I stayed in the doorway and listened to his footsteps recede, then to Tiny whining from my office like he had been abandoned in a war.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Olivia.
Call when you’re home?
I looked down at the message until the screen dimmed.
Then I looked at the empty hallway where Jace had been.
For the first time, I did not try to file what was happening under coaching, discipline, responsibility, or any other clean word.
I wanted him to listen because it helped him.
I wanted him to listen because it satisfied something in me I had not known was starving.
And standing there with my wife waiting on the other end of the phone and Jace’s obedience still alive in the room, I finally understood that the line I had been drawing for him was now under my own feet.
Chapter 11
Chapter 11
JACE
I woke up angry.
Not at anything useful. Not at my alarm, which I had forgotten to set and therefore could not blame. Not at the sun slicing through the gap in my curtains like it had a personal vendetta. Not even at the laundry basket I had kicked over sometime during the night, leaving socks and compression shorts scattered across my bedroom floor like evidence from a crime scene.
I woke up angry because my brain had apparently decided sleep was optional and replaying the same three things for seven straight hours was essential.
Because I knew you would take care of it.
The closed door.
The way Declan had looked at me.
Not yelled. Not begged. Not softened the edges for me. Just looked at me like he saw every moving part inside my head and had already decided he wasn’t impressed by the chaos.
I had stood there like an idiot after he shut the door. Stood in the hallway with my skin too tight and my dick half-hard and my pulse doing something embarrassing, trying to convince myself it was adrenaline.
It wasn’t adrenaline.
Adrenaline didn’t make me remember the exact weight of his voice. Adrenaline didn’t make me think about his hand on the door, the way his shoulders filled the frame, the calm certainty in him when he told me what to do.
Adrenaline definitely didn’t make me wake up with my body wound so tight that touching myself in the shower felt less like relief and more like losing an argument.
I tried anyway.
It didn’t help.
By the time I got out, I was irritated, unsatisfied, late, and thinking about my head coach while my girlfriend sat in my kitchen wearing one of my shirts.
Vanessa looked up from her phone when I came in. Her hair was twisted up on top of her head, makeup softer than usual, bare legs crossed on one of the stools. She had made coffee. Actual coffee, not one of those iced things that tasted like dessert pretending to be productivity.
That should have made me feel something warm.
It made me feel guilty.
