Offside Hearts

Chapter 7:old times

CHAPTER SEVEN: OLD TIME

Ethan's POV

Noah read the text four times. I counted, because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.

"Who sends a text like that?" I finally asked.

"I don't know."

"Do you recognize the number?"

"No." He set the phone face-down on the seat between us, like putting it out of sight might undo whatever it had already done. "Could be nothing. Fans find ways to get numbers. Could be a joke."

"Does it feel like a joke to you?"

He didn't answer that, which was answer enough.

By the time we got back to the mansion, he'd handed the phone to his head of security with instructions to trace it, and the whole thing had folded itself into the long list of things neither of us mentioned again that night. I lay awake anyway, replaying the message like it might rearrange itself into something less unsettling if I stared hard enough. Almost like old times. Old times implied a before. I didn't have a before with Noah Ashford. I was fairly sure I'd have remembered.

The next morning, Daniel showed up before I'd finished my coffee, laptop already open, already talking.

"The dance clip has four million views," he said, like this was a normal way to start a Tuesday. "Sentiment's overwhelmingly positive. We want to build on it."

"Build on it how," Noah said, not looking up from his own coffee.

"Practice. If the public's buying the dynamic, we lean into it. Small, natural moments. Things a real couple would do without thinking."

"Such as."

Daniel slid a printed schedule across the table like a syllabus. Grocery run, photographed candidly. Coffee shop, photographed candidly. A walk through the park that would somehow, coincidentally, have three photographers already in position.

"This is insane," I said.

"This is the job you signed up for," Daniel said, not unkindly, already gathering his things to leave. "Get good at it."

The grocery run turned out to be the strangest hour of my week, and my week had included a mansion and an anonymous text about old times.

"You put the eggs on top of the bread," I said, watching Noah load the cart with the careless confidence of someone who had clearly never once grocery shopped for himself in his adult life.

"Is that wrong?"

"It's a war crime."

He moved the eggs. Somewhere behind us, a photographer pretended very hard to be interested in cereal.

"You know an unreasonable amount about grocery logistics," Noah said.

"I know an unreasonable amount about a lot of things that don't pay well." I picked up a carton of orange juice, checked the date out of habit, put it back for a fresher one. "When you've had to make forty dollars last a week, you learn things."

Something shifted in his face — not pity, which I would have hated, but something closer to attention, like he was filing the fact away instead of just hearing it.

"What's your favorite thing to cook?" he asked, apropos of nothing, and it caught me so off guard I actually answered honestly instead of deflecting.

"Nothing fancy. Eggs, mostly. My mum taught me the trick with the pan temperature so they don't stick." I glanced at him. "Why?"

"No reason." But he was already steering the cart toward the egg aisle we'd just left, doubling back like the information mattered enough to act on immediately.

I didn't say anything. I let him.

Two days later, at the coffee shop Daniel had scheduled us into like a stage direction, Noah ordered for me without asking — the same thing I'd gotten the first three times we'd gone anywhere, remembered without effort, like it had settled into him without either of us noticing it happen.

"You didn't have to do that," I said.

"I know."

"Then why'd you do it?"

He shrugged, sliding into the seat across from me, not quite meeting my eyes. "Efficient."

"Sure. Efficient."

"Don't make it weird."

"I'm not making it anything. You're the one who apparently has my order memorized."

"It's one order."

"It's the right order, though." I wrapped both hands around the cup, letting the warmth settle into my palms, watching him not quite look at me across the small table while a photographer two shops down pretended to browse a window display. "That's the part that's weird."

He didn't have an answer for that. Or he had one and didn't want to say it out loud, which felt like roughly the same thing.

We sat there a while, not performing, not really talking either, just occupying the same quiet the way people do when the performance has quietly stopped being the point. I caught myself watching the way he held his cup, the specific angle he tilted his head when he was thinking about something he wasn't going to say, and filed it away the same unconscious way he'd filed away my order, my rent, my grocery logistics.

It scared me a little, how easy that was starting to feel.

I didn't think about the text again until we got back to the mansion that evening and I opened my laptop to back up the day's photos — mine, the ones nobody had commissioned, the private folder I kept separate from anything Daniel would ever see.

There was a new email in my inbox. No subject line. No name attached to the sender.

I opened it, and the air went out of the room.

Three photographs, time-stamped from inside the mansion. The kitchen. The hallway outside my room. And one of Noah and me at the counter that morning, close enough to be intimate, taken from an angle no photographer stationed outside could have possibly reached.

Someone had been inside the house