Chapter 27
Anya
Something really stupid happened when you finally admitted to yourself that you’d fallen in love.
It was like I’d popped some sort of hallucinogenic drug and now just had to wait out the effects. Every noise in the house was amplified—the heavy tread of Parker’s steps outside my bedroom door echoed like a gunshot, the low murmur of his voice when he spoke to Leo hit my sensitive ears like a scream.
I wanted to know everything he was doing. Everything. Even worse, I wanted to watch him doing all those things. Since when did I have voyeuristic tendencies? Since marrying Parker Wilder, apparently. I’d never be able to tell him of course, because he’d hold that over my head with a gleeful smile on his face.
There was a sharp pang in my chest when my brain conjured up a vivid image of the way he’d tease me about that.
I’d gotten cocky, hadn’t I?
Making it out of the room without giving in to that man flooded me with a false sense of confidence. Pride cometh before the fall and whatever other bullshit people said.
Part of the problem was that I’d retreated to my room too early, and I wasn’t tired enough to sleep. I lay on the bed, my mind racing and the clock flashing as the minutes passed, yet sleep never came.
Training camp loomed and maybe that was why all the thoughts in my head were amplified. I should have been calmly thinking about what that would look like, about what kind of performance we’d be putting on. But when I did, a sick feeling turned my stomach, squeezing it dangerously until I felt like I had to take several deep breaths.
That setting wasn’t new to me. I’d visited the Wolves training camp for years, even before … the bile rose in my throat. Even before Max. And every time I showed up, every time I donned the black and red gear, did my hair, and made sure everything was perfect, I walked onto those fields knowing exactly what I was doing there.
It was, had always been, a safe place for me.
My hands shook where I had them clasped on top of my stomach.
It didn’t feel safe showing up for Parker at the Voyagers fields. Or at his games. Not anymore. There was very little in the way of logic attached, but being at the Wilders had imbued me with a false sense of security. It was a bubble, far removed from reality, and I hadn’t realized just how much. Upon our arrival back to his house, the safety net disappeared in a poof.
I was alone on that tightrope, stretched tight over the Grand freaking Canyon.
Sleep was pointless, so I finally sat up and tossed the covers back, resting my elbows on the tops of my thighs and sinking my head into my hands.
I stared at my phone for a moment and wondered if it was too late to call Vida. Our Vegas trip notwithstanding, Vida was an early to bed, early to rise sort of person. Something we’d always had in common, which was why living together had been so easy.
She’d know exactly what to tell me right now. My eyes pinched shut, because so would Isabel. God, if anything could make me cry, it was that. A desperate ache built under my skin, because I wanted to ask her a million questions. I’d heard the story of her and my dad enough times, she’d know exactly how I was feeling.
What did you do when you fell in love with someone who wasn’t emotionally ready to love you back?
My hand moved toward my phone, ready to damn the consequences of asking her exactly that when the screen lit up with a notification.
One year ago today , it said, and the knot in my stomach turned into a block of concrete. Like I was going to open those pictures. The universe had strange fucking timing, and if it were a person, I’d elbow them in the face so hard. The small preview of the photos in my cloud-based storage folder were big enough that I knew exactly what pictures they were.
The shared folder, training camp photos from last year, would be appearing on someone else’s phone right now too, and I found myself off the bed in the next heartbeat, the phone left on the nightstand.
If he was feeling particularly dimwitted, he might try to do something stupid like text or call, and I didn’t even want to see his name appear.
It felt like a mockery to those pictures now— look, Anya, look at where all this got you. What voice were you listening to for all those years? Your heart was quiet. Your gut knew something wasn’t right. And your brain was silent as the freaking tomb.
We numbed out in so many ways, didn’t we? We chose paths of least resistance when it benefited us, because we were biologically wired to avoid pain, to avoid the hard things we didn’t want to push through.
I wanted to slap my hands over my ears. I wanted to close my eyes. But there was a dangerous rumbling—something ominous building over the horizon, and I knew it would decimate me when that build crested into a painful, messy explosion.
Like navigating a minefield.
Not because of Max, because of me. Twenty-five years old didn’t seem like enough life lived to have these kinds of doubts and regrets. This was supposed to be the time of my life when I lived in blissful, unearned confidence that I knew what the fuck I was doing with my life.
I didn’t. Because all I wanted to do was walk across that hallway and just … be with him.
I wanted to lie in bed with him beside me, holding his hand over the blankets.
I wanted to give him a sweet kiss that didn’t lead to anything else.
I wanted to let him hold me because somehow, impossibly, he’d become one of my favorite people to be around, even when he was dark and broody and sad. When he was cocky and flirtatious and made me want to rip his clothes. When he was funny and thoughtful and showed his incredible ability to make people feel better.
More than anything, I wanted to be in his orbit and absorb the warmth he emitted without even trying because it was so ingrained in him. I wasn’t even sure he was aware of the potency.
My legs bounced restlessly as I turned it over and over and over in my head.
It would make everything harder. Everything.
It’s already hard , a voice whispered. I didn’t know where that voice came from, which part of me, and I didn’t particularly care.
I stared at my bedroom door, which I’d kept open just a tiny crack, and thought about how Parker had described something very similar to this. Messy explosions with every tiny reminder. Except my own form of loss didn’t deserve to hold this same type of pain. The thing I lost was good. It was healthy. Like cutting out an infection you didn’t even know was there, and I was the one who injected it under my skin.
Hadn’t he done the same thing? I’d watched him do it, even if each cut took him a while, and he’d fought it every step of the way, he’d still done it.
I pulled the door open and crossed the hall, pausing outside Parker’s closed door.
He didn’t leave it open, then. My hand curled in a fist at my side, and I couldn’t bring myself to knock. Leaning forward, I allowed my forehead to rest on the trim and let out a trembling sigh.
What was I going to ask anyway?
Hi, can I lay next to you? I promise I won’t mount you in your sleep.
A helpless, breathy laugh escaped because I couldn’t promise that. Not even close.
I lifted my chin and set my jaw because yes, I could. It was okay to admit that I liked being around him. That we were friends, for lack of a better term.
Friends who had given each other orgasms. And kissed occasionally. And … were married.
My hand raised before I made the decision, and I rapped lightly on the door, nerves flooding my entire body in a great, swooping rush. I could practically hear millions of wings battering my insides while I waited.
Then … nothing.
My brow furrowed, the nerves sliding into something bigger. Something scarier and far more vulnerable. I knocked again.
“You better not wake the baby, or you’ll be in so much trouble,” a deep voice came from the bottom of the stairs.
I whirled, hand slapping to my pounding chest as I watched him slowly ascend the steps. “Holy shit, Parker, you scared the hell out of me.”
His face was shadowed because it was dark downstairs, and it was only when he came closer that the light from my bedroom cut across his face—his jaw and mouth and cheekbones briefly highlighted in a way that made him look dangerous.
He was dangerous.
Everything in my body screamed it. It was in the goose bumps on my arms. The nervous pitch of my belly. The racing pulse and thundering heart. My senses were on high alert as he came closer, my head swimming as his scent got stronger as he took the last few steps.
There was a cocky glint in his eye, and God, I wanted to smack him.
“Quit looming,” I snapped. “You don’t intimidate me.”
“Not trying to,” he murmured, gaze tracing over my face, then down to the Voyagers T-shirt that I found in the guest closet, the one bearing his name. “What did you need, golden girl?”
Words. I needed words. And my sanity. And … I needed him.
When did Parker Wilder become the one thing that would make me feel better? How had that happened?
Dredging up the last shred of my sanity, I forced myself to say the thing I didn’t want to say. Mention the thing I didn’t want to mention.
“How did you deal with this?” I asked quietly.
His brow wrinkled. “What?”
I laid my hand over my chest, my eyes closing briefly. “The … explosions in your chest. I’ve tried … I’ve tried to ignore them. And I keep thinking about training camp tomorrow, and how I’ve been to so many, and it’s never felt this big. It’s never felt this …” My voice trailed off because the way Parker looked down at me made my stomach flip dangerously.
“Felt this what?” he whispered.
“Important,” I whispered back. “It feels like a performance. I don’t know how to do that with all those eyes watching.”
He took another step closer. “We just did.”
I dropped my gaze. “No, that was different. They weren’t judging. They wanted us to be happy. Your family wasn’t looking to pick us apart.”
Parker sucked in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “And you think the rest of the world will?”
“Yes,” I breathed. “Maybe not at first. But they will. They’ll search for a chink in the armor, and the second they find it, it’s a bloodbath.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed on a swallow, and he dropped his chin into his chest for a moment. He opened his mouth to say something, and I heard my ringtone inside my bedroom.
“I fucking knew it,” I muttered.
“Do you need to get that?”
It was so dark in the hallway, and it made him seem taller. Made him seem bigger. No matter what he said, he was looming, and my weak little heart wanted to lean into him, to let him take some of my weight for a while.
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I think it’s Max,” I whispered.
His eyes flared, and his gaze locked in on my room. “Why?”
I sighed. “We have a shared drive from training camp pictures, and … I just had one from last year pop up. I’m sure he got the notification too.”
The phone was still ringing, and it made my insides rattle dangerously. Partially because the look on Parker’s face was terrifying.
“And that hurts you?” he asked quietly. “That gives you those explosions?”
“No,” I answered after a beat. “It’s not him, it’s … me. It’s what I did to end up there. What I didn’t do. I’m not blaming myself for his problems, but I still have some accountability in how my own life turns out. How I ended up here, and … I hate thinking about it. I hate it.”
The admission hung between us, and I desperately wanted to pull it back. Wanted to make it disappear. Admitting your own pride was a particularly bitter thing to say out loud, but he’d set his aside so many times. He’d said the ugly things, the hard things, and not only was he still standing, he was one of the strongest people I knew.
“I hate it,” I said again. “I am not a weak person, and the fact that I stayed with him makes me feel that way, and I don’t know how to make that feeling go away. Everyone will try to tell me it’s fine and they understand and I didn’t do anything wrong, but that doesn’t make it stop.” I stepped closer, allowing my forehead to rest briefly on his chest. “How do I make it go away?”
Parker’s hands ghosted up the line of my back, and I melted briefly into his touch. Then he carefully set me back so he could look down into my face.
His expression was fierce. “I know a good place to start.”
He brushed past me, his crisp, clean scent making my head spin, and for a second, all I could do was stare dumbly at his back as he disappeared.
I blinked. Then rushed after him, grabbing blindly at his shirt to tug him backward. “Hold on, what are you doing?”
It was like trying to slow down a freaking truck with my bare hands. If there was room on the floor, I would’ve taken his ass down so fast.
My phone was in his hand, and the screen illuminated as the ringtone started.
Max Bridges calling.
Parker’s gaze was incendiary, and I couldn’t look away. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
“With my life,” I told him. There was no hesitation, not a single part of me that begged me to slow down or think about how I answered that.
His eyes gleamed, lips hooking up on the side as he brought the phone to his ear.
“Bridges,” he answered pleasantly. “It’s Parker.”
There was a beat of silence on the other end of the phone, then the sound of Max’s spluttering came through. I was standing close enough to Parker that I could hear everything.
“Where’s Anya? I called her, not you.”
Parker’s gaze stayed locked on mine. He never flinched, never wavered. I hardly dared blink. Definitely couldn’t breathe. And my heart, it was lodged smack in the center of my throat.
“Yeah, see, I have a problem with that,” Parker said smoothly. Max started saying something, but Parker interrupted. “Even more, Anya has a problem with that, and even though she doesn’t need me to, that’s the point when I step in. So I’ll just say this once, and I’ll keep my words small so you understand.”
“You fucking?—”
“Oh no, we’re not doing that,” Parker interrupted. “Play nice, Max, and I will too. I don’t really like that you’re calling her.”
“I’m not trying to get her back, you prick. I’m just trying to talk to her.”
I had to clench my teeth at the flare of rage so hot that it felt like it was melting my bones. Parker saw it in my face, a slight narrowing of his eyes. “I’m glad to hear that.” He tilted his chin, the heavy-lidded look in his eye tightening my nipples, and I licked at my suddenly dry lips. “Because you can’t have her back,” he stated. “First and most importantly, because she doesn’t want you, and second, I don’t particularly like sharing things that are mine.”
It was outrageous. Archaic. The overt, chest-thumping display of possession had never appealed to me in my entire life, but hell if I couldn’t feel every ounce of feminism leave my body when he said it.
With the race of my pulse thundering in my ears, I couldn’t hear what Max said.
Parker’s expression hardened, his voice dropping to a low growl. “Stop calling my wife. If I see your name on her phone again, you and I will have a problem. Believe me, you don’t want that. Now … you go enjoy your night because I fucking promise, I’ll be enjoying mine.”
He hung up, and the phone fell onto the nightstand with a loud clatter.
I didn’t want to know if this was pretend. I didn’t want to know if that testosterone-fueled display wasn’t real. I wanted his jealousy. Wanted his possessive hands everywhere on my body. There wasn’t a whisper of caution anywhere, maybe because I couldn’t hear anything over my raw, blinding need for him.
We stood there staring, my chest heaving as I tried desperately to pull air into my lungs. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to breathe again until this man kissed me.
I didn’t know who moved first, but in the next heartbeat, Parker’s mouth was on mine.