Chapter 19 Tanner
TANNER
Seth’s fingers traced lazy circles on my hip, his breath warm against the back of my neck.
I’d been awake for ten minutes, maybe longer, but I hadn’t moved—hadn’t wanted to break whatever this was—his breath on my neck, his fingers tracing patterns like he was memorizing me, the way neither of us had spoken yet because speaking would mean acknowledging the clock on his nightstand and the early morning practice the coaching staff had insisted on this close to the end of the season.
“I know you’re up.” His voice was rough with sleep, amused.
“Prove it.”
He laughed, low and soft, and pulled me closer. His chest pressed against my back, solid and warm, and I let myself sink into it. A week ago, this would have sent me spiraling—the intimacy, the vulnerability of wanting something this much. Now I just breathed.
“Practice,” he murmured against my shoulder. “I have to go.”
“Five more minutes.”
“You said that twenty minutes ago.”
I rolled over to face him. His eyes were soft, half-lidded with sleep, but the way he looked at me—steady, certain, like he’d already decided something I was still figuring out—made my breath catch. It still made my chest tight, but not in a bad way. Not anymore.
“Fine.” I pressed a kiss to his jaw, felt him smile. “Go be a football star. Soon you won’t have a good excuse to leave me in this big ole bed by myself.”
“And when that time comes, I will happily rot in bed with you all day.” Seth untangled himself from the sheets reluctantly, and I watched him move through the dim room—pulling on sweats, hunting for a clean shirt, checking his phone.
The same routine as always. But when he paused at the bedroom door and looked back at me, something had shifted between us.
Something I couldn’t name but felt in my bones.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said.
“Yeah.” I pulled the blanket up to my chin. “You will.”
The door clicked shut behind him, and I lay there in the quiet, cataloging the feeling. We’d spent months circling each other, months of tension and wanting and holding back. Now the holding back was over, and what remained felt terrifyingly like peace.
I woke up Saturday morning to the smell of coffee and found Seth already in the kitchen, humming something tuneless while he cracked eggs into a pan.
He’d pulled on sweats, but no shirt, and I let myself look at the way his back muscles shifted as he moved, the fading bruises from last week’s game mapped across his shoulder blades like abstract art.
“You’re up early,” I said, sliding onto one of the barstools.
He glanced over his shoulder, that soft smile spreading across his face. “Game day. Couldn’t sleep.”
“Nerves?”
“Something like that.” He turned back to the eggs, flipping them with practiced ease. “Second-to-last regular-season game. Win this one, and we lock up the division.”
I watched him plate the eggs, add toast, pour coffee into my favorite mug—one of my dad’s that I’d snuck out of the house after he died.
The ease of it caught me off guard sometimes, how seamlessly we’d learned to move around each other.
How he’d memorized the small things without me ever having to explain.
“Here.” He set the plate in front of me, then leaned across the counter to kiss my forehead. “Eat.”
This was new too. The casual affection, the comfort of routine.
We’d been dancing around each other for so long that I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to just exist in the same space without tension coiling between us.
Now I reached for it greedily—every brush of his hand, every shared meal, every night falling asleep tangled together like we were afraid to let go.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, pushing eggs around my plate.
Seth paused with his coffee halfway to his mouth. “About?”
“The Riddell thing.” I’d been turning it over in my head since I got back from Huntsville, examining it from every angle like one of my prototypes.
Lincoln’s faith in me. Holloway’s interest. The possibility that my work might actually reach the field, might actually help someone.
“I think I want to do it. The consultation stuff, when I start grad school.”
His whole face lit up. “Tanner, that’s— Yeah. Of course you should.”
“It’s not a lot of money or anything. And it might be nothing. But—”
“Stop.” He set down his coffee and came around the counter, spinning my barstool until I faced him. His hands settled on my thighs, warm and solid. “It’s not nothing. Your work matters. And Holloway saw that, which means other people will too.”
I looked away, uncomfortable with the sincerity in his eyes. “Lincoln did most of the talking. I just nodded and tried not to throw up.”
“Bullshit.” Seth caught my chin, tilted my face back toward his. “You walked into a meeting with a VP of R&D and showed him something worth investing in. That was all you.”
The praise settled somewhere in my chest, warm and unfamiliar. For years, people had looked at me and seen Patrick McBride's son, the kid holding his family together, the one who needed to be strong. Seth looked at me and saw something else entirely. “Thanks,” I said quietly.
He kissed me, soft and unhurried, tasting like coffee. “I’m proud of you.”
I pulled him closer, hooking my fingers in the waistband of his sweats. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He smiled against my mouth. “Now eat your breakfast. I have to leave in an hour.”
I let him go reluctantly, watching him disappear into the bedroom to start getting ready.
The apartment felt different when he was about to leave for a game—charged, somehow, with all the things that could go wrong.
I’d gotten better at managing it. Better at reminding myself that anxiety wasn’t prophecy, that my fear didn’t create the outcomes I dreaded.
Better. Not cured.
I finished my eggs, washed the dishes, and tried to lose myself in a book I’d been meaning to read for months. But my mind kept drifting back to something that had been building for days, ever since I got back from Huntsville.
I wanted to go to the game. My mom hadn’t made it to all of Dad’s games, but she was there as often as she could be. She hated seeing him go down, but that didn’t stop her from showing up to support him.
The thought terrified me. I'd avoided stadiums since Dad got bad, had barely watched a game until Seth became impossible to ignore.
Even then, I kept it at a distance—screens where I could control the volume, mute the commentary, look away when I needed to.
Going in person meant surrendering that control.
Putting myself inside the noise instead of observing it from safety.
But this was Seth’s second-to-last regular-season game.
His last season, period, because I believed him when he said he wasn’t going pro despite the scouts sniffing around, despite the coaches pushing him to reconsider.
He’d chosen this. Chosen us, chosen a future that didn’t involve grinding his brain down for strangers’ entertainment.
And I wanted to see him play. Really see him, not through a screen that sanitized the violence into something almost palatable. I wanted to be there when his team won the division. I wanted to be part of it, even if being part of it meant facing everything I’d been running from.
Seth emerged from the bedroom in his warm-up gear, duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He stopped when he saw my face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I stood, crossed to him, smoothed my hands over the front of his jacket even though it didn’t need smoothing. “I want to come today.”
He went very still. “To the game?”
“Yeah.”
“Tanner—” He searched my face, looking for something. The cracks, maybe. The places where I might shatter. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to.”
“Are you sure? Because if you’re doing this for me—”
“I’m doing it for me.” The words came out steadier than I felt. “I can’t keep hiding from it forever. And I don’t want your last season to be something I only experienced through a screen.”
He was quiet for a long moment, his hands coming up to bracket my face. I could see him warring with himself—the part that wanted me there, the part that knew what it would cost me.
“If it gets to be too much,” he said finally, “you leave. Don’t stay and white-knuckle it to prove something. Just go.”
“I know.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He kissed me, harder than the gentle morning kiss in the kitchen. When he pulled back, his eyes were bright. He grabbed his phone from the counter and typed quickly.
“Marcus’s parents have season tickets,” he said, still typing. “They always have an extra seat. His mom loves me.”
“Does Marcus know?” The question slipped out before I could stop it. “About us, I mean.”
Seth glanced up from his phone, something careful in his expression.
“No. Not yet. I want to tell him before anyone else finds out though. I just wanted to make sure we were good before I did. Otherwise, he’d probably give me shit for fucking things up.
” He went back to typing. “He’s a good guy.
He’ll be cool with it. He was super supportive of Hunter when he and John got together. ”
I nodded, filing that away for later. One thing at a time.
His phone buzzed almost immediately. He grinned at the screen.
“Done. She says she’ll meet you at the east gate, section 12. Marcus told her you’re coming. She’s excited to finally meet the roommate I won’t shut up about.”
“You talk about me to Marcus’s mom?”
“I talk about you to everyone.” He pocketed his phone and kissed me again, quick and certain. “She’ll take care of you. And I’ll know where to look.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you there.” He said it with a weight that made my chest tighten, his eyes holding mine a beat longer than necessary. Something unspoken passed between us, something neither of us was ready to name.