I clicked into the document and stared at the blinking cursor and realized I had no idea what I was supposed to bewriting because my brain was still in that closet I refuse to acknowledge, still standing in front of him frozen, still hearing the rough edge in his voice when he said my name like a curse.
‘Bliss, fuck’.
Not Pip.
Bliss.
I pressed my palms over my face and groaned softly into the quiet room. I was in so much trouble.
Then finally, I opened the document.
Cross Checked.
And started typing.
Cade Mercer: he becomes consuming without even trying to.
Not intentionally. Not manipulatively. He just takes up space in people’s lives so naturally you don’t realize it’s happening until suddenly he’s worked himself into your routines, your conversations, your thoughts, and somehow the idea of your day not including him starts feeling wrong.
I understand now why the Fury orbit around him the way they do. Why teammates trust him instinctively. Why girls fall into him so easily. Cade listens harder than most people talk, and when he focuses on you it feels overwhelming in a way that’s difficult to explain unless you’ve experienced it directly. There’s an intensity to him that makes everything around him feel quieter somehow. Smaller. Less important.
That should probably concern me more than it does.
Tonight felt different from all the other nights we’ve spent together, and honestly I think that realization scares me a little. Somewhere between starting the project and us becoming close friends we crossed into something more personal than this assignment was ever supposed to become. We know each other now. Not fully, obviously, but enough that conversations don’t feel surface-level anymore. Enough that silence betweenus doesn’t feel awkward. Enough that I can recognize his moods almost immediately and he can apparently recognize mine too, which is deeply unfortunate considering how hard I’ve worked over the years to become unreadable.
The problem with Cade is that he notices things.
Not performatively either. Not in the way some men pretend to pay attention because they think it’ll get them laid. Cade actually notices. Changes in tone. Tension. Body language. The things people are trying very hard not to say out loud.
Tonight he noticed my wrist.
And the truly horrifying part is I think he know’s it is Luke.
That moment has been replaying in my head ever since I left Hockey House because I genuinely don’t know what to do with someone touching me carefully anymore. Luke always hurt me and he did it purposefully. Possessive. Demanding. Everything with him is about control even when he disguised it as love to my young naïve heart.
But Cade touched me like he was trying not to hurt me more.
Which honestly might be the most dangerous thing about him.
Not the flirting. Not the ego. Not the fact that he looks delicious shirtless while lifting weights like some kind of romance novel written by women with smut on the brain.
It’s thegentleness.The restraint. The way he always gives me room to pull away if I want to. I don’t think Cade realizes how rare that is.
And unfortunately, I also don’t think he realizes how much harder that makes it for me to maintain emotional distance from him.
Because attraction is one thing. Attraction is manageable. I’m a twenty-one-year-old woman, not a nun. Obviously I have eyes. Obviously I noticed the sweat running down his chest tonight while he looked at me like he was trying very hard not to kiss me. Obviously I watched him beat off knowing both of us wanted my hand doing the work.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that I like him. I like his sarcasm. I like the way he pretends to be emotionally unavailable while simultaneously caring way too much about everyone around him. I like how protective he is of the Fury guys without making a show of it. I like how his face softens around children and old people and apparently me, which feels significant considering most of campus only ever sees the cocky hockey version of him.
And goodness, I really like the way he looks at me. Which is humiliating because I know better than this. Boys are fun until they aren’t.
I swore a long time ago I would never tie my emotional stability to another man.
Especially a hockey player.
And yet somehow Cade Mercer has been slowly bulldozing every boundary I built around that promise without even trying. Tonight he admitted he’s never experienced a broken heart before.
That sentence has genuinely haunted me ever since.
