Chapter 22 Brynn
Chapter twenty-two
Brynn
His mouth crashes to mine with such intensity that it feels like six years of distance never happened.
I don’t know who moved first. Maybe it was both of us, like some invisible cord between us finally snapped and slingshotted us together.
All I know is one second we were throwing accusations, and the next I’m gripping the soft cotton of his hoodie like it’s the only thing keeping me standing.
His hands are on my hips, fingers flexing like he doesn’t know whether to pull me closer or push me away—but God, I hope it’s closer. I want closer. I want all of it.
My brain goes blissfully quiet. No noise, no doubt, no common sense. Just heat and memory and the word more echoing in my chest like a damn drumbeat.
I’m gone for him. Stupidly, recklessly, irrevocably gone.
He kisses like he’s furious. Like he’s still hurt. Like he wants to punish me and himself in the same breath. But underneath all of that is something else—something fractured and desperate. Like he’s trying to taste the version of me he used to know. Like he’s searching for home in a kiss.
And when I moan into it—when I shift, pressing into him, fingers trailing up the back of his neck into that too-long, too-sexy hair—he makes a sound low in his throat that sends a shockwave straight through me. My knees nearly buckle. It’s hot and dirty and fucking dangerous.
He pulls back just enough for air, and I’m immediately lost without his mouth on mine. We’re still so close our noses brush, and his breath fans over my lips like a tease. His eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them—stormy, wrecked, hungry.
“Brynn…” he rasps, and his voice is gravel and regret and something I don’t know if I can survive. “There’s so much that’s wrong with this.”
I blink, my pulse still a riot in my veins. “Oh.”
His hand is still on my waist, his thumb dragging slow, almost apologetic circles into my skin.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’ve wanted to do that since the second I saw you again.
Hell, if I’m honest—long before that. But this…
” He shakes his head like it physically hurts.
“If we’re going to figure this out, we’ve got to do it right. If that’s what we’re doing.”
“I don’t know if we know what we’re doing.”
“Then let’s figure it out, instead of doing anything foolish.”
I pull back just enough to raise a brow. “Right. Says the man who barged into my apartment and kissed me like we were on the movie poster for a Nicholas Sparks adaptation.”
That huff of laughter escapes him, quiet and annoyed and stupidly attractive. “You told me to kiss you like I was mad at you.”
“And you did,” I murmur, my voice catching halfway between heat and heartbreak.
Silence stretches between us again, but this time it’s heavier. It’s full of all the what-ifs, all the things we never said, all the ways we ruined each other and still somehow want more.
His hand finally drops from my waist, and it feels like losing something. He steps back like it costs him. Like it physically hurts to put space between us.
“I want to talk,” he says, scrubbing a hand over his jaw like he’s trying to scrub away whatever just happened. “Actually talk. No yelling, no pretending. No kissing until we forget everything again.”
I nod, throat tight. “Not a date. A talk.”
He gives me this crooked half-smile, all dimple and sincerity. It cracks something open in me. “Not a date.”
I nod slowly. “A time and place to clear the air.”
“Exactly. You pick when.”
Then he turns toward the door, slow and reluctant, like every step is a decision he doesn’t want to make. He pauses with his hand on the knob, head tilted like he’s still working up the courage to say what’s next.
“I meant it, you know,” he says quietly.
I frown. “Meant what?”
He doesn’t turn around. “I like you. Still. Even if I shouldn’t.”
And then he leaves, just like that, and the silence he leaves behind is suffocating.
I stand in the kitchen, my head a chaotic mess of what just happened. My arms come up around my waist, holding myself like maybe I can keep everything in if I just squeeze hard enough. But the quiet floods in, wraps around me, presses hard against my ribs.
And then the spiral hits.
Because kissing Knox again—letting myself feel that much again—it opens a door I thought I’d boarded up for good.
Back when we were just two wide-eyed kids who thought forever would wait for us, he used to talk about the future like it was already mapped out.
Coaching football. A little white house on a quiet street.
Two kids and a golden retriever in the backyard.
He wanted to be the dad who showed up to everything, the one in the stands with the loudest cheer and the biggest heart.
Just like his own. He said he’d teach his daughter how to throw a perfect spiral and terrify any teenage boy dumb enough to show up on the porch.
And I used to picture all of it with him.
But somewhere in the time we spent apart, that picture shifted. The edges blurred. The colors changed. Not because I stopped loving him—I’m realizing now that wasn’t the problem—but because reality caught up to me in the harshest, quietest way possible.
I left because I thought I wasn’t enough for the life he was building.
That he’d outgrow me the second the spotlight found him.
But it isn’t just fear or selfishness. Now it’s this thing that lives in my bloodstream like a warning bell.
My diagnosis—premature ovarian insufficiency.
A mouthful of a phrase that reshaped everything I thought I knew about my own future. About what I could give someone.
He thinks I ran to Seattle because it was shiny and new, and maybe part of me did. But I was scared of not being enough. And now I fear that more than ever.
I exhale, slow and shaky, the taste of his kiss still clinging to my lips.
I need to tell him. The truth. All of it.
Because if he still wants the picture he used to paint—the football games and backyard and tiny feet running down the hall—then I owe it to him to be honest.
Even if it means I lose him all over again.