Chapter 23
Jacks
The doorbell rang, and Skyler launched off the couch like he’d been electrocuted.
“Food’s here. Don’t move.”
He disappeared into the kitchen. Cabinets opened and closed. Plates clinked. Something rustled.
Then more rustling.
Then a lot more rustling.
He emerged carrying two plates stacked with pad see ew and pad Thai, set them on the coffee table, then disappeared again.
Green curry.
Then dumplings.
Then crab Rangoon.
Then soup.
Then two boxes of fried rice.
I stared at the coffee table, which now looked like a Thai restaurant had exploded on it.
“Sky, how many people are coming to this dinner?”
“Just us. Why?”
“Because you ordered enough food to feed my entire bar on a game night.”
“I panicked. I didn’t know what you’d want, so I ordered everything.” Something sheepish crept across his expression. “Okay, not everything. I skipped the tom kha gai.”
“Oh, well. Restraint. I’m impressed.”
He shoved my shoulder. “Shut up and eat your pad see ew.”
I kicked off my shoes, and we ate cross-legged, facing each other, plates balanced on knees.
The pad see ew was excellent. I’d been going to that place for two years, and it had never let me down.
What surprised me was Skyler studying his first bite with the analytical focus of a man breaking down an opponent’s flaws before his eyes went wide and he shoveled in three more forkfuls without breathing.
We debated whether the pad see ew was better than Rosa’s carnitas, landing on the only diplomatic solution: different categories, both elite, no comparison necessary.
Then we sampled everything else while our knees pressed together and our shoulders bumped and the distance between us shrank to nothing.
This was what I’d been missing for two weeks.
Not Skyler—though, God, yes, Skyler—but this ease of being together.
I’d had good dates before, fun dates, dates where everything ticked all the right boxes, but I’d never felt so certain I was where I was supposed to be, not even on the best of dates.
“Can I ask you something?” I said, setting my plate on the coffee table beside the mountain of containers. “Yesterday, when you kissed me, what made you ask me to trust you instead of explaining what you were about to do?”
“I guess . . . I didn’t have the right words . . . or I wasn’t sure if I did. I’d been trying to figure out what to say for weeks. Nothing felt right. Everything sounded either too casual or too dramatic or . . . not enough.”
“So you skipped the words and went straight to the action.”
“Was that okay? The whole ‘trust me’ thing was kind of intense. I was trying not to be dramatic but ended up more dramatic than daytime TV.”
“It might’ve been the scariest ten seconds of my life,” I said through a grin and a mouthful of dumpling. “I thought you were about to tell me you were transferring to another team, or that you’d found out I’d been tracking your team’s private plane and were filing a restraining order.”
“You tracked our plane?”
Well, shit. Had I said that out loud?
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s a little bit the point.” He cocked one brow.
“The point is that ‘trust me’ covers a lot of territory, and my brain went to every worst-case scenario before it considered the possibility that you might kiss me.” I let the memory hit me full force.
“And I would like to officially state, for the record, that it was the single greatest surprise of my entire life, even better than making varsity as a freshman or my first touchdown at FSU.”
“Better than Rosa’s carnitas?”
“Don’t push it, Bolt Boy. Just take the win.”
He shoved me again, laughing.
I grabbed his hand before it left my shoulder and traced a slow circle on his wrist—a gesture I’d discovered yesterday made his breath hitch in a devastating way.
It worked again.
“I’m really glad you kissed me,” I said.
“I’m really glad you kissed me back.”
“You can’t back a guy into a wall and kiss him and expect immediate processing,” I said. “There’s a loading time, like those old computers with their floppy disks.”
Something wicked crossed his face. “My disk is never floppy, so you know.”
I blinked.
Skyler Shaw—golden boy, captain, and possibly the most earnest human being I’d ever met had just made a dick joke.
On our first date.
While holding my hand.
I loved him immediately.
The thought arrived without warning or fanfare.
It bore into me like a mother’s gaze, sharp and knowing and wholly empathetic.
Fine, maybe love was too strong of a word at that point in our whatever-we-were, but the tug at my heart every time I was near him was so close to what I believed love felt like that I had no other word to use. Everything else felt too small.
“Your not-so-floppy disk, eh?” I managed, burying the revelation under humor. “I like the sound of that.”
He turned redder than the pagodas on the takeout boxes.
“That’s the least romantic thing anyone has ever said to me,” he mumbled.
“You want romantic? Fine. You’ll learn to be careful what you ask for.
” I tugged his hand, pulling him closer.
“When you kissed me, it felt like every single thing that had ever gone wrong in my life had been leading me to that exact moment. It felt as though every heartbreak and every lonely night was actually the universe clearing a path to you.”
Silence.
He stared at me.
Blinked.
Opened his mouth.
Closed it.
I wanted to crawl inside one of the empty takeout containers and die.
“Too much?” I asked.
“No,” he choked out. “That was . . . no. That was perfect.”
The air shifted.
Everything went still and charged.
And then Skyler leaned in. There was no hesitation, no trembling, no “trust me.” His mouth found mine with a certainty that made my heart crack open. The angle was wrong because our legs were still tangled. A plate clattered off the coffee table as we shifted.
“The pad Thai,” I murmured against his lips.
“Leave it.”
“It’s on the floor.”
“The floor can have it.”