Not when I’m this wound up. Not when I’m afraid I’ll type something I can’t take back. Something with her name in it. Something true.
I drop the towel.
I lie back and let my imagination have what reality won’t.
Her in that jersey again, the hem hitting her mid-thigh, the way she’d tugged at the sleeve, but it’s not Kai’s number she’s wearing.
It’s mine.
My name across her back, where it belongs.
Her choosing it from a rack, off my floor, or out of my hands. I can’t decide which version is better, so I let them blur together.
Fisting my cock, I move my hand back and forth along my shaft. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the need to do this, but my body is begging for release.
As my mind plays its own version of the fantasy with Harlow in my jersey, I realize something else. I’ve memorized her without meaning to.
The way she smiles shyly, the way she captures her bottom lip between her teeth when she’s trying not to. I want to release it from her torture and replace it with my own. I want to kiss her, long and slow, exploring her mouth and learning the sounds she would make. The way her body would melt into me and mine into her.
My pace changes, my hand moving faster as I think about her hands. The way they’d feel exploring my body, slipping down lower and lower until she touches me. My lips at her throat, feeling the beat of her pulse and knowing that I was the reason. The way she’d feel pressed against a wall or a door or any flat surface if I stopped being careful for five consecutive seconds. I think about what it would take to make her stop composing herself, to get under that careful, watchful exteriorand find the version of her that forgets to be guarded. I want that version. I want to be the reason for it.
Release comes hard and fast, punched out of me, and I lie there in the dark with my chest heaving and one arm thrown over my eyes like I can block out what I just did.
Guilt replaces the relief that I feel quickly, the automatic punishment for wanting something that isn’t mine to want.
Then something worse slips in underneath it.
Hope.
The dangerous kind. The kind that doesn’t stay abstract. Because now it’s not just a fantasy I can shut off. It’s a desire that I can’t outrun or ignore. A future my brain keeps reaching for even though it knows better, sketching out scenes I have no business drafting, with her in my clothes, my space, in my life, looking at me like I’m worth the risk.
I want her to wear my jersey and mean it.
I want her to look at me like that and not look away.
And with November 21 sitting on the horizon like a storm front moving in slow and inevitable, I can feel my control slipping, my grip on the careful, manageable version of this loosening, and my whole life tilting toward something I’m not sure I can afford to want.
The ceiling doesn’t have any answers, but I keep asking anyway.
21
HARLOW
The difference between being watched and being seen isn’t something I know how to explain without making it sound overly dramatic.
It’s quiet. It happens in my body before my brain can label it—the way my shoulders tense automatically when I feel eyes on me, the way my chest coils with discomfort that spreads into my stomach, making me feel like I’m on a Tilt-A-Whirl.
Being watched feels like scrutiny. Like I’m standing in the center of a bright spotlight I didn’t ask for but can’t seem to escape.
Being seen feels softer, like exhaling after you’ve been holding your breath for so long that you forgot you were doing it.
I’m learning the difference now, slowly and painfully, and it unsettles me how clearly Grayson Bennett lives on the right side of that line.
The morning after the game arrives gently, like it doesn’t want to scare me.
Morning light stretches across the ceiling of Kai’s bedroom, and for a few blissful seconds, I exist in that fragile space between sleep and awareness where nothing is required of me.
My body feels heavy, not exhausted but full—like I spent the night carrying something carefully and only just set it down. There’s a faint ache in my palm that doesn’t hurt so much as it remembers. My chest feels tight in a way that isn’t panic.
