Chapter 4
Bliss
The second we turned onto Athlete Row, the bass from Hockey House hit hard enough to vibrate through the wet pavement beneath my boots.
Pink and yellow Fury lights glowed from the massive front windows, cutting through the misty northern Michigan night while bodies crowded the lawn and spilled off the wraparound porch in loud, laughing clusters.
Music thundered through the open front door every time somebody went in or out, mixing with shouts, beer bottles clinking together, and the unmistakable energy of college students making terrible decisions before classes had technically even started.
Charm let out a low whistle beside me. “Okay, this is aggressively hockey.”
“This is a lawsuit waiting to happen,” Aura corrected as she counted all the underage partiers.
I laughed quietly, but my eyes moved automatically over the crowd anyway. Porch. Driveway. Windows. Street. Cars. Faces. Movement.
Safe.
At least for now.
The tension in my shoulders loosened slightly as we climbed the porch steps together, all three of us moving in instinctive formation after years of practice. Charm in front. Me in the middle. Aura behind me. Casual enough nobody else would notice it. Intentional enough that we all did.
The front door opened before we even reached it.
Briggs Lawson stood there shirtless for absolutely no reason except apparently the universe occasionally enjoyed testing women’s desire to make responsible choices.
“There they are,” he announced dramatically. “The only three girls at KFU capable of making hockey players temporarily normal.”
Charm walked straight past him into the house. “You say things like a man who has absolutely failed a drug test before.”
“Twice,” Briggs admitted proudly.
Aura shook her head. “You should not say that out loud.”
“Why? Transparency builds trust.”
I stepped into the entryway behind them and immediately got hit with warmth, music, and the overwhelming scent of beer, cologne, detergent, sweat, pizza, and whatever expensive candle some girl had apparently lit in the kitchen in a wildly optimistic attempt to make Hockey House smell less like twenty men with athletic scholarships.
The place was massive in the way athlete housing only got when donors confused sports with religion.
Dark wood floors. Giant stone fireplace.
Oversized sectional packed with bodies. Fury flags hanging from the walls beside framed hockey photos and old championship memorabilia.
The kitchen island was already covered in alcohol, pizza boxes, chips, and enough liquor to qualify as a public safety concern.
And somehow, despite the chaos, my eyes found Cade Mercer almost instantly.
Fuck, remember the bear, Bliss.
He stood near the kitchen talking to Rider and Ryan Decker, one hand wrapped around a beer bottle while the other rested casually in the pocket of gray sweats that probably cost more than my monthly Jeep payment because rich people loved making loungewear financially threatening.
Black hoodie pushed up at the sleeves. Dark hair slightly damp like he’d showered recently.
Calm expression. Sharp jaw. Entire body language screaming controlled while the house detonated around him.
Then his eyes lifted, straight to me. Warmth climbed my throat so fast it annoyed me immediately.
“Gross,” Charm whispered beside me.
I elbowed her lightly. “Stop.”
“You stop looking at him like he just stepped out of your fantasy.”
“I’m literally not.”
Aura glanced between us before her attention shifted somewhere over my shoulder and her entire expression softened.
Oh.
Oh, no.
I followed her line of sight toward the staircase where Easton Wade leaned against the railing watching her with the kind of quiet focus that made me want to throw up a little from secondhand emotional tension.
“There’s that look,” Charm muttered proudly. “The defenseman is down catastrophic.”
Aura’s cheeks flushed faintly. “You’re both dramatic.”
“You’re smiling at him,” I whispered.
“I am not.”
“You absolutely are,” Charm agreed. “And tomorrow we are dissecting every second of whatever weird emotionally constipated flirting thing you two have going on.”
Aura straightened her jacket instantly. “There’s nothing going on.”
Easton lifted one hand from across the room in a small wave and Aura waved back before she could stop herself.
Charm grabbed my arm hard enough to nearly dislocate it. “Oh shit, this is priceless.”
Aura looked horrified. “I hate both of you.”
“You love us,” I said automatically.
“Unfortunately.”
Briggs reappeared carrying shots. “Okay, before everyone starts confessing feelings and ruining the vibe, who’s playing beer pong?”
“Not me,” Aura said immediately.
“Coward.”
“Law student.”
“Same thing.”
“Beer pong!” somebody screamed from the dining room.
“Poker table’s full!”
“Who took my White Claws?”
“Hot tub!” another voice shouted from somewhere upstairs.
The entire house erupted again. And through all of it, Cade was still looking at me. Not intensely. Not weirdly.
Just steadily.
Like he noticed me in a room full of noise easier than he noticed anything else.
Which honestly should not have affected me as much as it did considering I had spent most of my life actively avoiding men exactly like him.
Athletes were fun until they weren’t and that was the problem.
Everybody loved hockey players when they were smiling in jerseys and signing things and buying girls drinks.
Nobody talked enough about the ego underneath it all.
The constant attention. The girls. The entitlement.
The cheating that somehow always became the girlfriend’s fault eventually.
I’d grown up surrounded by athletes between my brothers, their teammates, and Sutton County’s entire obsession with sports culture.
Different uniforms.
Same chaos.
Luke had confirmed every ugly thing I already believed. Which was why Cade Mercer being attractive was deeply inconvenient and absolutely irrelevant.
I would never date a hockey player.
The fact that my stomach apparently forgot that every time he looked at me was a separate issue entirely.
“Bliss.”
The deep voice pulled me back instantly, Cade had crossed the room without me noticing. That alone felt dangerous.
Up close, he smelled faintly like clean soap, cedar, and cold night air. Calm. Expensive. Male in that unfairly specific way hockey players always were after showers and ruining lives recreationally.
“You made it,” he said.
My pulse did one stupid little skip. “We were promised high alcohol content beverages and probable deniability. It felt rude not to come.”
The corner of his mouth lifted slightly. Not a full smile and that just made it worse.
Behind me, Charm silently mouthed, Oh my goodness.
I ignored her and rolled my eyes. “I was going to text you.”
“About?”
“A project I need your help on.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I just—”
“Bliss!” Briggs shouted suddenly from across the room. “Get over here. Rider says he can beat you at beer pong, and I personally find that offensive on your behalf.”
Rider lifted his beer from the dining room entrance. “I said probably.”
“Same thing!”
I laughed despite myself.
Cade glanced toward the dining room before looking back at me. “You play?”
“I have five brothers,” I said. “I came out of the womb knowing how to throw things competitively.”
His laugh caught me completely off guard. It was low and quick and real enough that something warm unfolded stupidly beneath my ribs before I could stop it.
Dangerous… Very dangerous.
“I wanted to ask,” I started again, “if maybe you’d be willing to hear me out about this human-interest project because I think you’d actually be really—”
“Bennett!” Briggs yelled again. “Move your cute little ass!”
I stared toward the dining room. “Did he just say my ass was cute or I am cute?”
“Yes,” Cade said, smiling. “Unfortunately, that’s progress for him.”
I laughed again.
Big mistake, because suddenly Cade looked at me differently for half a second. Softer maybe. More focused. Like hearing me laugh had done something weird to his internal wiring.
Before either of us could recover, Briggs appeared out of nowhere, hooked an arm around my shoulders, and immediately started dragging me backward toward the dining room like this was freshman year biology all over again and I was once again being forced to keep him alive academically and socially.
“Absolutely not,” I protested through laughter.
“You’re needed.”
“For what?”
“Justice.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s enough of one.”
Briggs Lawson had been my lab partner freshman year, which sounded cute and harmless until you understood Briggs and I both approached science the same way we approached life—with alarming confidence, questionable impulse control, and a complete willingness to touch things labeled do not touch.
Briggs was not a biological genious, so I kept him from failing biology.
He had kept me from sitting alone in the back of lecture halls pretending I didn’t care that college felt too big and loud and full of strangers who already seemed to know where they belonged.
By October, he was saving me seats at their games.
By November, he had introduced me to Rider, Easton, and half the Fury roster like I was some stray cat he’d found behind the arena and decided the team was collectively responsible for feeding.
Somewhere between shared notes, cafeteria coffee, and him texting me at midnight to ask if mitochondria were “the battery ones,” Briggs had accidentally become one of my people.
Which was probably how this happened.
He could drag me into chaos because, in a weird way, he had been one of the first people at KFU to make chaos feel safe.
“Briggs,” I said, trying not to trip over someone’s discarded sneaker, “I am in the middle of an academic conversation.”
“You’ve been academically flirting for ten minutes. I’m intervening.”
“I have not.”