15. Overtime #2
My hands are shaking. I press them against my thighs to steady them and it doesn’t work.
“I kept the promise through your first boyfriend and your second and through Drew, who I wanted to kill on principle before I’d ever met him.
I kept it when you told me at Christmas that he wasn’t who you wanted and I told you we were better as friends, which is the worst lie I’ve ever told and I’ve told some significant lies. ”
“Luke—”
“Not done.” I take a breath that doesn’t go deep enough.
“I kept it through seven months of not responding to your texts because every response I drafted said too much. I kept it through finding out you’d be my player and spending the entire drive to campus trying to figure out how to survive being near you without combusting.
I kept it through three months of you testing every boundary I have with chapstick and photos and that thing you do where you call me ‘Coach’ like it’s a word you invented specifically to destroy me. ”
Her mouth quirks. Even now. Even in this moment. Because she’s Emma and she can’t help it.
“And then BC happened. And I held your face in my hands in that corridor and realized that I’m in love with you, and that there is no way to keep that promise without destroying everything we’ve both worked for.”
“You…love me?”
I give her a small smile, as if she didn’t already know it. “There’s no version of us that doesn’t risk your career, my career, Grayson’s trust, everything. I’ve run the scenarios, Em. I’ve lost sleep. I’ve done the math. It doesn’t work.”
Her face starts to fall, and watching it is like watching a light go out, and I can’t. Not again.
“But I’m done caring about the math.”
Her breath stops.
I keep talking. “I’m done telling myself I’m being noble when I’m actually being a coward.
I’m done pretending the film packages are obligation and the midnight rink was just coaching and carrying you up those stairs and watching you sleep in my old room was anything other than the most important night of my life.
I’m done, Emma. I don’t have another season of this in me.
I don’t have another month. I barely have another minute. ”
The hazard lights tick. Orange, dark, orange, dark.
“So, yes. I love you. I have loved you for a long time. I love the way you tape your stick and the way you eat pretzels and the way you see Grayson’s hip injury.
I love that you’re too stubborn to fix your stance even though you know I’m right.
I love that you called me on my bullshit at Christmas and I love that you didn’t give up on me when I deserved it.
I love that you’re brave enough to say what you want out loud when I’ve spent years being too afraid to even think it. ”
She’s crying. The silent kind. The kind that happens when something inside you opens that’s been locked shut so long you forgot what was in there.
“I can’t promise this won’t be a disaster,” I tell her. “I can’t promise Grayson won’t want to kill me. I can’t promise the board won’t find out, or that some scout won’t hear a rumor, or that this won’t blow up in our faces in spectacular, career-ending fashion.”
“I don’t care about—”
“But I need you to know that whatever happens, I’m not running. Not this time. Not from you. Not ever again.”
The truck is quiet.
The highway is empty.
Emma’s looking at me like I’ve just handed her something she’s been reaching for her whole life.
“You’re done?” she asks. “With the speech?”
“I’m done.”
“It was a good speech.”
“Thanks. I’ve been workshopping it for about three years.”
She laughs. It’s wet and broken and the best sound I’ve ever heard.
“Can I talk now?”
“Please.”
“Get over here.”
“Emma—”
“Luke Anderson, I swear to God, if you make me climb across this center console—”
I don’t make her climb across the console.
I close the distance myself.
My hand finds her jaw. It’s the same gesture from every almost that’s been building toward this exact moment. Except there’s no pulling back this time. No two-second count. No interruption waiting in the wings.
Just her face in my hands. Her breath against my lips. Her fingers curling into the front of my jacket the way they did in the corridor, except now she’s pulling me closer instead of bracing for the moment I retreat.
I don’t retreat.
I kiss her.
And it’s nothing like I imagined.
It’s better.
Not because it’s perfect. It’s not . The angle’s awkward. The center console digs into my hip. My seatbelt alarm starts chiming because I unbuckled and the truck is deeply unhappy about this decision. But I’m not, I’m—
Her mouth opens under mine and every thought exits my brain through the emergency door.
She tastes like salt from the pretzel and something sweet underneath.
Her hands are in my hair, pulling (not gently) and the sound she makes when I lick into her mouth is a sound I will hear in my dreams for the rest of my natural life.
Small. Desperate. The sound of someone who’s been holding their breath for years and has finally, finally been given permission to exhale.
I kiss her like I’ve wanted to kiss her since that Christmas when she stood in front of the tree lights and told me the truth.
Like I’ve been starving and she’s the only thing that could save me.
Like every late-night phone call and every avoided text and every cold shower and every white-knuckled grip on a clipboard was just the prologue to this…
Her mouth and my mouth and the quiet, overwhelming, world-ending rightness of it.
Her hand slides from my hair to my jaw, thumb tracing the line of it the way I traced her cheekbone in the corridor. A mirror. A return. Giving back what I gave her and adding interest.
“Luke,” whispered in the space between kisses.
“Yeah.”
“Stop thinking.”
“I’m not—”
“You are. I can feel you thinking. You’re thinking about Grayson and the team and whether this is a mistake— ”
“I’m thinking about how you taste,” I correct, and the rawness of it surprises us both. “I’m thinking I’ve imagined this ten thousand times and it wasn’t even close. I’m thinking if I don’t stop kissing you in the next thirty seconds, I’m not going to be able to stop at all.”
She looks at me, our faces inches from one another. Her lips are swollen. Her eyes are black. Her hair is a wreck from my hands and she looks so beautiful it hurts.
“Then don’t stop.”
God, she’s going to kill me.
“Emma.” I press my forehead against hers.
Breathing hard. Every cell in my body screaming at me to pull her across the console and into my lap and do everything I’ve fantasized about for years in the cab of a truck on the shoulder of I-95.
“I want to. Believe me, I want to so badly I can’t see straight. ”
“But?”
“But not here. Not in a truck on the side of a highway.” I look at her properly. Make sure she sees what I’m saying and understands why. “You deserve more than that. We deserve more than that. I didn’t wait this long to rush the first time I get to touch you.”
Her expression shifts. The heat doesn’t disappear—it’s still there, banked behind her eyes like coals—but something softer surfaces alongside it.
“You’re not pulling away,” she checks. Testing it. Making sure.
“I’m not pulling away.” I run my thumb across her bottom lip, and the shiver that goes through her almost breaks my resolve entirely. “I’m asking for time. To do this right. Not because I’m scared. Because there’s too much at stake to do it any other way.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know. But I promise you—” I kiss her forehead. Deliberate. Real. Not a maybe this time. Not a fragment she’ll question in the morning. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She closes her eyes. Leans into the kiss the way she leaned into my shoulder in this same truck two weeks ago, the full-body surrender of someone who’s finally found the place they can stop running.
“Okay,” she whispers.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” She opens her eyes. Smiles. It’s watery and wrecked and perfect. “But Christmas is going to be torture. Just so we’re clear. Especially if you’re still forced to go to your mother’s wedding. ”
“We’ll figure something out,” I promise. Beg, maybe.
She doesn’t seem fully convinced, but doesn’t call me out on it. Instead she smirks. “So… how’d I taste?”
Like fucking heaven.
I kiss her again. Just once. Softly. Tasting salt and sweetness and, faintly, underneath everything else—
Strawberry .
“Like something I’ll never get enough of,” I tell her instead, linking my hand through hers.
It fits like it was designed to be there.