Chapter 22
Bliss
The apartment had gone quiet in the strange, soft way it only ever did after midnight, when Aura and Charm were either asleep or pretending to be because they loved me enough to give me privacy and were nosy enough to absolutely ask questions tomorrow.
After an insane round of benefits, Cade and I had gone back down to the party at Hockey House, but it had somehow grown twice as loud and twice as crowded, which was absolutely not my vibe anymore.
We stayed for a few drinks, long enough to prove we were technically social creatures, then grabbed Cade a small overnight bag and came back here.
Cade lay beside me in my bed like he had always belonged there, which was rude because I had worked very hard to convince myself no man belonged anywhere near my sheets, my heart, or my emotional infrastructure.
His back was propped against my pillows, one arm tucked behind his head while the other stayed around me, his fingers moving lazily over my hip beneath the blanket.
I was curled into his side with one leg thrown over his, my cheek resting against the warm slope of his chest, and everything inside me felt too settled for the kind of girl who usually treated peace like a suspicious package.
That was the problem.
I didn’t think I would ever feel safer than this.
Not because Cade made the room perfect or because what happened between us earlier had magically erased anything.
It hadn’t. The bruise on my neck still ached when I swallowed.
Luke still existed somewhere outside these walls like a rot the world hadn’t cut out yet.
My past still sat beneath my ribs with teeth.
But Cade’s hand kept moving over me in slow, thoughtless strokes, and for once, the silence didn’t feel like something waiting to punish me.
It felt like space.
Like maybe I could finally put this burden down.
Cade didn’t ask at first. That was the thing about him that made my chest hurt if I thought about it too long.
He could push harder than anyone I’d ever met when he wanted something, but right now he didn’t shove.
He waited. He watched me stare into the dark like he knew I was standing on the edge of something, and when he finally spoke, his voice was low and rough behind my hair.
“You’re looking at the ceiling like the answer’s written up there.”
I looked up at him. “Maybe it is.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Maybe you’re stalling.”
“Maybe you’re nosy.”
“I’m absolutely nosy.”
I swallowed hard and let the room breathe with me.
“But I deserve something, Pip.”
There it was. Not therapy. Not pleading.
Not some soft, golden-retriever emotional support nonsense that would have made me climb out the window from secondhand embarrassment.
Just Cade being Cade. Blunt. Controlled.
Cocky enough to sound calm while his fingers brushed a bruise another man had left on my skin.
“I know,” I whispered. “And I know this is about keeping me safe in your eyes, not some deep dive into the psyche of the girl you’re crushing on.”
“Crushing on?” His mouth twitched. “Give me a little more depth, Pip.”
I smiled and rolled my eyes. I knew what he was doing, and I secretly loved it. The way he could make the heaviest parts of my past feel less terrifying by keeping me grounded in the outside of it. The trauma itself was detestable, but somehow Cade kept us outside of it.
Cade and Bliss.
Still us.
“Okay,” I said. “I see your point, and I raise you a ‘my friends with benefits’ psyche.”
He groaned dramatically and clutched his heart. “That’s worse than crushing. How about my girl’s psyche? It just feels right, Pip.”
“And allow you to give us a title? I would never defeat that easy.”
He leaned down, and I thought he was going to kiss me, but he dropped a quick kiss on my nose instead and winked. “I’ll get your defeat.”
I let out a shuddering breath. “Keep dreaming, Cross Check.”
He sat back against the pillow, calm as ever, like he hadn’t just scrambled my entire nervous system with a kiss to my nose.
“So, tell me what you can give me, Pip.” His hand resumed stroking my hip, and then he just waited for me to be ready.
“I can give you what I can get through,” I whispered. “Enough to corroborate it if it ever comes to a courtroom. Enough for you to understand his depravity. But I’m not going to sit here and paint a picture of my trauma. I spent too many years trapped in it already.”
My throat tightened.
“The specifics are ugly enough. Yes, he raped me. More than once. And honestly? One is just as brutal as a hundred when you’re the one who has to live with it.”
His hand stilled against my hip.
“You have evidence against Luke?” he asked.
“Mountains of circumstantial.”
The name sat there between us for a second, and I could feel him mentally calculating the dismemberment of Luke’s body if he ever got him alone.
He shifted behind me, not enough to move away, just enough that his chest pressed more firmly against my back. “That sounds ominous, Pip.”
“That sounds prepared.”
“You are one of those girls that has a crime drawer, aren’t you?”
I huffed a weak laugh into the dark. “It’s not a crime drawer exactly.”
“Crime binder?”
“Don’t make it so weird.”
“It was weird before I got here.”
I tipped my head back enough to glare at him, even though he probably couldn’t see much of it in the dark. “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
Stupid man. Stupid dry voice. Stupid confidence. Stupid emotionally disturbing cheekbones probably still being emotionally disturbing in the dark.
Cade’s thumb started moving again, slow and steady against my skin. “Look, I don’t want details you don’t want to give me. I don’t need a picture of your trauma to know how it’s affected you. I care more that you trust me enough to show me your worst moment and let me sit beside you in it.”
My throat tightened so fast it hurt. “You would never sit beside me,” I whispered. “You give John Wick energy.”
His mouth brushed the top of my shoulder, and I felt the smallest curve of his smile against my skin. “Accurate.”
“See?”
“I just want to know you, Bliss.” His voice dropped around my name, heavier now. “And knowing you isn’t knowing what happened to you. You can tell me what you want to tell me, and I’ll play mental Jeopardy with the skimmed-over pieces.”
My laugh came out watery and ridiculous. “Mental Wheel of Fortune is a better analogy.”
“Jeopardy is literally categorized.”
“You cannot at any point call out, ‘I’ll take abusive ex-boyfriends for three hundred, Alex.’”
“I wouldn’t lower myself to ever address Luke as your ex-boyfriend.”
That hit me in a place I wasn’t ready for, so naturally my mouth saved me before my heart could embarrass itself.
“I’ll take brother’s best friend trope for six hundred.”
Cade’s chest moved against my back with a quiet laugh. “Fine. I’ll concede to mental Wheel of Fortune. My point is, I’ll fill in the blanks. I’m working on my bachelor’s in engineering, Pip. I’m confident I can gather context clues.”
I turned in his arms before I could lose my nerve, cupping his face in my hands and kissing him because sometimes kissing was easier than answering.
Cade let me for about three seconds before his hand slid into my hair and his mouth took over like he had a personal vendetta against my ability to think.
When I pulled back, he looked entirely too pleased with himself.
“So kissing is still undecided,” he murmured.
“Under review currently.”
“Tell me how Glory Days gets a boyfriend title and all I get is friends with benefits.”
“I think I like besties with benefits better. Catchier, don’t you think?”
Cade stared at me for one silent second, then said, “I’ll take things that cause a breakup for two hundred.”
A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it, and his mouth twitched like he’d won something. The next second he rolled me beneath him, one hand finding my side and tickling me just enough to make me shriek into his chest.
“No, no, no, absolutely not.” I grabbed at his wrist, laughing so hard my ribs ached. “That’s psychological warfare.”
“You laughed at my joke.”
“It was funny.”
“I know.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.” He kissed me before I could argue, slow and deep and unfairly good at ruining every defense mechanism I had ever built.
By the time he pulled back, I was flushed and breathless beneath him while he hovered over me with one forearm braced beside my head, his other hand smoothing my hair back from my face like he had every right in the world to touch me like I was his.
Maybe he did, but I would never let him know that.
That thought scared me more than it should have.
“Why is it,” I whispered, my fingers settling against his cheek, “that I can joke with you and feel this happy, and then trauma dump my worst moment, and it still just feels like a Monday night?”
Cade’s expression shifted.
Not soft. Cade never went soft. But something in his face changed, focus sharpening as his fingers drifted from my hair to the side of my neck. His touch brushed over the blue and purplish bruise there, so careful it almost undid me.
“I want to kill him, Pip.”
I knew he did.
That was the terrifying part. It wasn’t male ego or empty threat or hockey-boy chest beating.
Cade meant it with the same quiet certainty he brought to everything else.
Out of thousands of men at KFU, somehow I had found the one who would tear a star from the sky if I told him I was afraid of the dark.
I trusted Cade with the parts of me I had never given anyone. The broken parts. The ones I buried beneath jokes and glitter and loud chaos before anybody could look too closely and see the cracks.
But Cade did. He had been seeing them for longer than I wanted to admit, and I had been fighting against him ever since, desperate to keep him at a distance because if he got close enough, he would destroy his life over me and I didn’t know how to believe I deserved that kind of selfless loyalty.