I’mtired.
Not the jittery, wired kind of tired I’m used to. Not the kind where my pulse lives in my throat and every sound has teeth.
This is bone-deep. A heavy, worn-out exhaustion that settles in my muscles and hangs off my shoulders.
It’s been two days since the parking lot, since the truck, since thealmostthat didn’t happen. Two days since the doorframe and his breath in the cold air and the way my body leaned toward Declan before my brain caught up.
And still, last night, I stared at my ceiling half the night, replaying the same loop: the parking lot, the cold air burning my lungs, his truck sitting there like it had been waiting. The way he stepped out of the shadows, tape on his hands, eyes on me.
The way he drove me home.
The way the cab of that truck shrank to the space between his mouth and mine when he leaned in and didn’t quite kiss me.
The old noise is still there in my head—memories, slammed doors, locker metal—but it’s… muffled. Like someone laid a thick layer of ice over everything. My heartbeat feels slower under it, muted, like I’m moving through a quieter world.
I walk across campus with my backpack dragging at one shoulder. The morning crowd is its usual mess—skateboards rattle, someone shouts across the quad, a girl laughs too loud into her phone—but it doesn’t feel like an assault. It just feels… like college.
My fingers curl and uncurl around the strap in a steady rhythm. Left, right. Left, right. My boots beat time on the pavement. A new ritual.
I pass a group of guys loitering near the library steps, voices carrying in the cold.
“—Coach put him back in net for Saturday, you hear?”
“Yeah, man. Guess they worked it out. Still saw the dent, though. Savage.”
“Reid’s a freak. I’d watch my throat around him.”
The last line lands like a small, mean stone.
A week ago, it would’ve sent me straight back to my dorm. I would’ve heardfreakandpsychoand believed them because it would’ve confirmed everything I already fear about men who hit things when they’re angry.
Now my jaw clenches, but my feet don’t stop.
No one in the audience has a clue what Rylan said. They totally missed his expression at the bar. Nobody heard him verbally abuse me without ever touching me. They didn’t see Declan’s hand slam into steel instead of bone. All anyone saw was the dent.
He is dangerous. The locker didn’t hit itself. My father benched him. The administration wanted his head on a platter. None of that is nothing.
But the version of him in their voices doesn’t match the one in my truck Monday night, knuckles wrapped in white, jaw rigid with control. The man who kept his hands light on the steering wheel and his eyes on the road. The man who watched me walk into my dorm and didn’t move until the door shut between us.
The man who asked, quietly, “Lock it?”
Dad’s voice slides in under the memory, low and certain:Give him space. Live wire. Don’t get pulled into the blast radius.
I tug my hood lower and keep walking. The anger in my chest burns low and steady. They can call him a freak in the abstract. They have no idea he’s the reason I walked across this campus this morning at all.
I cut around the science building toward the main lecture hall. My Stats class is in ten minutes. I’m half on autopilot, half replaying that night in humiliating high-definition.
When I got back to my room that night, I almost texted him. The wanting sat in my palms like an electric itch.
Turning the corner toward the wide stone steps, I stop.
Declan’s there.
Leaning against the low brick railing just outside the flow of students, hood up, bag slung over one shoulder. Stillness radiates off him in a way that warps the space. People unconsciously arc around him, giving him a berth they don’t give each other. A solid, quiet obstacle the stream of bodies bends around.
Declan Reid in daylight looks exactly like he did last night in my head and not at all like he did in my head all week. Black hoodie. Dark jeans. Tape peeking under his sleeve, white against tanned skin.
His head is tilted down like he’s watching his boots. But before I can thinkturn around, turn around, turn around, his head lifts.
