Chapter 17 #2
She stands there for a beat, weighing the gift against the cost, before she pulls out her phone. ‘I didn’t bring anything,’ she says, scrolling through a playlist.
‘Doesn’t matter. The floor doesn’t know what you’re wearing. It’s so you can see if it works for you. It has the wooden rail and all that.’
‘The barre.’ Ava smiles and connects to the Bluetooth speaker in the corner.
Slow and melancholic piano music fills the room as she takes off her shoes and socks. She saunters to the centre of the room and finds her focus. Rolling her ankles, she starts warming up, stretching her calves, careful with the foot that’s recently recovered.
I stay in the corner, in the background. Arms crossed, trying to be part of the furniture.
Then she moves.
I’ve watched and played rugby all my life. I know about force vectors, momentum, impact. I know what it takes to stop a 120-kilo prop moving at sprint speed. I understand raw physical power and brute force.
But this? This is different. It’s defying physics through discipline and grace.
It starts small. A lift of the arm. A turn of the head. But then she explodes. She spins, and the jumper she’s still wearing flares out. She leaps, and the laws of physics cease to exist. She lands silently, absorbing the impact through ankles and knees, and immediately flows into the next shape.
It’s powerful. I see the quiver in her muscles as she holds a leg extension that seems impossible, and I want my hands where the strain is.
She’s not fragile. She’s strong. Ava is a fucking force of nature that I’ve been trying to protect with bubble wrap. Jesus. I’m a patronising prick. She doesn’t need my protection.
She spins. Once, twice, three times. Four. Pirouettes that whip her jumper out. She’s panting, a sheen of sweat on her forehead. On the fifth spin, she stumbles, overcorrects, and comes hurtling towards the corner
I move forward on instinct. ‘Easy, watch your—’
She lands directly against my chest. Neither of us breathes. Her small hands are braced on my shoulders, breath hot against my neck, pupils blown wide. My heart kicks so violently, I’m convinced she can feel it through the layers of fabric.
‘Ava,’ I warn. It’s a plea. Run. Before I snap.
But she grabs a fistful of my hoodie and hauls me down to her mouth.
Fuck yes.
This kiss is a detonation. She tastes of caramel, and the groan that rips out of me is filthy with need. I take her waist and lift. She wraps her legs around me, and I carry her backwards until her back slams into the mirrored wall with a thud that threatens to break it.
Last night, I slammed the brakes on to keep her safe.
But Ava isn’t fragile. She’s a fucking powerhouse.
Treating her like porcelain isn’t protective.
It’s an insult. And if she’s pushing for this, I’m pulling her right into the deep end with me.
So I kiss her apart until we’re both gasping for air.
‘Wow,’ she pants. ‘You really can kiss.’
‘Thank you. I’m gonna do it again now.’
‘Yes,’ she gasps against my mouth. ‘Yes. Scottie, don’t stop.’
I pin her to the mirror with my hips, kneading her arse, tilting her until she’s flush against my cock. She rolls down, and I nearly lose my mind.
‘Fuck, Ava.’ I grind up into her, and she lets out a whine. ‘You feel that? That’s how fucked up you got me.’
She bites my bottom lip, and my hips buck on reflex, driving against her. Her thighs squeeze around my waist. She moans into my mouth, riding the friction, and I feel her chasing it already.
We’re combusting.
My hand slides under the hem of her jumper. Hot skin. The dip of her waist. I want to go higher. I want to cup her tit and feel the nipple harden between my fingers. I want to drop to my knees, drag those leggings down with my teeth, and fucking devour her.
Every roll of her hips drags her right over my pulsing hardness, and my hands on her arse crush her closer, locking the angle, taking what I need.
‘Harder.’ I bite the word into her neck. ‘Go on. Work me harder.’
She does, and her mouth drops open against mine. The moan that spills out is wrecked. I match her, driving up, and she whimpers with need. So I keep that tempo until her eyes roll back.
‘Ah! Oh god. Yes…’ Her breath is ragged against my ear. ‘I’m going to… I’m—’
Right there. Right on the fucking edge.
Footsteps. Heavy soles on the floorboards outside the studio door.
We rip apart. She drops from my waist and steadies herself on the barre. I stagger away, fists balled, every nerve screaming to pin her against that mirror and finish what we started. The footsteps pass and fade down the corridor.
Cold guilt douses the heat. I’m not her boyfriend.
‘God. This is…’
‘…a problem.’ I try to hide how gutted I feel. ‘You just left a relationship. I’m your… I don’t know what I am to you.’
She laughs, but it’s shaky. ‘You’re my friend. The only one I’ve got right now.’
‘Aye.’ I let out a breath that burns. It’s one thing to punch your teammate because he threatened his girlfriend, who happens to be your friend. Making that same woman your girl only days after? Another dimension of fuckery.
But that’s what I want. I want Ava MacKinney so bad it hurts all over.
Yet as I stand here with the memory of her body against mine, the brutal reality of it sets in. I’m gonna fuck it all up. Her life, my life, our friendship.
Ava gazes up at me. Lips bitten red, hair tangled, chest heaving. She’s wearing the evidence of what I just did to her, and I want to do it again. Harder. Slower. With far fewer clothes between us.
‘I can’t lose this,’ I hear myself say. ‘Our friendship. If this goes wrong – if we try and it explodes – I lose you. And I can’t have that.’
She furrows her eyebrows. ‘You’re worried about losing me?’
‘Aye. You’re the only thing that’s made sense in ages.’
She’s chewing her lip. Why the hell does she look guilty? I’m the one who’s rubbed his raging boner against her. I’m the one who’s kissed her like he’s trying to steal her soul. I’m the one who’s going to mess this up.
The timing is catastrophic. The optics are nuclear. And the last thing she needs is another man complicating her life while she’s still picking shrapnel out of the last one.
‘So we put this…attraction in a box for now,’ I say. The words taste like sawdust. A lie we both need to believe.
‘A box? Okay. We put it in a box. We’re friends. Pals who fight seagulls and change tyres. Friends who don’t…’ She waves at the mirrored wall, the scene of the crime, ‘…do that. Ideally.’
‘Right.’ I shove my hands into my pockets, so I don’t reach for her. ‘Friends.’
We glare at each other. The tension hums between us, a live wire neither of us can touch. The box we’re building is made of sodden cardboard. It will hold until it doesn’t.
She tugs at her bun and tries to reassemble herself into a person who wasn’t just dry-humped against a mirror. ‘Okay. We’re grand. This is grand.’
‘Grand,’ I echo.
‘Scottie,’ she says softly. ‘Thank you. For the studio. For…all of it. You have no idea what this means to me.’
‘Aye, well. It’s only a wee room with a floor. Let’s go home, Marzipan.’
Saturday night means the chippy run. The kitchen table is covered in paper-wrapped bundles of grease and joy.
Ava is sitting between Mum and Erin and grins.
She fits. That’s the thing that kills me.
She passes the salt to Mum without being asked.
She steals a chip from David’s plate and winks when he protests.
No, Ava’s not a guest. She’s here not even forty-eight hours and already woven into the fabric of this family. How the hell is that possible?
I sit at the end of the table, nursing my fish supper and watching her. Then it clicks. Hot and sharp right in my chest.
I’m fucking gone for her.
It’s a simple, life-ruining fact.
Ava isn’t a charity case or a stray I picked up. She’s the whole point. The absolute centre of my fucking universe, sitting right here in my kitchen.
I look at her, relaxed and happy in the chaos of my family, and I feel the weight of the future. The years ahead. Watching her be ‘only a friend’. Watching her meet someone else. Watching her move on, get married.
I push a chip around my plate, appetite gone.
I replay the scene in the studio. The feel of her legs around my waist. The desperation in her kiss.
Put it in the box. Lock the lid.
‘You awright there, son?’ Mum’s voice cuts through the noise. ‘You’ve gone a bit green.’
‘I’m knackered.’ I push my chair back. ‘I’m going to get an early night.’
Ava’s gaze cuts to mine, and I see the same ache reflected back. Then she lowers her eyes.