Chapter 12
RAFE
I barely sleep. I drift. I surface. I stare at the ceiling and replay the night in fragments sharp enough to cut.
Ollie’s mouth on mine. The weight of his hand at my back. The sound his breath made when I kissed him back.
Every time I get close to unconsciousness, my brain drags me up by the collar like it doesn’t trust me alone with my own thoughts.
It’s stupid-early in the morning, so early that it’s still dark.
I give up pretending and roll onto my side, grab my phone from the nightstand, and check it for the tenth time.
There’s nothing from Ollie. Which is stupid, because he’s in my house. Down the hall. Sleeping—hopefully—after the night we just had.
I scrub a hand over my face.
Trust your heart, a voice whispers.
Another one answers immediately: Your heart has terrible judgment.
The phone vibrates in my hand, and my chest tightens hard enough that for half a second, I think it’s Ollie. It’s not. It’s Rachael.
I answer before it can ring again. “Hey.”
“You alive?” she asks.
“Define alive.”
She exhales. “I figured. I wanted to call before the sun comes up and the internet does what it does best.”
I push myself upright, back against the headboard. “What’s out there?”
“Nothing concrete yet,” she says. “A few blurry photos. Some chatter. Nothing published by a reputable source. But it’s coming.”
I close my eyes. She doesn’t rush me. Rachael’s good like that. She knows when silence is a negotiation.
“Did Oliver Marshall kiss you?” she asks finally.
The question lands heavy, even though I knew it was coming. “Yes,” I say.
“And did you kiss him back?”
I open my eyes, staring into the dark. “Yes.”
Another pause, longer this time.
“Okay,” she says slowly. “That’s… enough for now.”
“I’m not giving interviews,” I say immediately. “I’m not making statements beyond confirming what happened.”
“I figured.”
“And I’m not saying anything else without talking to him,” I add.
Her voice softens just a fraction. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
“Rachael,” I say, and my breath catches. “I don’t want this turned into a spectacle.”
“I know,” she says. “And for what it’s worth? You handled this better than most people would.”
I snort quietly. “You weren’t there.”
She hums. “I know you.”
When we hang up, the house feels too quiet again. I sit for a while, phone warm in my hand, and then finally swing my legs over the side of the bed.
The smell of coffee hits me halfway down the hall. That alone almost stops me in my tracks. Ollie’s at the counter, hair still damp like he showered recently, wearing a hoodie that is very much mine. He’s holding a mug with both hands like it’s a life raft.
He looks up when he hears me. There it is again—that careful scan of my face, like he’s bracing for impact.
“Hey,” he says softly.
“Hey.”
We stand there for a beat too long, until I gesture weakly at the coffee machine. “You… made coffee.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I hope that’s okay. I didn’t know if you were—”
“It’s perfect,” I cut in.
His shoulders drop a fraction. I grab a mug and pour myself a cup. The normalcy of it feels almost obscene.
I lean back against the counter, eyes on the steam curling up between us. “Rachael called.”
Ollie stiffens. “Already?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“I confirmed the kiss,” I say simply. “Nothing else.”
He nods, absorbing that. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not… deciding things without me.”
I study him over the rim of my mug. “What about you?”
He swallows. “I called Eric last night.”
“And?”
“I told him I’m gay,” Ollie says, and even now, after everything, the words feel like a live wire between us. “I told him I’m not doing interviews, and I’m not agreeing to labels. I told him I won’t deny what happened.”
My chest aches.
“And your team?”
“I have to call PR today,” he says. “That part’s nonnegotiable.”
I nod slowly. “Okay.”
There’s a pause. A big one. Neither of us mentions the obvious thing.
Finally, Ollie does. “We haven’t… agreed on what we’re saying. About the kiss.”
I meet his eyes. “No.”
Silence stretches, taut. I think about last night. About watching him walk through my door and not implode. About the way he listened when I set boundaries instead of trying to talk me out of them. About how he said he’d sign the papers if I needed him to.
My heart is a stupid, stubborn thing.
“Let’s date,” I say suddenly.
Ollie blinks. “What?”
I stare into my coffee like it might have answers. “Let’s… date. Publicly. Carefully. With rules. With space.” I have no fucking clue what I’m saying or where the words are coming from. My traitorous, na?ve heart is more than likely running the show.
His mouth opens, then closes. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“For real?” His voice wobbles. “You actually want to?”
I look up at him. “How else are you going to win me back?”
The look on his face—shock, hope, terror—nearly takes me out at the knees.
“I—” He laughs once, breathless. “Fuck.”
I want to kiss him so badly it hurts. The instinct is overwhelming.
I don’t.
“That doesn’t mean anything changes overnight,” I add quickly. “And it doesn’t mean sex. Or declarations. Or—”
“I know,” he says, fast. “I know. I’ll take anything. I mean—” He stops himself, visibly reining it in. “I’ll take… what you’re offering.”
Good. Because if he’d pushed, I might have bolted.
He takes a sip of coffee, then sets the mug down like he needs his hands free. “I should tell you… I’m flying to San Francisco today.”
I stiffen. “Today?”
“Yes. The loft is ready for the final stage of renos.”
“Loft,” I repeat. “You bought a place.” He mentioned something about San Francisco yesterday, but in the middle of everything else, the words didn’t really compute.
He nods, nervous again. “I’m staying at a hotel for now. My sister’s going to be there. And her husband. And my niece.”
I blink. “You’re an uncle?”
His smile is soft. “Yeah. Amelia. She’s—” He hesitates, then grins. “She’s loud.”
Something warm spreads through my chest. “I love San Francisco,” I say quietly. “It’s home.”
Ollie’s fingers tighten slightly around his mug. “I know.”
That lands harder than it should. I look at him. “You know?”
He nods, a little sheepish, a little too honest. “I heard you had a place out there.” He hesitates. “I figured… if I was going to choose somewhere to land, it should be somewhere that already mattered to you.”
The room tilts. What the fuck do I do with that information? Should I be flattered? Terrified? Angry that he made a decision that close to my heart without telling me?
All three collide and leave me standing there, stunned. “You bought a place there,” I say slowly.
“Yes.”
“Because of me.”
“Because of… us,” he corrects gently. “Or what we were. And what I hoped we could be, if I ever stopped being an idiot.”
My lungs stall painfully. I look away, focusing on the counter, because if I don’t, I might reach for him—and that’s still dangerous territory.
“I need to be there,” I say finally, anchoring myself to something practical. “This week. I’ve got meetings. And I don’t want us doing this long-distance again, especially with the news about to go shit crazy.”
Even as I say the words, I wonder what I’m suggesting here. If I’m not willing to do long-distance, does that mean I’m willing to head out to Minnesota? If I do that, isn’t that me giving in and doing the chasing?
I’m so fucking confused and tired that my brain hurts.
Ollie’s breath stutters. “You want me there at the same time?”
“Yes.”
Not with me. Not for me. At the same time.
He nods immediately. “Okay.”
“Separate places,” I add.
“Of course.”
“Schedules. No assumptions.”
“I understand.”
I study him for a long beat. He’s not pushing. Not negotiating. Just… listening.
Good.
“This is still slow,” I remind him quietly.
“I know,” he says. “I swear.”
We finish our coffee standing here, talking about flights, about timing, about who’s landing when and where—about logistics that feel almost absurdly ordinary considering everything that’s cracked open between us. But the ordinariness matters.
For the first time in years, the future doesn’t feel like a wall. It feels like a shared coordinate. And maybe—if we don’t rush, if we don’t lie—a place we can both stand without losing ourselves.
I’ve rarely been elaborate. Well, not so much over the past few years.
I’m decisive. I’m practical. I make choices and live with them. That’s always been my strength—onstage, in contracts, in rehab, in the way I rebuilt my life piece by piece when everything went to hell.
Chartering a plane for a basketball star, his sister, her husband, and their kid is…
not that. But the news is everywhere. By midmorning, it’s not just whispers or blurry photos.
It’s speculation dressed up as certainty.
Headlines hedging their bets. Social feeds doing what they always do—turning a moment into a thousand narratives before lunch.
Oliver Marshall kisses Steel Saints frontman.
Secret romance?
Friends? Former collaborators?
And threaded through all of it: the attack. The knife. The danger.
I watch Ollie read the headlines over my shoulder, his jaw set, his expression calm in a way I’m starting to recognize as deliberate. That alone is enough to make the decision for me.
By the time we’re at the private terminal, the flight is arranged, security doubled, routes adjusted. Vinny moves like this is a chessboard he’s memorized. Seth is already in San Francisco coordinating ground transport.
Ollie doesn’t argue.
He thanks me once, quietly, like he knows this isn’t about luxury—it’s about containment. About buying space and about getting out of a city that’s already circling.
The jet hums beneath us as we taxi. It’s smaller than a commercial flight and absurdly comfortable.
Ollie’s sister, Lindy, settles in with the practiced efficiency of someone used to moving children through chaos.
Her husband—Phil—buckles in and immediately starts rummaging through a bag for snacks.