy scent.
“So,” she said, pushing a mug toward him. “The trying. Where do we start?”
He wrapped his hands around the hot ceramic. “I don’t have a script for this.”
“Good. Scripts are boring.” She blew on her tea, watching him over the rim. “I don’t do this either, you know. The famous guy thing. The… all of this.”
“It’s not about that,” he said, the words coming out sharper than he intended. He softened his tone. “With you, it can’t be about that.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay. So it’s just you. And me. And a truly alarming amount of tea.” She took a sip. “Start simple. Tell me something true. Something from today that wasn’t in a newspaper.”
He thought. The demand was disarming. “The left side of the practice pitch has a divot. Been there for months. Every time I run over it, I think they’ll fix it. They never do. Today I realized I’ve started to like it. It’s predictable.”
She listened, her head tilted. She didn’t look amused or pitying. She just absorbed it. “See? That’s a start. A secret about a divot.” She set her mug down. “My true thing. I burned the first batch of shortbread I made this morning. I was… distracted.”
“By what?”
“By wondering if you’d actually text.”
The air tightened. He put his mug down, too. The few feet of worn wooden floor between them felt like a canyon he needed to cross. “Hadley.”
“Eli.”
He closed the distance. This time, there was no surprise, no spilled syrup. It was a deliberate convergence. He framed her face with his hands again, his thumbs brushing the delicate skin just below her eyes. He studied her—the faint freckles across her nose, the tiny chip in her front tooth he hadn’t noticed before, the clear, unwavering blue of her gaze.
He kissed her. It was slower than yesterday. Deeper. A confirmation. Her hands slid up his chest, over his shoulders, linking behind his neck. She melted into him, and the feeling was so profoundly disorienting he almost pulled back. No one leaned on him. They leaned on his fame, his money, his strength. They didn’t just… settle their weight against him and sigh.
He didn’t pull back. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight, burying his face in the soft space between her neck and shoulder. He just held her. They stood like that in the silent back room for a long time, the tea going cold behind them.
“This is trying,” she whispered into his shirt.
“Yeah.”
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Then buzzed again. And again. The outside world, impatient, demanding an audience.
He ignored it, focusing on the feel of her breath against his collarbone. But the spell was cracked. The fortress he’d imagined building with her had very thin walls, and the siege was always waiting.
She felt him tense. She leaned back, her hands coming to rest on his biceps. “You have to get that.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Eli,” she said, her voice gentle but firm. “You do. The trying includes the rest of it, too. Not just the parts in here.”
He let out a slow, ragged breath and finally pulled the phone from his pocket. The screen was a barrage of notifications. Missed calls from his agent. Texts from the club’s PR director. A trending topic alert with his name and a hashtag he didn’t recognize.
He clicked on it. It was a grainy, zoomed-in photo. Taken from across the street yesterday. It showed the two of them in the shop’s doorway, just a sliver of visibility through the glass. Him, his head bent toward hers. Her, looking up at him. The angle suggested intimacy. The caption was brutal: ELIAS BEDFIELD’S NEW DISTRACTION? Who’s the mystery florist costing him his focus?
He felt the blood drain from his face. He showed her the screen.
Hadley’s eyes scanned the image and text. Her expression didn’t crumple. It hardened. A flinty, determined calm settled over her features. She looked from the phone to his eyes.
“Well,” she said, her voice devoid of all its earlier softness. “I guess the trying starts now for real.”