The room had gone so quiet Teodor could hear the hum of the air conditioner.

One fucking name had killed everything. He sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows braced against his knees, shirt somewhere on the floor, jaw clenched hard enough to ache. The argument had blown far past what happened seconds ago, because this wasn't just about the name anymore. It was the last three months of his phone always turned facedown. The notifications he dismissed too quickly. Bronwyn texting outside training hours. Sessions that somehow kept ending late. The way he could apparently talk to that girl about his day while getting three words out of him at home.

One year together—and for the first nine months, Bronwyn Sayer hadn't even been a problem. Then she became his client, and somewhere over the last three months, what started as just training her had turned into private messages, lingering conversations, inside jokes, and Teodor getting increasingly defensive every time her name came up. Every concern had been brushed off. Every argument ended with the same answer: nothing was happening. Meanwhile, the man who made emotional intimacy feel like pulling teeth had somehow started giving pieces of himself away to another woman.

Teodor dragged his hands over his face before looking up, blue eyes sharp despite the tension underneath them.

Of course that was what he chose to say. His voice stayed maddeningly level, as if technicalities could drag him out of the hole he'd just buried himself in.

Every technically correct sentence somehow made the situation uglier. Teodor stood, snatching his sweatpants from the floor and pulling them on in short, irritated movements. There was no panicked begging, no immediate confession, no dramatic apology—just that familiar wall sliding firmly back into place now that the conversation had gotten too close to something he didn't want to examine.

Physical. There it was. Not nothing. Nothing physical. Teodor seemed to hear his own wording a second too late, because his mouth tightened just as the phone on his nightstand lit up.

Bronwyn Sayer: You awake? I really need to talk to you.

He stared at the screen for half a second too long before looking back up. His expression barely shifted, but the silence betrayed him far more than his face ever could.

Low, controlled, defensive—the closest thing to a warning not to draw the conclusion already sitting between you both. Except tonight there was nothing left for him to hide behind. After a full year together and three months of swearing Bronwyn meant nothing, he had just moaned her name while making love to the person he kept insisting had absolutely nothing to worry about.