I thought about all the times I’d wanted to run. All the times I’d woken up on the couch with his arm around me and forced myself to pretend it meant nothing because acknowledging it felt too dangerous.
“I can try,” I said. “I can’t promise I won’t freak out. I can’t promise I won’t need to take things slow.”
“Slow is fine. Slow is good.” His smile was small, tentative. “We’ve got time.”
“Do we?”
“Six more games. Then the season’s over, and I’m just a guy trying to get into grad school.” Seth lifted our joined hands, pressed a kiss to my knuckles—brief, careful, asking permission. “We don’t have to figure everything out tonight.”
The gesture was so gentle it made my throat tight. I stepped closer, let myself lean into his space.
“Can I—” I stopped, uncertain. “I want to try something. But I need you to tell me if it’s too much.”
“Okay.”
I leaned in slowly, giving him time to pull away. When my lips brushed his, it was barely a kiss—just the softest press of contact, there and gone. Testing. Questioning.
Seth’s breath caught. His free hand came up to rest on my hip, steadying without pulling.
“Okay?” I whispered.
“Yeah.” His voice was rough. “That was okay.”
“Can I do it again?”
“Please.”
The second kiss was still soft, still careful, but it lingered. I let myself feel the warmth of his mouth, the slight chap of his lower lip, the way his hand tightened almost imperceptibly on my hip. When I pulled back, we were both breathing harder than the moment warranted.
“Tanner.” My name came out of him like a question and an answer at once. His hand slid from my hip to my lower back, pulling me closer until I was standing flush between his knees. “Can I?—”
“Yes.”
He kissed me this time. Not soft, not careful. His mouth opened against mine, and I tasted heat, desperation, three weeks of waiting crashing through both of us at once. I made a sound I didn’t recognize—needy, raw—and his grip tightened, one hand splayed across my lower back while the other slid up to cup the back of my neck.
I grabbed his shoulders for balance, then remembered his injuries and moved my hands to his hair instead, fingers curlinginto the strands, tugging without thinking. Seth groaned against my mouth and pulled me down onto his lap.
The position put us chest to chest, my knees bracketing his hips on the arm of the couch. His hands mapped the curve of my spine, slipped under the hem of my shirt to find bare skin. When his fingers traced up my sides, I shivered and pressed closer, grinding down without meaning to.
“Fuck.” Seth broke the kiss, breathing hard, his forehead pressed against mine. “Tanner, we need to?—”
I kissed him again, swallowing whatever he’d been about to say. His hands flexed against my ribs, and I felt him hard beneath me, felt myself just as hard, and some desperate part of my brain saidmore, now, please.
But then Seth’s hands slid down to my hips and held me still, breaking the kiss with visible effort.
“Wait.” His voice was wrecked, his pupils blown wide. “Wait, wait. We need to slow down.”
“I don’t want to slow down.”
“I know. Fuck, I know.” He let out a shaky laugh, his thumbs tracing circles on my hipbones. “Believe me, I don’t either. But you said—slow. You said you needed slow.”
The reminder hit like cold water. I’d said that. I’d meant it—or thought I had before Seth’s hands were on my skin, his mouth was on mine, and my whole body was screaming for more.
“I did say that,” I admitted.
“And I’m trying to respect that. Even though right now—” He shifted beneath me, and I felt exactly how much he wasn’tinterested in stopping. “Right now I want to take you to my room and not come out until Monday.”
The image his words conjured made my whole body flush. “Seth?—”
