20. Futures #2
This is the other kind. The desperate kind.
The kind that’s trying to hold onto something you can feel shifting beneath your hands.
The kind that says I’m here, I’m not leaving yet, don’t let go all at once, tangled together until the words lose their individual meaning and become something more primal.
His response is immediate. Arms around me, lifting me off the ground, kicking the door shut behind us. His mouth opens against mine and makes this low, guttural sound like a man who’s been holding himself together all day and has finally found the person he can fall apart with.
“Em. I was going to tell you tomorrow. In the office. With Sloane. I had a plan—”
“Plans are overrated.” I fist the front of his t-shirt and pull. “You’ve been planning for seven years and look where it got us.”
We don’t make it past the hallway .
The one I texted him about on New Year’s Eve. That empty wall in your hallway. I’d like to be on it. He’d read it at his mother’s wedding and had to stay seated. I’d considered that text one of my finer moments.
Turns out reality exceeds the fantasy. Significantly.
My back hits the wall and Luke’s body pins me there.
One hand braced beside my head, the other gripping my thigh, lifting it around his hip.
The angle brings us flush together, and when I feel him hard against me through two layers of sweatpants, my head drops back and I stop thinking about development camps and timelines and the distance between here and Lake Placid.
“I need—” I pull at his shirt, but the logistics of removing clothing while being pressed against a wall by a man who’s six-two and not inclined to let me go, are more complicated than they look in movies.
“I know.” His mouth is on my neck, my collarbone, the spot behind my ear that he discovered last week and has been weaponizing ever since.
“Luke, now. Right here.”
“Baby—”
“The wall. You promised me the wall.”
“I didn’t promise—”
“It was implied. By your silence. Which is basically a binding verbal contract.”
He laughs against my throat. Even urgent and desperate and half-undressed in a hallway, he laughs. And the sound of it breaks a dam I didn’t know was weak.
Because this is what I’d miss. Not just the sex, though the sex is extraordinary. This . The laughter. The way we can be falling apart and still find each other funny. The way his humor surfaces at the exact moment I need it most, like a reflex. Like breathing.
He leans back, eyes that midnight color, the one that means he’s past the point of restraint. “You need to be quiet. These walls are—”
“Thin. I know. You’ve mentioned.”
“Because last time you woke up Mrs. Patterson next door, and she left a passive-aggressive note about ‘late-night furniture rearranging.’”
“Is that what we’re calling it now?”
“It’s what she’s calling it, and I’d like to keep my lease.”
I silence him by pulling his mouth back to mine. His hands find the waistband of my sweats and mine find his, and then it’s a race against the frantic, consuming need to erase every barrier between us.
When he enters me, my back arches off the wall and the moan that escapes is not quiet. Not even close. His hand covers my mouth and the pressure of his palm against my lips while he moves inside me is so intensely, devastatingly Luke that I come apart fast.
Embarrassingly .
“That’s it, baby.” Murmured against my temple, his hand still over my mouth, my legs locked around his waist. “I’ve got you.”
He follows minutes later with his face pressed into my neck, my name spoken like something sacred, and for a long, suspended moment, we just breathe. My legs still around him. His forehead against my shoulder. The hallway wall doing structural work it was never designed for.
“Mrs. Patterson’s going to have thoughts,” I whisper.
“Mrs. Patterson can write another note.”
“Furniture rearranging.”
“Very vigorous furniture rearranging.” He lifts his head. Smiles. Traces my cheekbone with his thumb. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“You came over.”
“You opened the door.”
“I’ll always open the door, Em.” He says it simply. Like it’s not the most loaded sentence in our shared vocabulary.
I’ll always open the door . The opposite of seven months of silence. The opposite of every text left unread, every call not returned, every door he kept closed because he thought distance was the same thing as protection.
“Then it's a good thing I keep showing up.”
We migrate to his bedroom eventually.
Not for round two, though the night is young and my competitive nature is what it is.
For the quiet part . The part that’s harder than the hallway and more important than any orgasm, even the earth-shattering ones.
I’m on his bed. His shirt on my body because I’ve claimed all of his clothing as community property.
My head on his chest. His fingers tracing the tattoo on my hip in slow, absent circles that he probably doesn’t realize he’s making.
The gesture has become habitual. A touchstone.
The place his hand goes when he’s thinking about something big.
“Grayson new something was different about me today,” he comments toward the ceiling. “Apparently I’ve been smiling. With my whole face. Which is, according to your brother, ‘kind of unsettling.’”
The laugh that escapes me is genuine. Of course Grayson noticed. Grayson notices everything about the people he loves, he just doesn’t always know what he’s noticing.
“What did you say?”
“That the job’s going well. That I feel settled.” A beat. “He asked if I was seeing someone.”
I go still. “And?”
“And I almost told him.”
My hand flattens against his torso. I feel his heartbeat, steady and sure beneath my palm.
“I was going to, Em. Right there in the tailor shop because Gray was looking at me with that face—you know the one. The pure, uncomplicated pride that makes you feel like the worst person alive because you’re lying to someone who trusts you completely.
” His chest rises and falls. “And then Walsh called. And I realized that if I told him… If anyone found out about us before the evaluation—”
“Every goal I’ve ever scored gets an asterisk,” I finish, echoing words we’ve already said.
I feel his head move up and down. “It wouldn’t matter that you’re the most talented forward in the conference. It wouldn’t matter that I started sending your film before I’d even admitted I loved you. The story would eat you alive.”
I press my face into his skin. Breathe in sandalwood and warmth and the specific, devastating scent of a man who loves me enough to keep hurting himself to protect me.
“Three weeks,” I say.
“Three weeks until the evaluation. The end of the regular season.”
“And Grayson? Where does telling him fit in?”
“After,” Luke breathes. “It has to be. No one can know, Em.”
I refrain from telling him that Sloane already knows. That Sky might. That Drew and Liz and whoever else might know about the tattoo on my hip. And instead, I keep it on Grayson. On what I know for sure. “He’s going to lose his mind. ”
“He’s going to punch me.”
“You sound remarkably calm about getting hit by a professional hockey player.”
“I’ve had time to prepare. Mentally, I’ve been getting punched by Grayson for about four years.”
I trace the scar above his eyebrow. The one from his sophomore year. The hit that started the cascade—the injury, the surgeries, the end of his playing career. The thing that broke him before I learned how to help put him back together through a phone pressed to my ear at 2 AM.
“He’ll get over it. Eventually. He’ll understand.”
“I hope so. Because I’m not going anywhere, Em.”
His hand comes up to my face, cupping my jaw, thumb finding the line of my cheekbone again. “You know what I thought when Walsh called earlier?”
“Hmm.”
“I thought—she’s going to do it. She’s going to make that team.
And I’m going to be the proudest man alive watching her do it.
And then I thought: she’s going to leave.
And I’m going to miss her so much it’ll feel like losing hockey all over again.
Except worse. Because hockey was a career.
Because somehow over the span of seven years, you’ve become my life, Emma. A life I’m only now starting to live.”
My eyes burn. I blink fast, but before I can suck it back in, a tear slides down my cheek. Luke catches it with his thumb.
“But here’s the thing,” he continues, voice fierce and unshaking.
“I’ve been here before. Watched you date other people.
Ghosted you for seven months like a coward and you still showed up to that first practice determined to show me why that was the biggest mistake I’ve made.
I told you we were ‘better as friends’ and you got my number tattooed on your body.
” He presses his lips to my temple. “Less than a year apart, Em? That's nothing. I’d wait forever.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why?”
“Because ‘forever’ is the kind of word that makes me want to do stupid things. Like tell Grayson tomorrow. Like kiss you on the bench after a goal. Like skip the evaluation entirely and stay right here in this bed for the rest of the season.”
“You’re not skipping the evaluation.”
“I know.”
“And you’re not telling Grayson tomorrow. ”
“I know that too.”
“And you’re definitely not kissing me on the bench because Calloway would fire me so fast it’d break the sound barrier.”
I laugh. It’s wet and messy. “I need you as my coach, Luke. Need you there when they show up. Need the way you ground me like no one ever has.”
“Why we’ve got to keep this quiet, baby.
Keep this ours. For now.” He pulls me back against his chest. “But I swear, afterwards? When you’re no longer my player?
When that invite is firm and unrecanting?
I’ll stand at center ice and declare to the entire student body, to Calloway, to God, that I’m yours Emma. That I’ll always be.”
The room is dark except for the light from his phone on the nightstand, casting a blue glow across the ceiling that reminds me of Christmas lights. Of a couch where my feet lived in his lap. Of the beginning of something I didn’t have a name for yet.
“Always is a long time, Luke,” I murmur against his chest.
His hand finds the tattoo again. Traces the Roman numerals through fabric. XIX. “And yet it’s still not long enough.”