I let out a breath that shakes all over again.
“I hate that.”
“I know.”
I pull back just enough to look at him.
His face is softer in the firelight.
Still broad and rough and absurdly male.
Still all those hard planes and big shoulders and callused hands and cut-off-hoodie neanderthal nonsense.
But here, like this, there’s something else too.
A steadiness I didn’t expect.
A patience I didn’t ask for and somehow got anyway.
His thumb brushes one damp piece of hair back from my cheek.
“You don’t have to be okay tonight,” he says.
My throat tightens again.
Because everyone else in my life—my mother, my teammates, coaches, trainers—always wants progress. Composure. Recovery. A timeline.
Drew just gives me permission to be ruined.
And that might be the kindest thing anyone has ever done to me.
So I nod once.
Tiny.
Broken.
And let him pull me back against his chest.
He strokes my hair.
My back.
The space between my shoulders where everything still feels too tight.
Outside, the rain keeps washing the world clean.
Inside, I sit in a giant old football T-shirt in the arms of the last man on earth I ever pictured being safe.
And slowly, through the wreckage and the wet and the ruin of wanting the wrong boy for too long, one truth begins to settle like warmth back into my bones:
I did lose him.
But I’m not alone in the losing.
Not tonight.
My phone starts vibrating somewhere under the blanket.
