A chance to destroy each other all over again.
My hand twitches toward him—reaches without permission.
He leans in, closer.So close his lips almost graze mine, warm and trembling, like he’s going to press them to me and finally take?—
Then the car lurches, the engine idles.
And the driver’s voice—flat, ordinary, fucking merciless—slices through the moment like a guillotine.“We’re here.”
Callaway doesn’t move.His breath still kisses my cheek like the kiss we didn’t get.
My hand is half-curled, empty.
My chest aching from the echo of something that almost happened.
Something we weren’t ready for—or maybe we always were.
Maybe that’s the problem.
He pulls away slowly.
Doesn’t look at me.
And I hate how badly I want him to.
How badly I want to drag him back and finish what we started so long ago—and broke—because our world doesn’t make room for a man loving a man, not out loud, not without punishment, not without someone calling it a distraction.And Vesper ...Vesper deserves more than being the secret we keep swallowing until it turns into poison.
That’s the cruel math of it: if I reach for him, I risk losing her.If I reach for her, I keep breaking him.And if I try to want them both the way my body already does—whole and honest—then I’m not just choosing love.
I’m choosing the fallout.
I’m asking her to carry the cost of my fear, again.
And the worst part is—if he touched me right now, if he put his mouth on mine like he meant it, I don’t think I’d stop him.
I think I’d give in so fast it would scare me.
Because wanting him isn’t the problem.
Wanting him feels easy.
It’s living with what it would do to us that makes my chest feel too tight to breathe.It’s the reason I rejected him, why I told him that he was wrong and to fuck off.It wasn’t out of cruelty, but survival.It’s so he could be the golden boy of the hockey world.
ChapterTwenty
Callaway
The car stops.
The driver brings me back to the present when he announces we reached our destination.Though, I don’t move right away.
I can’t.
Because my body hasn’t caught up to reality yet—hasn’t realized I didn’t kiss him, that I didn’t finally break the thing I’ve been holding together with denial and bad decisions and people whose names I don’t learn.
Fuck.Fuck.F-u-c-k ...I almost kissed him.
Almost begged him with my mouth instead of my voice.I swallow, hard, and stare straight ahead like the windshield might save me from myself.
