Offside Hearts

Chapter 6: The performance

Ethan's POV

The stylist took one look at me and sighed like I'd personally ruined her Friday.

"We have three hours," she said, circling me with a tape measure like I was a piece of furniture she'd been asked to reupholster on short notice. "Three hours to make you look like someone who belongs next to him."

"Comforting."

"I'm not paid to be comforting. I'm paid to be right."

By the time she finished, I barely recognized myself in the mirror — dark suit, sharper collar than anything I owned, hair actually behaving for once in my life. I looked like someone who'd never once calculated whether he could afford groceries after rent.

Noah found me in the hallway outside the guest wing, already dressed, already unreadable, the captain fully back in his shoulders. He didn't say anything for a second. Just looked.

"What," I said.

"Nothing." He adjusted his cuff, not quite meeting my eyes. "You clean up fine."

"High praise."

"Don't let it go to your head."

The car ride to the gala was quiet in a way that felt deliberate, both of us running through whatever version of tonight we'd separately decided to become. I watched the city slide past the window and tried not to think about the fact that in twenty minutes, several hundred cameras were going to be pointed at a lie I'd agreed to become half of.

"Rules," Noah said, breaking the silence. "Stay close. Don't wander off with reporters. If someone asks a direct question, redirect, don't lie outright — lies get fact-checked, redirects don't."

"You've done this before."

"Not like this." Something flickered across his face, gone before I could read it properly. "Just follow my lead."

"Bold of you to assume I take direction well."

That almost got a real laugh out of him. Almost.

The gala was worse than I expected and exactly what I expected, all at once. Chandeliers, a string quartet doing its best impression of elevator music, and a red carpet stretched out front like a tongue waiting to swallow us whole. The second we stepped out of the car, the flashes started, a wall of light so constant it stopped registering as individual bursts and became something closer to weather.

"Noah! Over here!"

"Who's your date tonight?"

"Is it true you two are living together?"

Noah's hand found the small of my back, light, practiced, and I felt my whole body want to flinch away from the touch before some other instinct overrode it and I leaned into it instead, playing my part, letting my shoulder brush his like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Smile," he murmured, barely moving his lips. "You look like you're being escorted to your own execution."

"I'm doing my best."

"Do better."

I turned toward the nearest camera and gave it everything I had, and something about the absurdity of the moment — me, faking a smile beside the most photographed man in the country, my rent finally paid for the first time in a year — made the smile turn briefly, treacherously real.

Inside, it got easier. Noah introduced me to sponsors whose names I promptly forgot, to teammates who looked at me with varying degrees of curiosity and suspicion, to an older woman in emeralds who pinched my cheek and told Noah I was "an improvement." I laughed at the right moments, complimented the right people, let my hand rest against Noah's arm exactly as long as felt convincing and not one second longer.

Then the band shifted into something slower, and Daniel appeared at Noah's elbow like he'd been summoned.

"Dance with him," Daniel said, low enough that only we could hear. "Now. The room's watching."

Noah held out his hand. I took it before I could think too hard about it.

We moved into the space cleared for dancing, and up close, away from the cameras' angle, something in Noah's shoulders loosened by a fraction — not performance now, just proximity, the two of us moving in a slow circle while a hundred phones tracked us from a polite distance.

"You're better at this than you let on," I said.

"Ballroom lessons. Age eight to fourteen. My grandfather insisted."

"Rich people problems."

"You have no idea."

His hand tightened slightly at my waist, and for a second — just a second — the room around us blurred into something quieter, like we'd stepped half a foot outside the party without either of us moving. There was a song underneath the string quartet's arrangement, some old standard I half-recognized, and something about the melody snagged at the back of my mind in a way I couldn't place. A feeling more than a memory. Sunlight on water. A voice I couldn't attach to a face.

"You okay?" Noah asked, noticing the shift in me before I did.

"Yeah." I shook it off. "Déjà vu. Weird night."

He studied me a beat too long, like the answer hadn't quite satisfied him, before the song ended and the moment dissolved back into noise and flashbulbs.

Across the room, I caught a woman watching us — not with a phone raised like everyone else, but with a notepad, sharp-eyed, unbothered by the crowd around her. She wasn't smiling. She was studying us the way I studied a subject before deciding how to frame a shot.

"Who's that?" I asked Noah quietly, nodding toward her.

His jaw tightened. "Vanessa Reed. Reporter. Ignore her."

"She's not taking pictures."

"That's what worries me."

We finished the dance, and Vanessa never looked away once, her pen moving steadily across the notepad the entire time, like she was building something out of us one careful word at a time.

By the time we left, the "ambiguous friends" headline was already trending, fans dissecting every frame of the dance for proof of something more. Noah didn't check his phone once on the ride home. I checked mine four times, watching strangers fall in love with a version of us that wasn't real yet, and trying to ignore the small, treacherous part of me that had liked the dance more than the job required.

We were almost back at the mansion when Noah's phone buzzed. He glanced at it, and whatever ease the night had built between us evaporated in an instant.

"What is it?" I asked.

He turned the screen toward me. A text from an unknown number, no name attached.

Nice dance. Almost like old times.