"Stay," I said.
It wasn't a question, but it could have been. There was still time for him to pull away. Get dressed. Walk back across the bridge to Riverside and pretend this was just another hookup. Just sex. Just bodies.
His eyes held mine.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
Something in my chest cracked open so wide I thought it might never close again.
I cleaned us up with the towel in my nightstand drawer. Just let me wipe the mess off his stomach, off mine.
We settled into the bed. Legs intertwined. His arm across my chest. My hand resting on his forearm.
I pulled the covers over us. The October cold pressed against the windows, but under the blankets, with his body heat radiating into mine, the world felt impossibly small and impossibly safe.
Liam shifted. Getting comfortable. His knee wedged between mine. His breath warm against my shoulder.
"Your bed's too small," he said.
"Your bed's in a room with Noah."
"Fair point."
Quiet settled over us. The sound of his breathing. The distant noise of campus outside—someone shouting across the quad, a car door closing. Normal sounds. The world going on as if nothing had changed.
But everything had changed.
I could feel it in the way Liam was lying against me—no tension in his body. No coiled readiness to bolt. No phone buzzing with a text that would make his face close up like a fist. Just his weight. His warmth. The steady rise and fall of his chest.
I wanted to say something. Wanted to tell him what I'd told Ethan at the diner—the thing I'd been too afraid to say out loud until someone else named it for me.
Do you love him?
Is he in your future?
Yeah.
Then you love him.
The words sat in my throat.
But Liam's breathing was already changing. Slowing. Going deep and even in the way that meant consciousness was draining out of him. The race had wrecked us both—the kind of exhaustion that no amount of adrenaline could outlast forever.
His arm tightened across my chest. Reflexive. Like even in the space between waking and sleeping, his body was holding on.
I pressed my lips to his forehead. Gentle enough that he might not have felt it.
"I've got you," I whispered.
His breathing didn't change. Maybe he heard. Maybe he didn't.
I lay there in the dark. Liam's weight against me. His heartbeat against my ribs—slower now, steadier, falling into sleep.
I didn't know what happened next—whether Liam would wake up and reach for me or wake up and pull away. Whether the openness I'd felt tonight was permanent or just the afterglow of a perfect race and perfect sex and the temporary insanity of bodies too exhausted to maintain their walls.
But right now—right now he was here. In my bed. Choosing to stay.
I closed my eyes and let Liam's breathing pull me under.
