Chapter Text
The door shuts behind them with a quiet finality that feels too deliberate to be accidental.
Some minor miscommunication, they were told. Someone’s schedule overlapped, and the crew didn’t realize this room had already been assigned for prep. Just ten minutes, maybe less.
Tessa crosses the room and places her water bottle on the table with that measured calm that’s always been her tell. She doesn’t sit. Doesn’t speak. Her spine is straight, but not rigid.
Controlled, as always. The grace she’s known for has always come with an undercurrent of constraint.
Scott leans back against the wall. He watches her. Not with hunger, not even longing. Just that ache again—the one that’s never really left since Korea. Since that last Olympic free dance when he thought they were on the edge of something more, when he left a letter he still remembers word-for-word in a drawer she apparently never opened. They haven’t been alone together—really alone—in years.
“I can give you space,” he offers, the words low, careful.
She turns, slowly, eyes soft. “It’s fine. We’ve shared tighter quarters —maybe I should try for a signal again. There’s got to be a solution here.”
He could tell that she was getting progressively more anxious.
He smiles at that. The kind of half-smile that pulls only one side of his mouth and lands heavier than it should.
“Hey Tess,” then he said the trigger phrase.
“Just breathe…” It made no sense that the phrase they consistently used in their training would derail her and calm her simultaneously. He didn’t mean any harm.
There’s no choreography now. No audience. No microphones. Just a closed door, shared history, and two people who carry matching fractures.
“How’s your boy?” he asks, voice gentle.
She smiles, real this time, her whole face lighting. “He’s on a pirate kick. Everything is about treasure maps and shouting ‘Arrr.’ It’s... chaotic.”
“I love that,” he says. “My girl’s into volcanos right now. Keeps trying to make baking soda explosions on the kitchen floor.”
She laughs, and the sound catches him off-guard. It still lands in his chest the same way it did when they were kids—like warmth, like light, like home.
“Our kids would get along,” she says without thinking.
He looks at her. “Come on, they already do.”
And it’s true. Birthday parties. Holiday events. Social media likes and FaceTime hellos. Her son once told Scott that he wanted to “be funny like Uncle Scott.” Scott had to excuse himself for a moment, just to breathe.
Silence settles between them again, this one thicker, messier.
“Um…do you…still - ?” he asks, too suddenly.
She flinches. Her eyes meet his, steady, but glassy. “-You know the answer to that, Scott — you always will.”
Something cracks open in his face. Not surprise. Recognition. Grief.
“I thought you didn’t.” His voice is low, cracking. “After the letter. I poured everything into that letter and—nothing. So I figured that was your answer.”
Tessa freezes. “What letter?”
His laugh is hollow. “Tess… Don’t. The letter I gave to TJ to give to you. After Pyeongchang. The one that spelled it all out. Every damn thing I was too much of a coward to say when I had the chance.”
“Scott, I never got a letter from TJ. She flew out later so she could celebrate more.”
He stops breathing.
“Seriously,” she says, stepping toward him now. “I thought you… didn’t want to risk the partnership. That maybe it was just me.”
He shakes his head, stunned. “No. No, I wrote it. I said everything. About how I saw you. Us. Our future. I waited for days. When you didn’t respond—”
“— I never got it,” she says, voice breaking.
He presses his hands to his face. “God.”
Tessa swallows. “And then you got engaged.”
“Because I thought you didn’t want me!”
She covers her mouth, eyes full. “How could I not, when you were everything?
Scott sighed. He put his hands on his hips and started pacing in circles shaking his head in true shock.
“I was crushed, Tess. You were silent. I figured I’d imagined the whole thing. I went back to what I knew. Or thought I knew.”
The silence now is unbearable. Dense with years of unspoken grief.
Scott finally whispers, “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Me too,” she says. “We were both right there.”
Another beat. A sigh.
“I still can’t finish a sentence around you,” he mutters.
She smiles sadly. “That’s because I always know what you’re going to say.”
He looks at her. Really looks. “I wish...”
She puts up a hand to indicate a stop and quickly nodded sniffing away tears.
And they sit, side by side, not touching, not talking, locked in—by time, by history, by what never was and still could be.
After a few minutes they heard the door unlock.