Five Years Later, He Still Wants Me

Chapter 3: The Man I Left Behind

I read his message four times before I made myself delete it.

Five years changed you. It didn’t change what I wanted.

Gone from my screen. Not gone from anywhere else.

I told myself I would not reply. I told myself that at eleven at night, and again at midnight, and again when I finally gave up on sleep and lay there staring at the ceiling with his words running laps through my head.

I will not reply.

I didn’t. That felt like a victory, even if it was a small one. Work the next morning was supposed to fix everything. Routine always did. Deadlines. Emails. The particular calm of a newsroom that didn’t care what had happened to me in a hallway two nights ago.

It didn’t work.

“You’ve read that same paragraph three times.” Tori appeared at my desk with two coffees, sliding one toward me like a bribe. “What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Addie.”

“I’m fine. Just tired.”

She studied me the way she’d been studying me since college, the way that meant she knew exactly when I was lying and had decided, for now, to let it go.

“Okay.” She didn’t sound convinced. “But you know I’m going to ask again.”

I did know that. I still said nothing.

I gave myself permission, just for a moment, to remember him the way he used to be.

Not the man in the press conference. Not the man in the hallway with his jaw set and his voice gone cold.

The boy who used to show up at my dorm with soup when I was sick, even though he had practice at six in the morning. Who memorized the way I took my coffee before he memorized his own playbook. Who used to say you’re my life as it cost him nothing to mean it?

I remembered loving him so completely it frightened me.

Then I remembered why it ended, and the memory came sharp and ugly the way it always did, and I slammed the door on it before it could pull me any further down.

Not today.

I had survived by not looking at that particular room in my memory for five years. I wasn’t going to start now. The email came in just after lunch. Charity gala, downtown, black tie, hosted by the league’s foundation. My name was on the press list. Marcus had already RSVP’d me before I’d even seen the invitation.

I almost declined anyway.

Then I saw the list of honorees near the bottom of the page.

Alex Callahan.

My stomach dropped straight along the floor.

“Absolutely not,” I said out loud, to no one. Closing the laptop like that would make the email disappear too.

Tori, of course, had opinions.

“If you skip it, everyone’s going to ask why the reporter covering his championship run suddenly can’t make his own foundation gala.” She raised an eyebrow at me over her monitor. “You go. You stay professional. You leave early if you need to. But you don’t run, Addie. Running makes it a story.”

I hated that she was right.

The gala was exactly the kind of event I usually enjoyed, good lighting, better canapés, the low hum of important people pretending not to network while networking. I stood near the edges of the room, close to the bar, close to Tori, close to anyone who wasn’t him.

I found him anyway. Or he found me. Across a room full of people, it didn’t matter which.

He wasn’t surprised to see me.

That was the part that unsettled me most. No double take, no flicker of shock crossing his face the way it had at the press conference. Just a quiet, certain look, like he’d already known exactly where I’d be standing.

He knew I’d be here.

I turned back to my drink and tried to remember how to breathe like someone unaffected.

He crossed the room anyway.

“Addie.”

“Alex.” I kept my voice flat. Formal. The kind of voice you used with a stranger, not a man who used to know every version of you.

“How has your life been?” His eyes didn’t leave my face. “Since you left.”

“Fine.” One word. Nothing else was offered.

He tilted his head slightly, the way he used to when he caught me lying about something small, whether I’d eaten, whether I was actually okay. Like he could see straight through the word to whatever sat underneath it.

“Why do you keep showing up in my life?” I finally asked, because the silence between us had gotten too loud to bear.

“Maybe this isn’t something either of us gets to avoid.”

“Five years passed, Alex.”

“Five years didn’t erase what happened between us.” His voice was quiet. Certain. “It just gave us time to pretend it did.”

I needed to leave. I turned out to do exactly that.

“One question.”

I stopped, against my better judgment.

“Why did you really walk away?”

The question landed somewhere it wasn’t supposed to reach, somewhere I’d kept locked for five years, and I felt my composure crack right down the center.

“I have to go,” I said instead of answering.

“That’s not a no.” His eyes narrowed slightly, like he’d just confirmed something he’d only suspected before. “You’re still hiding something.”

“Whatever happened between us is over.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He said it so calmly. So certain. Like he’d already decided the truth and was simply waiting for me to catch up to it.

I walked away before he could see what that certainty did to my face.

I found a quiet corner near the terrace doors and stood there until my pulse slowed to something survivable.

Seeing him again has reopened something you thought you buried.

I made myself admit it, just once, just to myself, where no one could hear it and use it against me.

I remembered the man I left behind five years ago, gentle, devoted, mine.

And standing there in that gala, watching him across the room, laughing easily with someone else while his eyes kept finding their way back to me, I understood the real danger wasn’t that he still wanted me.

It was that some reckless, unguarded part of me still wanted him too.