Dad watched us carefully.
Hunter turned back to him. “I’ll ask for a trade.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
Hunter didn’t look at me. “I’ll talk to management. If this becomes a conflict, I’ll ask out.”
“No,” I said.
“Catherine.” His voice was low. “I can absorb the hit better than you can.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Catherine—”
“No.” My voice cracked. “You don’t get to blow up your life and call it protecting me.”
The room went very still. Dad and Mom were silent. For once, neither of them interrupted. Hunter looked at me, and the pain in his face almost undid me.
“I don’t know how to do this without hurting you,” he said quietly.
My tears came harder.
“I don’t know how to do it without hurting you either,” I replied. We had hit a dead end. The thing neither of us had wanted to look at too closely because sex and texts and stolen nights had made it easy to pretend the answer would appear if we loved each other hard enough. But love, or whatever terrifying almost-love this was, did not change the fact that he was the Dallas Blaze captain and I was the coach’s daughter working with the team.
Mom squeezed my hand. Dad looked exhausted. Hunter stood slowly.
“I’m sorry, Cole. I never meant to hurt you or your family,” he said, his head bowed.
I looked up at him. “Where are you going?”
His throat moved. “Home. You should be with your family.”
“We haven’t solved anything,” I said, feeling like my heart was cracking in two.
“I know,” he replied, completely defeated.
“Hunter.”
He looked at my parents, then back at me. “I’m sorry.”
I stood too. “Don’t.”
His eyes held mine. For one second, the room disappeared. My parents. The team. The consequences. All of it. There were only him and me. Only the man who had made me feel wanted, safe, and seen, now standing in my parents’ living room looking like he was breaking in two.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
I nodded. Then he left. The door closed behind him quietly. That was worse than if he had slammed it. I stood there for a few seconds after he was gone, staring at the empty space he left behind. Then I turned and walked to my room before anyone could stop me. The second the door shut, I broke. I cried into my pillow like I was sixteen again. Like the world had narrowed to one impossible ache. Like I had finally found something I wanted with my whole chest and the wanting itself had become the problem. I did not know how long I cried before there was a soft knock on my door.
“CC?”
Mom.
I wiped my face even though there was no point. “Come in.”
The door opened slowly, and she stepped inside. She looked less like my mother the doctor and more like my mother who had once sat on the bathroom floor with me after Julian broke my heart and told me I didn’t have to be okay before I was ready. She closed the door behind her and sat on the edge of my bed. For a minute, neither of us spoke. Then I said the thing that had been tearing through me since Hunter walked out.
“I’m falling in love with him.”
