Chapter 3
Bliss
By the time Aura decided my outfit needed legal intervention, Charm was sitting cross-legged on my bed with a curling iron in one hand, a slice of cold pizza in the other, and the kind of confidence that only came from being raised in a house where people casually used words like foyer without irony.
“No,” Aura said from inside my closet.
I looked down at myself. “No what?”
“That.”
“That is so specific. Thank you.”
She stepped out holding the black top I’d already rejected twice and gave me a look sharp enough to pass the bar exam early. “You are not wearing a giant sweatshirt to Hockey House.”
“It’s not giant. It’s comfortably spacious and looks cute as a dress.”
Charm pointed the curling iron at me without looking away from her reflection in my vanity mirror. “Baby, it could house a family of four and their unresolved generational trauma.”
I glanced down at the oversized KFU hoodie swallowing half my body, then back at them. “It’s raining.”
“It’s misting,” Aura corrected.
“It’s Northern Michigan. That’s commitment issues.”
Charm grinned around her pizza. “And yet somehow Cade Mercer will survive seeing your arms.”
The second she said his name, warmth crept up the back of my neck so fast I wanted to throw something at her, preferably something soft enough not to damage her face because Charm Harlen’s face was expensive in a way mine and Aura’s had never been.
Not because she acted like it. That was the thing about Charm.
She came from the kind of Sutton County money that lived behind iron gates and old trees, but she had never once made us feel like we were visiting from a different planet.
Her parents had money, real money, the kind that didn’t announce itself with logos because it had been sitting in investment accounts since before any of us were born.
But Charm had shown up in sixth grade wearing glitter sneakers, crying in the bathroom because some girl told her she talked too much, and Aura had told the girl that was brave commentary coming from someone whose entire personality came from a clearance rack, while I handed Charm a paper towel and asked if she wanted to sit with us at lunch.
That was it. Our very own origin story of The ABC’s.
Aura, Bliss, and Charm.
It sounded ridiculous when adults said it, like we were a girl group from a children’s show, but to us it had always meant something else.
It meant emergency sleepovers and shared lip gloss and three toothbrushes in every house because somebody was always staying the night.
It meant Aura knowing I hated orange soda before I knew I hated orange soda.
It meant Charm’s mom buying three matching Christmas pajama sets every year because by seventh grade, she had stopped pretending Aura and I weren’t partly hers.
It meant my dad, Daniel, and Aura’s dad, Ray, working the same fire department for so long that our families had blurred together before we were old enough to understand where one house ended and the other began.
Aura and I had been stuck with each other since we were born. Charm became inevitable by twelve. By now, there was no version of my life where they didn’t exist in the framework holding me up. There was a time they kept me breathing without even knowing that was what they were doing.
Aura tossed the black top at my chest. I caught it on reflex.
“Put it on,” she said. “Then the jeans. Then boots. Then we discuss whether your hair needs volume or secular intervention.”
I paused with the shirt clutched against me. “Secular intervention?”
“You get weird when I say divine.”
“My dad raised me right.”
“Your dad raised you to apologize to vending machines and overthink eye contact with attractive men.”
Charm lowered the curling iron with a dramatic sigh. “Honestly, both are very on brand.”
“That machine took my money,” I muttered.
Aura disappeared back into my closet, already working the situation like a courtroom. “Also, before you deflect with jokes, are you actually asking Cade about the project tonight?”
I pulled the hoodie over my head and reached for the black top. “I was thinking about it.”
Charm made a sound so rude it barely qualified as human. “You’ve been thinking about it since Simpson assigned it.”
“I have not.”
Aura’s head appeared around the closet door. “You wrote his name in the margin of your syllabus.”
I froze with one arm halfway through the sleeve.
Charm’s grin turned lethal. “You wrote his name?”
“It was for academic purposes.”
“You wrote Cade Mercer’s name in the margin and called it education. That is the sluttiest thing you’ve done since sophomore year.”
I shoved my other arm through the sleeve and yanked the shirt down. “I hate both of you.”
“No, you don’t,” Aura said calmly. “You need us. Without us, you’d wear oversized hockey hoodies to parties and pretend you don’t notice six-foot-four hockey captains staring at you like you’re the answer to a question they’re too emotionally repressed to ask.”
The room went hot for a second.
Charm’s mouth fell open. “Aura, that was terrifying.”
“It was truth.”
“It was poetry.”
“It was evidence.”
I turned toward the mirror because looking at them was dangerous when they were like this, all sharp smiles and sister energy, ganging up on me with love disguised as harassment.
The black top did look better. Of course it did.
It skimmed instead of swallowed, soft enough to look casual but fitted enough that I could already hear Charm taking credit for Cade’s imaginary reaction.
“He doesn’t stare at me like that,” I said.
Charm stood, abandoning her pizza crust on a napkin like a woman preparing for war. “Bliss.”
“What?”
She came up behind me in the mirror and met my eyes through the reflection. “That man looks at you like he’s mentally removing everyone else from the room for efficiency.”
Aura nodded from the closet. “Very organized obsession. Honestly, on brand for him.”
My stomach did the stupid fluttery thing I refused to name because naming things made them real, and Cade Mercer did not need to be real in that way.
He was a human-interest subject. A good idea.
A year-long project centered around identity and public image and the carefully curated mythology surrounding college athletes who walked through campus like they’d been built by donor money, ego, and people telling them yes too often.
Which honestly made him perfect for the assignment.
Athletes were performers before they were people half the time.
I’d spent most of my life around them. My brothers.
Their teammates. The endless rotation of cocky boys raised on attention, competition, and the certainty that rules somehow bent softer for them.
Hockey players were the worst of all. Beautiful, worshipped, emotionally allergic to accountability, and somehow always shocked when girls eventually got tired of being treated like temporary entertainment.
My ex-boyfriend Luke had confirmed everything I already thought I knew. He was the poster child for what happened when charm gave a man access he never should’ve had.
Which was exactly why Cade Mercer could never be a real possibility.
Interesting? Absolutely.
Attractive? Unfortunately.
But actually date an athlete? Fuck no. A hockey player? Hard fucking no. You know that trend where women say whether they’d trust a bear or a man?
I will always trust the bear.
Besides, Cade was not a crush and definitely not the reason my pulse had started acting weird every time I imagined walking into Hockey House tonight and seeing him there, calm and unreadable, probably leaning against a counter like the entire party had formed around his boredom.
“I’m asking him because he’s interesting,” I said.
“Mm-hmm,” Charm said.
Aura emerged with my boots. “He is interesting. He’s also intense, rich, emotionally complicated, and clearly watching you.”
“That sounds like your dream client.”
“That sounds like a liability with dimples.”
Charm snapped her fingers. “Put that on a shirt.”
I laughed despite myself, and for a second everything felt normal enough to hurt.
My room was crowded with the scent of A Thousand Wishes body spray, rain dampening the window screen, Charm’s expensive perfume, and the faint buttery grease of the pizza we had sworn we weren’t going to eat before going out.
Clothes were scattered everywhere. My makeup bag had exploded across the vanity.
Aura’s phone kept buzzing with texts she pretended not to care about, which meant they were absolutely from Easton Wade, and Charm was dancing softly to music coming from my speaker while trying to curl the back pieces of my hair without burning either of us.
This was our ritual.
Getting ready was never just getting ready.
It was surveillance, strategy, fashion, therapy, comedy, and damage control wrapped into one chaotic hour where they pretended not to be worried and I pretended not to need them to be.
Aura handed me my boots, but her expression had shifted before she even spoke. “Have you heard from him?”
The room did not go quiet. Not exactly. Charm still moved behind me.
The music still played low from the speaker.
Rain still tapped softly against the glass.
But something in the air tightened with the kind of familiarity none of us ever acknowledged too directly because if we named it too clearly, it became harder to laugh around.
I looked down at the boots in my hands. “Not really.”
Aura’s eyes sharpened. “Bliss.”
“I haven’t seen him in a while,” I said, which was true if I kept the sentence narrow enough. “I mean, I can always feel him watching. That doesn’t exactly go away. But he hasn’t done the dramatic parking-lot lurking thing or the jump-out-of-the-bushes-at-night thing lately.”
Charm’s hand paused near my hair. “That’s not funny.”
“I know.”