Chapter 11
Bliss
By the time I left Hockey House a little after nine, my entire nervous system felt scrambled in the worst possible way because nothing about tonight should’ve felt this easy between us after what had just happened in that gym.
Don’t even get me started on the closet.
Not after conversations like that. Not after standing close enough to Cade that I could feel the heat coming off his skin while he touched my wrist like he was trying not to break something already damaged.
Not after his hands settled on my hips and his voice brushed against the side of my neck while he talked me through reps like training was still the point and not the excuse both of us were using to stand too close.
And definitely not after I felt how bad he wanted me.
Holy fuck.
My fingers tightened around the steering wheel as the memory hit again, hot and sharp and impossible to shove back down.
Cade behind me. His chest almost against my back.
His hand at my waist, his breath unsteady near my ear, his body betraying him even while every other part of him stayed controlled.
The way he’d asked if I needed him to step back.
The way I had said no before I could pretend I was smarter than that.
I had been one second away from begging him to kiss me. Not wanting him to. Not imagining it. Begging. That was the part starting to scare me most.
Because somehow, even after moments that should’ve made everything awkward, we always found our way back to steady ground with each other anyway.
Nothing between us stayed uncomfortable for long.
Not tension. Not emotional conversations.
Not even the kind of near-line-crossing moments that should have changed the atmosphere between us completely.
We just recovered naturally afterward like both of us instinctively knew how to pull the other person back from the edge before things got too heavy.
It made everything feel dangerously normal.
And the sexual tension alone should’ve made this impossible already.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew exactly what was happening every time Cade looked at me too long or his eyes dropped toward my mouth mid-conversation like he was thinking about taking it.
I knew what was happening every time I caught myself staring at his arms, or his chest, or the way his hands looked gripping weights in that stupid gym.
I knew what it meant when my whole body lit up because he told me to breathe like he had any business giving orders that close to my neck.
Honestly, if I forced myself to fully acknowledge the situation, I wanted Cade Mercer in ways that were becoming deeply inappropriate.
Which was genuinely humiliating considering I’d spent the last several years swearing hockey players were emotional terrorism wrapped in expensive cologne and inflated egos.
I snorted softly to myself while pulling into the apartment parking lot because at least I was self-aware enough to recognize the disaster unfolding in real time.
Fantasy wasn’t reality.
Plenty of women fantasized about men they’d never actually date. That didn’t mean I was emotionally spiraling into some tragic hockey romance just because Cade happened to look insane shirtless and occasionally stared at me like he was trying to figure out if my mouth tasted good.
Except whatever existed between us was starting to feel too real to dismiss as fantasy.
The attraction was real. The chemistry was very, very real.
And unfortunately, the friendship being real was probably the biggest problem of all because friendship meant comfort.
Trust. Routine. It meant getting attached.
It meant stealing time together and pretending it was for school.
It meant laughing too easily after almost falling apart under his hands.
And relationships with athletes?
Hard pass.
I already knew too much. Saw too much. Athletes loved attention almost as much as they loved themselves, and everything in their lives revolved around performance, image, ego, and the sport always coming first no matter what they promised otherwise.
Even Cade admitted he didn’t really understand emotions properly.
He’d never had his heart broken. Never experienced unconditional love the way I understood it.
Never learned what healthy emotional attachment was supposed to look like inside a family that actually stayed warm after the cameras and money and expectations disappeared.
What kind of idiot would trust someone like that with their heart?
Apparently me.
Potentially.
Which was exactly why I needed to get my shit together immediately.
The apartment was mostly quiet when I walked inside.
Soft music drifted faintly from Aura’s room while Charm’s television played low somewhere behind her closed door, but I didn’t stop to talk to either of them because honestly, I was already too far inside my own head to survive human interaction right now.
At the rate things were going, one of us was eventually going to slip because the tension between us was becoming impossible to ignore now.
It existed in every room we occupied together like something living and breathing between us.
Every glance lasted slightly too long. Every joke carried undertones neither of us acknowledged directly. Every accidental touch felt loaded now.
And after tonight?
There was no pretending my body didn’t know his.
Not fully. Not the way some reckless part of me wanted to. But enough. Enough to know the heat of him behind me. Enough to know the weight of his hands when he was being careful. Enough to know what his restraint felt like when it strained against both of us.
Maintaining a platonic friendship with him was starting to feel like trying to hold a lit match without getting burned.
Still, I’d fight for it because no matter how much I wanted him sometimes, I would never let another man destroy me again.
I changed into one of Cade’s stolen hoodies before climbing into bed with my laptop balanced against my thighs, twinkle lights glowing softly around my room while a cold breeze drifted in through the cracked window.
The hoodie smelled faintly like him, clean laundry and cold air and something warm underneath that made my chest tighten before I could talk myself out of it.
Pathetic.
I tugged the sleeves over my hands and opened my notes for the project, determined to focus on literally anything besides Cade’s mouth, Cade’s hands, Cade’s breath against my neck, Cade’s voice telling me that was him holding back.
I clicked into the document and stared at the blinking cursor and realized I had no idea what I was supposed to be writing because my brain was still in that closet I refuse to acknowledge, still standing in front of him frozen, still hearing the rough edge in his voice when he said my name like a curse.
‘Bliss, fuck’.
Not Pip.
Bliss.
I pressed my palms over my face and groaned softly into the quiet room. I was in so much trouble.
Then finally, I opened the document.
Cross Checked.
And started typing.
Cade Mercer: he becomes consuming without even trying to.
Not intentionally. Not manipulatively. He just takes up space in people’s lives so naturally you don’t realize it’s happening until suddenly he’s worked himself into your routines, your conversations, your thoughts, and somehow the idea of your day not including him starts feeling wrong.
I understand now why the Fury orbit around him the way they do.
Why teammates trust him instinctively. Why girls fall into him so easily.
Cade listens harder than most people talk, and when he focuses on you it feels overwhelming in a way that’s difficult to explain unless you’ve experienced it directly.
There’s an intensity to him that makes everything around him feel quieter somehow. Smaller. Less important.
That should probably concern me more than it does.
Tonight felt different from all the other nights we’ve spent together, and honestly I think that realization scares me a little.
Somewhere between starting the project and us becoming close friends we crossed into something more personal than this assignment was ever supposed to become.
We know each other now. Not fully, obviously, but enough that conversations don’t feel surface-level anymore.
Enough that silence between us doesn’t feel awkward.
Enough that I can recognize his moods almost immediately and he can apparently recognize mine too, which is deeply unfortunate considering how hard I’ve worked over the years to become unreadable.
The problem with Cade is that he notices things.
Not performatively either. Not in the way some men pretend to pay attention because they think it’ll get them laid. Cade actually notices. Changes in tone. Tension. Body language. The things people are trying very hard not to say out loud.
Tonight he noticed my wrist.
And the truly horrifying part is I think he know’s it is Luke.
That moment has been replaying in my head ever since I left Hockey House because I genuinely don’t know what to do with someone touching me carefully anymore.
Luke always hurt me and he did it purposefully.
Possessive. Demanding. Everything with him is about control even when he disguised it as love to my young na?ve heart.
But Cade touched me like he was trying not to hurt me more.
Which honestly might be the most dangerous thing about him.
Not the flirting. Not the ego. Not the fact that he looks delicious shirtless while lifting weights like some kind of romance novel written by women with smut on the brain.
It’s the gentleness. The restraint. The way he always gives me room to pull away if I want to. I don’t think Cade realizes how rare that is.
And unfortunately, I also don’t think he realizes how much harder that makes it for me to maintain emotional distance from him.