Later, tangled in the sheets with Tanner asleep against my chest, I stared at the ceiling and let myself feel everything I’d kept bottled up inside of me.
This was what choosing looked like. Not some grand gesture or dramatic declaration, but this: coming home to someone who knew your failures and chose you anyway. Who let you be afraid and pushed you to be brave. Who made you want to be better even when better felt impossible.
Tanner shifted in his sleep, his hand finding mine under the covers, holding on. I pressed a kiss to his hair and closed my eyes.
19
TANNER
Seth’s fingers traced lazy circles on my hip, his breath warm against the back of my neck. I’d been awake for ten minutes, maybe longer, but I hadn’t moved—hadn’t wanted to break whatever this was—his breath on my neck, his fingers tracing patterns like he was memorizing me, the way neither of us had spoken yet because speaking would mean acknowledging the clock on his nightstand and the early morning practice the coaching staff had insisted on this close to the end of the season.
“I know you’re up.” His voice was rough with sleep, amused.
“Prove it.”
He laughed, low and soft, and pulled me closer. His chest pressed against my back, solid and warm, and I let myself sink into it. A week ago, this would have sent me spiraling—the intimacy, the vulnerability of wanting something this much. Now I just breathed.
“Practice,” he murmured against my shoulder. “I have to go.”
“Five more minutes.”
“You said that twenty minutes ago.”
I rolled over to face him. His eyes were soft, half-lidded with sleep, but the way he looked at me—steady, certain, like he’d already decided something I was still figuring out—made my breath catch. It still made my chest tight, but not in a bad way. Not anymore.
“Fine.” I pressed a kiss to his jaw, felt him smile. “Go be a football star. Soon you won’t have a good excuse to leave me in this big ole bed by myself.”
“And when that time comes, I will happily rot in bed with you all day.” Seth untangled himself from the sheets reluctantly, and I watched him move through the dim room—pulling on sweats, hunting for a clean shirt, checking his phone. The same routine as always. But when he paused at the bedroom door and looked back at me, something had shifted between us. Something I couldn’t name but felt in my bones.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said.
“Yeah.” I pulled the blanket up to my chin. “You will.”
The door clicked shut behind him, and I lay there in the quiet, cataloging the feeling. We’d spent months circling each other, months of tension and wanting and holding back. Now the holding back was over, and what remained felt terrifyingly like peace.
I wokeup Saturday morning to the smell of coffee and found Seth already in the kitchen, humming something tuneless while he cracked eggs into a pan. He’d pulled on sweats, but no shirt,and I let myself look at the way his back muscles shifted as he moved, the fading bruises from last week’s game mapped across his shoulder blades like abstract art.
“You’re up early,” I said, sliding onto one of the barstools.
He glanced over his shoulder, that soft smile spreading across his face. “Game day. Couldn’t sleep.”
“Nerves?”
“Something like that.” He turned back to the eggs, flipping them with practiced ease. “Second-to-last regular-season game. Win this one, and we lock up the division.”
I watched him plate the eggs, add toast, pour coffee into my favorite mug—one of my dad’s that I’d snuck out of the house after he died. The ease of it caught me off guard sometimes, how seamlessly we’d learned to move around each other. How he’d memorized the small things without me ever having to explain.
“Here.” He set the plate in front of me, then leaned across the counter to kiss my forehead. “Eat.”
This was new too. The casual affection, the comfort of routine. We’d been dancing around each other for so long that I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to just exist in the same space without tension coiling between us. Now I reached for it greedily—every brush of his hand, every shared meal, every night falling asleep tangled together like we were afraid to let go.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, pushing eggs around my plate.
Seth paused with his coffee halfway to his mouth. “About?”
“The Riddell thing.” I’d been turning it over in my head since I got back from Huntsville, examining it from every angle like oneof my prototypes. Lincoln’s faith in me. Holloway’s interest. The possibility that my work might actually reach the field, might actually help someone. “I think I want to do it. The consultation stuff, when I start grad school.”
His whole face lit up. “Tanner, that’s— Yeah. Of course you should.”
