Chapter 24
DECLAN
Jace broke in my arms without warning.
Not dramatically. Not the way people broke in movies, with clean sobs and pretty grief.
It came out of him jagged and disorganized, like his body had been holding too many signals for too long and finally lost the ability to sort them.
His hands clenched in the back of my shirt.
His forehead hit my shoulder. He shook once, hard enough that Tiny whined against his leg.
“I’ve got you,” I said, keeping my voice low. “You’re inside. Door’s locked. Feet on the floor. My hand on your back.”
He dragged in air, but it caught halfway.
“Again,” I said. “Don’t make it good. Just make it happen.”
His breath came rough against my neck.
“That’s it.”
“I hurt her,” he got out.
“I know.”
“She looked at me like I was a stranger.”
I held the back of his neck, thumb steady against the tense muscle there. “You told her enough truth to end it.”
“Not all of it.”
“No.”
His fingers tightened.
“I’m not going to dress that up for you,” I said. “But you did not keep her in it another month because facing this felt awful. That matters.”
“It doesn’t feel like it matters.”
“Not tonight.”
Tiny shoved his head between us as if emotional distress required his personal inspection. Jace gave a wet, broken laugh into my shirt when the dog’s jowls smashed against his hip.
“Tiny,” I said.
Tiny ignored me, leaned harder, and licked Jace’s wrist.
“Jesus,” Jace muttered. “Your dog is damp.”
“He’s committed.”
Jace’s laugh cracked apart again, and I shifted, bringing him in tighter. I had held injured teammates on the ice. My brothers after bad calls from home. Olivia once, years ago, in an airport when her mother had surgery and she couldn’t get a flight out until morning.
This was different.
Not because Jace needed more. Because I wanted to give more than I had any right to give.
“Look at me,” I said.
It took him a second. He lifted his head, eyes red, face drawn with exhaustion and guilt.
He looked twenty-three in that moment, not young in a childish way, but young enough that the weight he was carrying pissed me off at the world, at myself, at every decision that had led him to my front hall trembling in a jacket that still smelled like cold air.
“You are not too much because you’re having a bad night,” I said.
His mouth twisted.
“Don’t argue with me in your head.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
“I was a little.”
“Then stop.”
That got his breathing steadier by a fraction.
I unzipped his jacket and eased it off his shoulders. He let me. That trust moved through me like heat under skin. I hung it on the hook by the door, then bent and tugged his sneakers loose one at a time. He looked down at me like he didn’t know what to do with being cared for in such a plain way.
“Phone,” I said.
He blinked. “What?”
“Phone.”
He patted the wrong pocket first, then the right, then handed it over. His fingers were cold. I checked the screen, not his messages, just the battery and notifications crowding the top.
“Text Roman,” I said. “Alive.”
He winced. “Now?”
“Now.”
He took the phone back, thumbs moving too fast and then stopping. “If I text weird, he’ll call.”
“Then text simple.”
Jace swallowed, typed, erased, typed again, and showed me without being asked.
Alive. Home safe. Talk tomorrow.
The word home sat there between us.
He noticed a second after I did.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean...”
“Send it.”
He looked at me.
“Send it, Jace.”
He did.
I took the phone and set it on the entry table. “Kitchen.”
“I don’t think I can eat.”
“You don’t have to eat a meal. You’re having water and two bites of something.”
“That sounds like a hostage situation.”
“It’s a cracker situation. Keep moving.”
Tiny escorted us with great seriousness, shoulder pressed to Jace’s thigh like he had been assigned protective detail.
In the kitchen, Jace finally looked around.
Not much. Enough to see the coffee mug in the sink, Tiny’s massive food bowl, the mail stacked by the counter, the dish towel Olivia had bought in Vermont three years ago because she’d said mine looked like evidence.
His gaze snagged on it.
So did mine.
There it was. My real life. Not hidden. Not cruel. Just present.
I filled a glass of water and slid it toward him.
He drank because I watched him.
I put three crackers and a piece of cheese on a plate. He stared at it like I’d asked him to solve advanced math.
“Two bites,” I said.
He ate one cracker slowly, then half the cheese. “I feel like shit.”
“You’re going to.”
“Great bedside manner, Coach.”
“Would lying help?”
“No.”
“Then no.”
His shoulders sagged. He looked so tired it made my chest hurt.
I stepped closer and brushed my fingers over the back of his hand. “You’re done performing tonight.”
The words hit him harder than I expected. His face tightened. He nodded once.
I took him upstairs.
My bedroom was dark except for the lamp I turned on low. Tiny barged in ahead of us, circled twice on the rug, then stared at Jace as if waiting for him to make better choices.
Jace stood by the bed and looked lost.
“Arms up,” I said.
He obeyed without the usual comment, which told me enough. I pulled his hoodie over his head, then the T-shirt beneath it. His skin was warm under my hands, muscles tense from holding himself together too long. I undid his jeans.
His breath caught.
“Not that,” I said quietly. “Not unless you ask with a clear head.”
He nodded, jaw working.
I pushed his jeans down and helped him step out, leaving him in black boxer briefs. There were bruises on his thigh from the last game, yellow at the edges. A thin scar near his ribs. His hands fidgeted at his sides until I caught one and squeezed.
“Bed.”
He climbed in, stiff at first, like he didn’t know where to put his limbs in my space. I stripped down to my briefs, turned off the lamp, and got in behind him. Tiny let out a huff from the rug, then flopped down with enough force to shake the floor.
Jace made a small sound when I slid an arm around his waist and pulled his back to my chest.
“You okay with this?”
“Yeah,” he whispered.
I tucked him in close, my knees behind his, my palm spread over his stomach. He was still vibrating under his skin.
“Listen to me,” I said against the back of his head. “Nothing else gets solved tonight. Not Vanessa. Not Olivia. Not Roman. Not the team. Tonight you breathe, sleep, and let your body come down.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“Then I stay awake until it does.”
He was quiet a long time.
“That’s not fair to you.”
I pressed my mouth to his hair. “Let me decide what I can give.”
His hand covered mine on his stomach. He held on like he needed the proof.
So I talked.
Not about us. Not about consequences. I talked about Tiny eating drywall as a puppy.
About Owen convincing Nate he could grill a frozen turkey if he started early enough.
About the worst minor league bus trip I’d ever had, twelve hours with no heat and a rookie who wouldn’t stop playing harmonica until our captain threw it out a window at a gas station.
Jace’s breathing changed halfway through the harmonica story.
His body got heavier. His fingers loosened around mine. Every so often, he twitched like his brain was still firing off alarms in sleep, and I tightened my arm until he settled.
Sometime after midnight, he finally went under.
I didn’t sleep for a long time.
I lay with him in my bed and stared at the dark wall, feeling the shape of him against me and the shape of my choices around us. Olivia’s towel in the kitchen. Her shoes in the closet. Her name in my phone. Jace’s car outside my house.
I had crossed lines before. I had told myself each one had a reason.
This one had an address.
Morning came gray and quiet.
I woke before my alarm, still curled around Jace. Tiny snored from the floor with obscene commitment. Jace was asleep on his stomach now, one arm under the pillow, hair wrecked, mouth soft. Without the movement and the jokes and the sharp brightness of him, he looked painfully unguarded.
I liked him here.
That truth landed without mercy.
I liked his clothes on my chair. His phone charging on my dresser.
His bare foot hooked outside the blanket.
I liked that Tiny had accepted him as if the house had been waiting for him.
I liked waking up and not feeling the immediate, familiar emptiness of a room built for two people who rarely occupied it together.
Then guilt followed, heavy and deserved.
Olivia and I needed to talk.
Not someday. Not when the timing was convenient. Not after I figured out how to make the damage smaller. There was no clean version left. There was only honest or cowardly.
Jace shifted.
His eyes opened slowly, unfocused at first. Then they found me.
“You’re staring,” he mumbled.
“Yes.”
“Creepy.”
“A little.”
His mouth curved, tired and small. “How long?”
“Long enough.”
His gaze moved over my face. The sleep left him in pieces. Awareness came in behind it, where he was, what had happened, what it meant.
He didn’t pull away.
I brushed his hair back from his forehead. “How’s your head?”
“Quiet.” He swallowed. “For now.”
“Good.”
His eyes dropped to my mouth.
The air altered, slow and unmistakable. Not panic. Not escape. Want, waking up warm under the blankets.
I leaned in and kissed him.
He opened for me with a sound that went straight through my spine. Morning made it different. No hotel urgency. No phone distance. No parked car panic. He was in my bed, under my hands, and I had hours before the world could ask anything of us.
I rolled him onto his back and kissed him until his breathing turned uneven. Then I moved lower, mouth along his jaw, his throat, the hollow beneath it. He gripped my shoulders when I drew one nipple between my lips.
“Dec,” he breathed.