Chapter 17
seventeen
SOPHIE
Mike goes statue-still when I first press my lips to his, every muscle in his body locking up like he’s processing a play that wasn’t in the game plan. For one horrifying second, I’m convinced he’s going to push me away, that I’ve completely misread every lingering glance and careful touch.
That I’ve just torched our friendship in a spectacular blaze of misplaced hormones and emotional vulnerability.
But then I fist my hands in his shirt and tug him closer with a desperation that surprises us both. He melts against me with a sound that’s half surprise, half surrender, and pure electricity races down my spine like someone’s injected lightning directly into my veins.
His lips are even softer than I remember, like velvet and peppermint and promises I shouldn’t want to hear. For a moment, I let myself dissolve into the kiss, into the familiar heat of his mouth and that clean soap-and-cedar scent that’s uniquely his.
It feels like an eternity since that night at my apartment, but my body has a photographic memory when it comes to Mike Altman—every nerve-ending sparking to life with recognition. The way we fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle someone had cruelly separated.
But even as liquid heat pools low in my belly, doubt slithers in through the cracks between the puzzle pieces. This is Mike. My dad’s golden-boy captain. The guy who sits through my anxiety spirals without his eyes glazing over, the guy who somehow decodes the mess of my emotions better than I can.
What the hell am I doing?
When I first reached for him, it felt inevitable—like gravity, like breathing, like coming home. After everything he’d said about me not being broken, after the way he’d looked at me like I was some kind of miracle instead of a walking disaster, I couldn’t not kiss him.
My hands moved of their own accord, my body making decisions my brain was too exhausted to veto.
But now that our lips are actually touching, now that I’m tasting spearmint gum and the faint sweetness of sports-drink on his tongue, now that the solid wall of his chest beneath my palms makes me want to climb him like a particularly attractive tree, the magnitude of what I’m gambling hits me.
One of his hands comes up to cradle my face with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious artifacts, his thumb tracing the arc of my cheekbone, while his other arm bands around my waist, eliminating every molecule of space between us until I can feel his heart hammering against mine.
God, I’d forgotten how being held by Mike Altman feels like being simultaneously set on fire and wrapped in the world’s safest blanket. My body is writing checks my mind knows it can’t cash, muscle memory taking over where logic fails.
The way he kisses like we have decades of experience with each other instead of moments, slow and thorough and devastating. The way his fingers had tangled in my hair that night, tugging just hard enough to make me gasp and ask him for more.
The way he’d asked about everything I liked and mapped every sensitive spot on my body with the focused intensity of someone studying for an exam, then used that knowledge to take me apart piece by piece until I was nothing but sensation and his name on my lips.
It would be so easy to fall back into that warm darkness, to let him drive me home and spend another night learning each other’s bodies like they’re written in braille.
To discover what other sounds I can pull from his throat, what other ways I can make his careful control shatter into beautiful pieces.
It would be even better now, enhanced by context and connection. But that’s exactly why I can’t do this. That’s why this kiss tastes like goodbye even as it feels like a beginning. And it’s clear that I’m not the only one who’s thinking it, because Mike is the one who breaks the kiss.
His hands are gentle but firm on my shoulders as he creates just enough space for rational thought to creep back in. My stomach performs a triple lutz straight into free fall, every self-preservation instinct screaming that I’ve ruined everything.
He’s going to tell me this was a mistake, that we should pretend it never happened, that I’ve crossed a line we can’t uncross. I’ve taken the one uncomplicated good thing in my life and complicated it beyond repair because apparently I have the impulse control of a caffeinated squirrel.
“Sophie.” His voice sounds like gravel and honey, rough and sweet. “What are we doing?”
I blink up at him. My brain is approximately seventy percent static, twenty percent want, and ten percent sheer panic. “I… what?”
“Is this what you really want?” His eyes search mine with an intensity that makes me feel like I’m under a microscope.
I find it hard to respond immediately— damn you, static! —but there’s something achingly vulnerable in his expression, a crack in his armor that reveals the soft uncertainty beneath. And I realize, for the first time, that he’s been waiting for me to take the leap, but wants to make sure I’m ready.
He continues. “Because this is definitely what I want, but I need to make sure we’re on the same page, and that we’re doing this with clear heads and open eyes.”
The doubt must be written across my face in neon letters because I watch his expression shift in real-time.
He’d interpreted my kiss as a declaration, a definitive yes to the question that’s been hovering between us since he walked out of the poetry reading.
But now he’s second-guessing, recalibrating, trying to read the mixed signals I’m broadcasting.
“What do you mean?” My voice emerges smaller than intended, like it’s been shrunk in the wash.
“Soph, we’re friends.” He doesn’t release my shoulders, but his grip gentles. “Friends who just dumped a whole lot of emotional baggage on each other like we’re in joint therapy or something. And you were already wound tight when we got here, fresh off that clash with your dad.”
I feel my face flush. Of course. He thinks I’m using him as a human Band-Aid, slapping him over my emotional wounds and hoping he’ll magically heal everything. And the worst part is, he might not be entirely wrong, and the thought makes my stomach churn.
“I don’t want us hooking up just because we’re looking for comfort,” he continues. “Not when I get validation by looking after others, and you’re clearly needing a lot of support right now. Support I’m happy to give, by the way, but that doesn’t have to come with a relationship attached…”
He’s right. Of course he’s right. Mike is being the responsible adult while I’m the one making choices with my hormones instead of my brain. I step back, needing oxygen and objectivity, but Mike catches my hand before I can retreat to a safe distance.
“Wait.” He grabs my hand. “If we’re kissing because we actually want each other—because you feel even a fraction of what I feel, like you’re this constant presence in my head and I can’t shake you no matter how hard I try—then that’s a whole different conversation.”
My heart forgets how to beat. It just stops dead in my chest like someone pulled the emergency brake. “You… you think about me?”
A self-deprecating smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, and it’s unfairly attractive. “Are you kidding? Sophie, I’ve been thinking about you since the second you walked into that bar looking like trouble in a nursing school sweatshirt. And now that I actually know you, it’s so much worse.”
“Worse?” I echo, trying to process this information with a brain that’s apparently gone offline for maintenance.
“I think about you during practice when I should be focused on plays. During class, I’m doodling your initials in my margins like I’m thirteen years old.” He smirks. “I check my phone constantly like some kind of lovesick teenager, hoping you’ve texted.”
When he pauses, I know I should say something, but all I can do is stare at him, mouth slightly agape.
He continues. “I lie awake at night replaying our conversations like game tape, analyzing every smile, every laugh, every time you touched my arm, wondering if you feel the same as I do. I wonder if you think about that night at your apartment even half as much as I do, because I think about it constantly.”
“Mike…” His name comes out breathless, like I’ve been running full speed, trying to keep up with my mom.
“I think about you—about it —at extremely inappropriate times. During team meetings. During class. During—” He cuts himself off, color rising in his cheeks like a tide. “Sorry, that’s probably way too much information, because I’m basically admitting to being a creep.”
“No,” I whisper, my voice barely audible over the thundering of my pulse. “It’s not too much. It’s…”
Perfect. Terrifying. It’s everything I want and everything I know I can’t have wrapped up in six feet of muscle and terrible jokes and surprising emotional intelligence.
Mike releases a short, embarrassed laugh. “Look at me with the word vomit. Smooth move that drives women wild.”
I can’t stop the smile that spreads across my face, even though my chest feels like someone’s sitting on it. “It’s kind of endearing, actually.”
“Endearing?” He looks physically pained. “Just what every guy dreams of hearing. Right there with ‘you’re like a brother’ and ‘you have a great personality.’”
“Would you prefer ‘devastatingly-sexy’?” The words slip out before my brain can intercept them, apparently my mouth has decided to go rogue.
His eyes darken to the color of deep forest shadows. “I wouldn’t object, to be honest.”
The joke doesn’t seem to lift the heaviness of the moment as we stand there, breathing the same air and trying to navigate this minefield. I’m still holding his hand and his thumb traces patterns on my skin like he’s writing secrets only my nerves understand.
My heart hammers against my ribs. “Mike?—”