“Alex—I’m—fuck—”
I didn’t stop.
He came with my name on his lips, and I swallowed it all, kept working him through it until he was shaking, until his hand in my hair went gentle, until he was pulling me up to kiss me again—messy and grateful and still desperate.
“Holy shit,” Liam said against my mouth. “Holy fucking shit.”
Something clattered behind us—a mop falling, cleaning supplies shifting on the shelf we’d been pressed against.
We both froze, then started laughing softly against each other’s mouths, the absurdity of it all catching up with us.
Liam’s phone buzzed in his pocket.
Reality crashed back. Slowly. Reluctantly. Like waking from a dream I didn’t want to end.
Liam pulled back, breathing hard, his forehead resting against mine. His eyes were dark in the dim light—pupils blown wide, lips swollen, hair completely wrecked from my hands.
He looked perfect.
“We have to go,” he said, his voice rough.
“Yeah.” I couldn’t quite catch my breath. “Yeah, we should—“
He stepped back pulled up his boxers and zipped up.
The cold air rushed in where his body had been and I felt it like a loss, like something vital had been ripped away.
But he was right. We had to move.
Liam opened the closet door carefully, checking the server room. Empty. The terminal screen showed white text on black background: PROGRAM COMPLETE.
We’d done it.
We’d actually fucking done it.
Liam pulled the USB drive, pocketed it, then looked at me. His expression was complicated—want and fear and something else I couldn’t name all tangled together.
“Ready?” he asked.
No. I wasn’t ready. I wanted to pull him back into the closet, wanted to finish what we’d started, wanted to live in the moment where we were just two people who wanted each other instead of everything else we had to be.
But I nodded.
We slipped out of the server room.
Back down the hallway. Up the stairs. Moving fast and quiet, adrenaline still pumping through both of us but different now—not fear of getting caught but the buzzing electricity of what we’d just done, what we’d just admitted.
We crossed Kingswell’s campus in silence, but it was different now—charged with something new, something dangerous and real.
I hadn’t felt this happy since that summer at the lake. And I didn’t even care what the implications were or what happened next. I wasn’t going to control this.
I was going to let this be even if it ruined every other aspect of my life.
Chapter 17: Liam
We burst through the door of my dorm room still riding the high—adrenaline and victory and the taste of Alex still on my lips.
“What happened? The line went dead.” Noah spun around in his chair.
