Chapter 25
Dominic
The wrench slips in my hand, and my knuckles crack against the edge of the engine block.
“Fuck,” I hiss under my breath, jerking my hand back; a smear of grease and a thin line of red bloom across my skin.
It stings, but it’s nothing. I’ve had worse from opening a beer bottle the wrong way.
I wipe my hand absently on the rag tucked into the waistband of my sweats, and lean back against the Charger, staring into the open hood.
I heard a rattling noise when I turned off the ignition yesterday—a little stutter that only someone who knows this car like a second body would notice. I popped the hood and found the loose bracket ten minutes ago.
It should’ve only taken me five minutes to fix. I’ve now been standing here for half an hour, listening to the soft murmur of Brendon’s complaints at the dining table through the open door.
Jericho is here, too. He’s parked himself at the threshold between the kitchen and the driveway, like a tiny, furry sentry—tail flicking, yellow eyes moving from me to his human and back again, as if he is taking attendance.
This is day three of whatever the fuck this is.
Three days of this weirdly soft domestic bullshit I keep telling myself I don’t want, and then easily sink into anyway.
Three days of waking up with someone in my bed who isn’t a one-night distraction.
Three days of Brendon shuffling around my kitchen in socks, making coffee too strong for normal people, and grading papers at my dining table.
Three days of nothing but football, sex, studying, and that domestic bullshit I have no business liking as much as I do.
It’s starting to feel dangerous in a way I don’t usually allow myself to feel. Dangerous because I know exactly what moments to point to if I ever want to lie to myself about where this goes wrong.
It isn’t the sex; that part was always going to happen. From the second he walked into my cottage, saw me with blood on my hands, and still sat down at my table, I knew this ended with his mouth open under mine and my name ruined on his tongue. That was never the dangerous part.
The danger is this—the in-between.
I scrub at the bracket again, and tighten the bolt harder than necessary; metal clicks into place. The fix is done. I know it’s done. I still don’t lower the hood.
Because the second I stop pretending to work on the Charger, I have to deal with what’s been pacing circles in my head since two fucking nights ago.
“Love you, Beast.”
My grip on the wrench tightens.
He said it half-asleep, voice thick and soft, and completely unaware of what he was doing.
Just a sleepy little confession dropped onto my chest. “Love you, Beast.” Then he passed the fuck out on me, all warm and boneless and trusting, while I lay there, staring at the ceiling like someone’s just put a bullet through my ribs and left it there to glow.
He doesn’t even remember saying it.
I know he doesn’t; if he did, there would be tension in him by morning. A blush. A stammer. Some tight little silence, while he tried to decide whether to pretend it didn’t happen or claw the words back into his mouth.
Brendon doesn’t say things like that casually when he’s awake; he thinks them in the dark.
He hides them behind bratty little comments, and pink cheeks, and that sweet, wrecked expression he gets when I press him just right.
But he doesn’t hand me his heart in broad daylight and call it a small thing.
So, I don’t bring it up.
I won’t bring it up.
Not because I don’t want to hear it again.
Christ, I want to hear it so badly it makes my teeth ache.
I want to pin him under me and make him say it with his eyes open.
I want to hear it when he’s fully conscious; when he knows exactly what he’s handing me.
I want to hear it over and over, until the words stop sounding impossible in relation to me.
I won’t bring it up, because he doesn’t know he said it—and there’s old rot in me that would turn that into leverage without meaning to.
I know myself too well for that. I know how easy it would be to tuck it away and pull it out when he’s vulnerable, to use it as proof he’s already halfway in whether he admits it or not.
That is her in me. That is exactly the kind of shit she would do: take someone’s unguarded moment and turn it into a chain.
I’ll keep it to myself and silently lose my fucking mind instead.
The Charger is an anchor—has been since I was nineteen.
The trust hit, and I bought her out from under the dust my dad left her in.
Every time I work on her, I feel a little bit of that same calm from when I was a kid, watching his hands move under the hood while he muttered about timing and compression and how American muscle has soul.
Before everything went sideways.
That familiar tightness pulls in my chest, the one that isn’t about blood or football or anything I know how to fix with a wrench. It’s older than Lakehaven, older than this car, older than half the scars on my body.
When I was sixteen, I knew exactly what not to do. I knew the rules: keep it casual, keep it shallow, and never, ever let anyone become something you can’t lose without hitting the fucking ground with them.
The worst part is: high school used to feel good. Before everything really sank its claws in, there were pieces of it that felt almost normal. I had real friends; not just teammates who liked me because I could carry an offense on my back.
We’d crowd around this same car in the driveway while my old man taught us how to change oil and rotate tires.
Leo would slap my shoulder and say, “You listening, Dom? You fuck this engine up and she’ll never forgive you.
” My friends would laugh and call the Charger my true love.
We’d spend hours sitting on the hood, talking shit about coaches and colleges and who was hot in chem class.
They cared about me, and I cared back. Stupid teenage loyalty, sure; but it was real.
There were sleepovers, late-night drives, and shared secrets.
I remember one of them, Tyler, telling me his parents were divorcing while we sat in this car in some grocery lot at midnight, both of us pretending it wasn’t a big deal while my chest ached for him.
Then senior year hit.
They started ignoring me, one by one, in ways that looked like drifting if you didn’t know what you were looking at.
Tyler stopped responding to texts, and Leo said his parents were cracking down, so he couldn’t hang out anymore.
Some stopped sitting with me at lunch. Some stopped looking me in the eye. Some disappeared entirely.
I didn’t have proof—she never left proof—but when you’ve spent your entire life watching the way someone solves problems, you just know. You feel the pattern in your bones. Every time someone got too close, they just… vanished.
You learn quickly, in a house like mine, that loving anything is the same as taking a knife and laying it gently against its throat.
So, I stopped getting close. I can play the part—captain, leader, friend. I’ll take a hit for you on the line, I’ll back you up in a fight, and I’ll help you study enough that you don’t fail out. I’ll joke with you, drink with you, let you crash on my couch when your girlfriend kicks you out.
That’s easy. That’s surface shit. But anything deeper than that, anything that feels like a real attachment, is a no fucking go for me.
Even Colton, for all that I call him my best friend, only gets so far.
I like him, yeah; we click. We move in sync on the field, we talk shit in the locker room, we share rides and meals, and we make the same kind of dark jokes only people who’ve been hit too hard can make.
He’s the closest thing I have to a brother that didn’t come with my blood.
But I still keep certain doors locked; I don’t let him in there often.
If she finds out I genuinely care, if she smells actual love on me, Colton would be a target.
And now there’s Brendon.
He clung without even trying—that’s the worst part. It’s not like he chased me. He didn’t text me a hundred times a day, or show up uninvited, or throw himself at my feet.
He just… stayed. He sat in my kitchen, made coffee, and graded papers.
He let me call him Little Sin, Daddy’s good boy, and everything in between.
He falls asleep halfway through a movie, with his hand in my hoodie pocket and Jericho on his chest. He wears my cuff, and runs his thumb over it whenever he’s thinking too hard.
He kneels like he was built for it, and then blushes after when I tell him he did good.
I care.
I really fucking care.
The smart thing to do is cut this off. Put distance between us for his sake, if not mine. Keep him on purely academic terms; let him help me pass my classes, and leave it there. No more overnights. No more pinky promises in my kitchen with crumbs on his shirt and his cat glaring at us.
The thought makes my jaw clench so hard it hurts.
On campus, nothing’s changed for anyone else. I’m still the golden boy. He’s still the quiet TA. I walk across the quad, surrounded by teammates, headphones in, and hoodie up. He walks ten feet the other way, with his bag and his neat little stack of folders.
Sometimes, he glances over. Sometimes I do. But we never let our eyes linger too long in public.
I can’t hold his hand in the student union.
I can’t press him against a brick wall by the library and kiss him.
He can’t look at me the way he does in my kitchen, when my hands are on his waist. All that intensity has to be shoved into the cracks—his office, my car, a cottage at the end of some shitty gravel road.
“Get your shit together,” I mutter to myself. “It’s a weekend. You’ve done this before. You can let him go.”