Chapter 37 #2
There’s nothing pushy in the offer. Nothing strange. Nothing I could point to and call too much.
It still feels off.
I put my phone away.
It’s such a small thing. A ride. A practical offer from someone I genuinely like. That’s what makes it so hard to argue with.
We reach the lobby doors, and I stop, turning to Nia.
“Actually,” I hear myself say, “I think I need to head out. I’m wiped.”
Nia gives me a sympathetic look. “Day two hitting hard?”
“Something like that.”
“Coffee tomorrow after anatomy lab?”
“Definitely.”
Rebecca waves without looking up from her phone. Mateo gives me a mock salute. I watch them head toward the library—my new people, my new life—while I walk back toward the familiar.
The feeling that follows isn’t guilt exactly, but it’s close enough to sour everything.
Just the sense that I have stepped out of my own day again, and that it took almost nothing to make me do it.
That’s the part I can’t stop feeling in my teeth.
Nate pulls up five minutes later in his SUV. Liam is in the back seat, still buzzing from the hospital visit.
“Doctor Adler! How’s med school treating you?”
“Ask me again in a month.”
Two blocks later, Liam peels off to his Tesla, and then it’s just me and Nate heading toward Brooklyn.
When I ask, lightly, how he knew where I was, he says Leo mentioned my orientation started this week and shrugs it off like it’s nothing.
Which somehow makes it worse.
I give him nothing and steer the conversation to his farm share and the new hockey season gearing up.
By the time he drops me in front of Leo’s building, I’m smiling my thanks and trying very hard not to think about how apparently everyone in Leo’s orbit knows where to find me.
The sky outside has turned a deep twilight blue when I let myself into the apartment.
I hear the shower running, but it turns off within a few minutes and the bathroom door opens.
Leo comes down the hall in black sweatpants and a white T-shirt, hair damp, shoulders still carrying the hard set of camp.
He’s cleaner than he is when he walks in straight from training, but not softer.
If anything, the shower only strips him down to something quieter and more dangerous—less sweat, less noise, the same contained force.
There’s still something tightly controlled in the way he moves, as if his body hasn’t fully gotten the message that the work is over for the day.
His expression lights up when he spots me.
“Hey, Flash.”
There is the usual warmth in it. The usual certainty. It lands exactly where it always does, and that’s part of the problem too.
“Hey.”
He crosses to me without hesitation, one arm settling at my waist as he bends to kiss me.
The contact is easy, unhurried, familiar, and my body answers it with humiliating speed.
Rain and city and library and Nate and every calculation I’ve been making all afternoon blur under the simple touch of his lips.
It should feel ordinary by now. It doesn’t.
When he pulls back, his arm lingers at the base of my spine.
“How was your day?”
I rest my head on his chest, breathing him in.
His body is warm from the shower, dense with that post-camp heaviness that makes him feel less like comfort and more like impact held in check.
“Good. A lot again.” He waits me out. “Less ceremonial. More systems, more reading, more people. It will be intense, Leo.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. “Sounds like exactly your speed. You can do this.”
He brushes his thumb once over the back of my neck, then pulls me toward the kitchen.
“Hungry?”
I want to laugh and tease him, say that I see how him and Nate ended up being best friends, but I bite it down.
“A little.”
He opens the fridge, scans the labeled containers, and pulls out two of them with the smooth confidence of a man who is used to solving the next thing before it becomes a question.
I watch him move around the kitchen with that same stripped-down efficiency he brings to everything else, and the split comes back.
Part of me loves this. The steadiness. The certainty. The sense that when he’s near, things get handled.
Another part of me can’t stop noticing how dangerous that competence feels in a man built like him—how easy it would be to mistake being overwhelmed by him for being safe with him.
He glances over his shoulder. “You okay?”
“Yes.” The answer is out before I can shape it.
He studies me more closely. “Try again.”
I manage a small smile. “No, really. It’s just all new right now.”
He nods and heats the meals, plates them, hands me sparkling water without asking, and we eat at the island talking about harmless things—Nia and Mateo, med school jargon, one funny camp story.
I don’t mention Nate.
That omission follows the whole meal, hot and mean under my skin. Because I know exactly what Leo would say if I brought it up.
Nate was nearby.
Nate was heading to Brooklyn anyway.
It made sense.
It helped.
And maybe that’s why I stay quiet. Because I’m afraid of him sounding reasonable. I’m even more afraid of the part of me that would agree.
Across the table, Leo refills my water without being asked.
I watch him do it and say nothing.