He stared at our hands. He didn’t pull his away. “She can try. But it won’t work. And you and I will be side by side when she does.”
Below, a door banged. Voices spilled out—laughs, curses, the usual chatter. We both stilled. A car alarm chirped once then stopped. No one took the stairs up. The roof stayed ours, a secret no one else knew.
I turned my face into Luke’s shoulder and breathed him in, loving the scent that clung to him no matter how many times he showered.
“I don’t want to wait until we’re safe to be close,” I whispered into his shirt. My voice scraped, raw. “Safe doesn’t exist. It’s just a word people use to make rules they later break.”
His chest rose under my cheek. Fell. His hand curved to the back of my neck, thumb pressing lightly into that soft place beneath my ear—the spot that made my eyes close. He knew where I unraveled. And he never tugged at it unless I let him.
“We don’t wait,” he said. “We don’t put us off. Not anymore.”
From anyone else, it would’ve sounded like a line. From him, it resonated.
I pressed closer. His thumb brushed the star at my neck, the charm catching the faint light as if to seal it.
“You’re my girlfriend,” he said—steady, certain, leaving no room to argue. “And everyone will know it soon. We’ll pick the right moment, and when we find it, there will be no more hiding. You hear me?”
I let out a shaky breath, almost a laugh. Flutters burst through my stomach, and elation pressed hard behind my ribs. “I hear you.”
“The fundraiser is in a few days. We’ll announce it then. My family won’t be able to do shit. They’ll play nice in public.”
I worried my lip.Publicdidn’t mean their hands were tied—just maybe restrained. Slightly.
We stayed until the arena lights clicked off in sections, shadows crawling across the lot below. We didn’t move. When we finally gathered up the bag, Luke cleaned the area with that same quiet efficiency he brought to anything he could control. We didn’t talk about what came next. Tomorrow had its own reckoning. Tonight was ours.
On the way down the stairwell, our shoulders brushed the whole flight. He didn’t pull away when a door slammed somewhere below. I didn’t flinch when laughter carried up through the shaft. The steady thing between us held, enough to carry us out into the hallway and still feel intact.
At the last landing, he snagged the edge of my hoodie and tugged. I turned. He didn’t crowd me. Didn’t make a show. He brushed his mouth across my temple, then the corner of my lips, then lower—to the pulse at my throat, slow and deliberate, as if he were marking every place he planned to memorize later.
“You’re mine,” he murmured. Not a claim for anyone else. A truth he’d built with me. “And I’m yours. What’s between us doesn’t belong to anyone else.”
My chest hurt in a good way—the kind that told me I was finally using the muscle as it was meant.
We slipped out by the equipment room and hugged the wall. The building had gone quiet—practice over, players gone. No one looked up. No one saw us pressed too close in the shadow.
In the lot, he folded the blanket into the trunk. On the drive back, windows down, his hand rested easy on the wheel.Streetlights smeared gold across his arms. The roads felt familiar again, worn by everything we’d survived on them.
“I’m scared,” I admitted. Pretending otherwise would only slow me down. Tomorrow was its own challenge. We were making our relationship public. Elise would go ballistic, up her endgame to levels I couldn’t predict. And then there was his family—and hers. What would happen when they found out? According to them, we were the last two people who should be together.
His hand slid from the wheel, fingers brushing mine before catching the belt loop at my hip. An anchor. “You don’t have to be. Not with me.” When he parked, he didn’t kill the engine right away. He looked at me in the half-light from the streetlamp. “We’ll make rules,” he said, voice low. “Not to cage this. To protect it.”
“No lies,” I echoed.
“No power plays.”
“And if we disagree, we say it then—not later,” I said.
“Agree.” A spark darkened the blue of his eyes. “And if it gets ugly?—”
“We don’t disappear.” We said it together. Not planned. Not rehearsed. My throat tightened anyway. He exhaled as though I’d taken the weight off what he’d been carrying too long.
We sat parked at the curb a few feet from the house until headlights swept past and faded. Moths battered the streetlight’s glass, chasing heat they’d never reach.
“I’ll have Jax or Theo meet me at the beach and drive your car back here before morning.”
I nodded, but my car was the furthest thing from my mind. “Come inside,” I whispered.
He didn’t ask if I was sure. His eyes did. I nodded. The knot behind my ribs loosened enough to make space.
