Chapter 17
seventeen
MORGAN
Everything in my mind just detonated.
It’s not a controlled blast, but messy and chaotic, because every piece of data I’ve collected on James Fitzgerald over the past three years is suddenly useless. Because the man who just torched his golden-boy status for me doesn’t fit anywhere in my careful classification system.
My pulse hammers so hard I can feel it in my teeth. The red EXIT sign above a service stairwell catches my eye—perfect. I grab his arm without thinking, and the contact hits like pure voltage, the first voluntary touch in three years bringing back everything my mind tried to delete.
The solid heat of his forearm.
The way his muscles cord beneath my grip.
His hands in my hair on that beach.
His mouth against my throat.
The way he held me like I was precious, before he broke me.
I yank him through the door before my knees buckle, and the stairwell swallows us in dust and shadows. A single bulb overhead throws harsh light that turns his face into something carved from stone and secrets. The air tastes stale, but he smells like home.
I whirl on him. “What was that supposed to prove?”
The words come out serrated as I brace for the usual routine: the thousand-watt grin, the charming deflection, or some stupid joke that'll be delivered with that infuriating eternal-sunshine energy. I almost beg for him to give me the jester, because I understand that, and I can hate that.
But he doesn’t.
He just stands there, shoulders squared like he’s about to take a hit, and absorbs my anger without a single defensive joke. The manic energy that usually radiates from him has been replaced by something that looks dangerously like the man I glimpsed for two weeks three summers ago.
Something quieter and steadier.
“Galloway’s a predator," he says, simple and stark, with no performance and no punchline. “And I’m sorry.”
My heart stops.
“For spraying you on the ice… for the locker room… for the jokes after Kellerman dropped the bar… for all of it.” His voice drops. “For before.”
Before.
One word, and I’m drowning, twenty-one and eighteen simultaneously, standing in this stairwell and sitting on the hood of that truck. The word carries everything—late-night conversations where he actually listened, his laugh when I made a joke, the way he kissed me—and the moment it shattered.
“I should’ve done something different three years ago," he says, quiet and earnest. "Instead of being a coward.”
The apology demolishes me.
Every carefully constructed barrier I’ve built crumbles to dust. Because this is him actually acknowledging that he hurt me, that he sees it, and that he cares about it. And, best of all—worst of all?—he means it, because the boy who always runs from sincerity is standing here bleeding it.
I refuse to cry. But my eyes betray me anyway. And, suddenly, all the hardness and loneliness and goddamn fucking strength I've had to maintain to protect myself and support others fractures into a million pieces. In its place is something that probably looks a lot like hope.
Which is the most terrifying thing I could possibly show James Fitzgerald.
He sees the exact moment my armor fails.
I see him hesitate, fighting the urge to make a joke or run away, to replace seriousness and silence with noise and motion.
But then he swallows, and stays, and suddenly the charge that’s been building between us for weeks has no way to ground itself and dissipate.
He takes a step closer.
Just one, but it changes the entire physics of the space. The stairwell shrinks. I can feel the heat radiating off his body. I can smell him, the same scent that once made me feel safe. My breathing goes shallow, quick little sips of air that don’t bring enough oxygen.
Or maybe that’s just him, standing this close.
My gaze drops to his mouth.
The air ignites.
And we collide.
I surge forward at the exact moment he reaches for me. His hand cups my jaw, rough with calluses from his stick, and warm and large enough that his fingers span from my ear to my throat. His thumb strokes across my cheekbone, just once, achingly tender.
Then his mouth takes mine.
Three years of repressed fury and want explode between us. He walks me backward until cold concrete slams against my spine. The shock of it, the sudden cold through my thin shirt contrasting with the furnace heat of him, makes me gasp.
He swallows the sound with a groan that starts in his chest.
His other hand finds my waist, fingers splaying wide. He grips hard, before yanking me flush against him. Every inch of space disappears. I feel everything—the solid wall of his chest pressed against my breasts, my nipples tightening to almost painful points, the heat burning through our clothes.
And—fuck—the unmistakable ridge of his erection against me.
He’s hard because of me, and that simple biological validation shoots straight between my legs so fast I feel dizzy. Because it's physical proof that I affect him as violently as he affects me. God, my underwear is absolutely ruined, and we’ve barely started whatever this is.
The kiss deepens into something desperate and consuming. His tongue sweeps into my mouth, and the taste of him makes me moan—actually moan, a sound I’ll deny forever—and then we’re devouring each other, trying to consume three years of denial in a single encounter.
My hands, which had been fisted in his shirt, fly upward with their own agenda. One tangles in his hair, those perpetually messy dark strands that feel like silk between my fingers. I grip hard and yank his head to a better angle, taking control, showing him I’m not some passive recipient.
He makes a sound against my mouth, then his hips roll forward, grinding his erection against me. My body responds without permission, my hips canting forward to meet his. The position is wrong—he’s too tall—so the angle isn’t right, but the attempt alone makes him tear his mouth from mine.
“Fuck,” he gasps against my jaw, the word more prayer than profanity. “Morgan.”
He says my name—not Morgue, not Riley—like something precious.
His lips trail down my throat, hot and open-mouthed.
I tip my head back, skull connecting with concrete, grateful for the dull pain keeping me tethered to reality.
When he reaches the junction of my neck and shoulder, he bites down—not hard enough to break skin, but enough to make every nerve ending light up.
I arch against him with a sound that’s embarrassingly close to a whimper, grinding against his thigh.
And, I realize then, I’m dry-humping his thigh in a dusty stairwell like we’re sneaking around after the prom.
The seam of my jeans catches against my clit with each roll of my hips, and if he keeps this up—
No.
I am not coming in a stairwell.
I have standards.
Apparently flexible ones, considering my current position.
But… standards!
I use my grip on his hair to drag his mouth back to mine, swallowing his protest. Our tongues tangle, fierce and frantic. His hand slides from my waist to cup my ass. He grips hard and lifts slightly, changing the angle, and suddenly his cock is pressed exactly where I need it.
“Thought about this,” he confesses against my mouth, the words spilling out between desperate kisses. “Every fucking day since I saw you in that meeting.”
“Stop talking,” I gasp, because if he keeps going, if he makes this about feelings instead of fury, I might actually combust.
But my body might already be past the meltdown point.
There's not enough water in the world to cool me down.
Better evacuate the campus and call the hazmat teams.
My hands map the broad expanse of his shoulders, feeling the muscles bunch and shift. The strength contained there, the power he’s holding back. My mouth opens wider, taking him deeper, our tongues sliding together in a rhythm that mirrors what our bodies are desperate to do.
His hand continues its journey upward, and when his thumb brushes the underside of my breast through my shirt, and—
The door above us crashes open.
We both freeze.
Footsteps echo down the stairwell—multiple sets, heavy, getting closer.
We spring apart like we've been shocked.
My body screams at the loss of contact, while he stumbles back, chest heaving, and for a split second we just stare at each other in the harsh fluorescent light.
His pupils are blown wide, his mouth is swollen where I bit him, and there's a mark darkening on his neck.
The footsteps are maybe two flights up.
"Shit," he breathes, then grabs my hand. "Come on."
He yanks open the door to the third floor and pulls me through. We're in another hallway—this one mercifully empty—and he's still holding my hand as we half-run past closed classroom doors. Behind us, the stairwell door bangs open again, and I can hear male voices talking.
“—told Nash to check the equipment room—”
One of his teammates. Looking for him.
Rook pulls me around a corner, then another, until we're in some administrative wing I've never seen. He knows the campus better than I ever will, but even that has limits, because when he tries a door handle, it’s locked. Another. Also locked. The third opens, revealing a supply closet.
We tumble inside, then he shuts the door and turns on a light, and when he turns to face me, his expression mirrors what I feel—utter horror at what we’ve just done and almost getting caught, mixed with undeniable recognition of what this means.
We’re not rivals anymore, but we’re not partners either.
We’re something else.
Something unnamed and dangerous.
“Morgan,” he says, my name rough and uncertain in his mouth, and it's clear he's fighting the urge to kiss me—to engulf me—all over again.
“Don’t," I say, because I need him to stop looking at me like I’m something precious he’s just rediscovered, and like he’s already planning the next time.
Because there can’t be a next time.
Can there?
My body is a live wire, every nerve ending sparked and singing. And the worst part is that now I know what I’ve been missing. Three years of careful control was just obliterated in seconds by an encounter that was an entire confession written in tongue and teeth and desperate hands.
“We can’t—” I start, not even sure how to finish that sentence.
“I know,” he says immediately, although I can still clearly see his bulge.
“This changes nothing,” I lie.
“Right,” he lies back.
We’re terrible liars, apparently.
Because this changes everything.
“This never happened,” I say, the words steady despite the chaos in my chest.
He looks at me for a long moment. Then something shifts in his eyes—not agreement, exactly, but understanding—because we both know this can’t happen again but that it absolutely will. Because resisting this force is like trying to take on a one-on-five power play all on your own.
“Never happened,” he echoes.
But when I reach for the door handle, his hand covers mine for just a second. His thumb brushes across my knuckles, and that simple touch sends me right back to wanting him again. Which is just great, because apparently he's turned me into someone who gets turned on by hand-holding.
“Morgan,” he says my name again, softer this time, a question and a promise and an apology all rolled into two syllables.
I meet his eyes, and what I see there terrifies me more than Galloway’s threats or my team’s struggles or any external enemy ever could.
I see the possibility of a future where the stairwell and this janitor's closet aren't the end but the beginning, and it's everything I’ve spent three years protecting myself from.
“I have to go,” I whisper. "But watch out, because Galloway will be after you now that you've helped me…"
He nods, his hand sliding away from mine, and the loss of contact feels like losing a limb. But before I can rethink it, I slip out the door, leaving him there with a raging case of blue balls and the taste of me on his lips and the secret of what we’ve just done hanging in the air.
The hallway is blindingly bright after the dim stairwell.
Normal. Ordinary.
Like the last ten minutes haven’t fundamentally altered my reality.
I make it three steps before I have to stop, pressing my palm flat against the wall to steady myself. My legs are shaking. My whole body is shaking. I can still feel him everywhere—his hands, his mouth, the solid weight of him pressing me into that wall.
But no matter how much I lie to myself, it's clear the war between us is over, and a secret alliance has just been signed in the most volatile way imaginable.
And I have absolutely no idea what happens next.