Chapter 31 #3
“Terrified.” I deadpan. Because she is strong and beautiful—a female warrior and scary as fuck on the court.
She leans back in the chair, and the movement drags my attention lower before I can stop it—the graceful line of her waist, the curve of her crossed legs, the quiet confidence in the way she takes up space.
I grip my coffee harder.
Hard enough the lid dents.
“Maybe,” she says softly, “we should just take things slow so we don’t combust and end up hating each other for it.”
I lean forward, forearms braced on the table, eyes locked on hers.
“You think we could ever do slow, Stells? That’s delusional. But I won’t be that guy who played with another girl’s heart and forgets it like nothing— when the one I always wanted decides it’s her turn.”
For a second neither of us moves.
Her lips part.
And all I can think about is dragging my thumb across that bottom lip, then my mouth after it. What it would take to make her gasp. To make her forget the controlled, careful version of herself and melt against me like I’ve imagined in the dark more nights than I can count.
My voice comes out rough.
“You think I don’t see you and—”
I stop.
Too late.
Her eyes flare.
“See me and what?” she asks.
Everything in me tightens.
Want.
Memory.
Frustration.
Need.
The sick, disciplined instinct to keep denying us both because I don’t trust what happens when I finally stop.
I sit back hard, jaw flexing.
“That’s the problem.”
A beat passes.
Then another.
She studies me like she’s trying to decide whether to push or show mercy.
Stella has never been generous with mercy.
Still, when she speaks, her voice is quieter.
“You walking away doesn’t mean it went away.”
I laugh once, without humor.
“I’m aware.”
Her gaze drops briefly to my clenched hand around the coffee cup, then rises again.
There’s heat in her expression now too.
No use pretending otherwise.
Good.
At least I’m not burning alone.
“Then what are you doing?” she asks.
Choosing not to lose my damn mind over a girl I have wanted in too many versions and not enough reality.
Instead I look at her and tell the ugliest truth.
“Surviving you.”
That hits.
Not because it hurts her exactly—because she feels it too.
The wanting.
The resisting.
The fact that attraction has long since blown past cute and landed somewhere dangerous.
“I need more time Stells. My season is just starting. I want to have time for you. For us. You know how the season gets—the away games. The pressure.”
“That’s the thing about time… ours never seems to be right.”
She stands, slow and fluid, gathering her notebook and sliding it into her bag.
For one insane second I think she’s leaving because of me.
Then she steps closer to me instead. Not enough to touch. Enough that I can see the tiny pulse in her throat again. Enough that I can smell her. Enough that I know exactly how little it would take to wreck every good intention I’ve built these past few weeks.
She looks down at me, lashes low, mouth soft but unsmiling.
“We might run out of time and chances while you try to figure your shit out, Vale. And you’r doing a terrible job of it.”
Then she brushes past me.
Close enough that her hip barely grazes the arm of my chair.
Close enough that her scent clings to the air after she’s gone.
Close enough that every part of me goes rigid with the effort not to turn, not to reach, not to drag her back and find out if all those fantasies would break us or save us.
The bell over the door chimes.
She’s gone.
And I sit there in the wreckage of her absence, fists clenched, heart pounding, body aching, knowing exactly two things:
She wants me.
I want her.
And I don’t know how much longer I can keep calling this self-preservation when it feels this much like punishment.
I make it exactly seventeen minutes after Stella leaves before I understand something ugly about myself.
I never should have let Isa become the place I went to feel less wrecked.
That realization sits in my chest all through practice like a bruise I can’t stop pressing.
Coach is talking. Whistle. Shoes squealing.
Ball snapping from hand to hand. Bodies cutting through drills with that hard, clean rhythm I usually lose myself inside.
Today every shot feels a half second late.
Every pass is a fraction off. Every sprint burns wrong.
Because my head is still back in that coffee shop, caught on the way Stella looked at me when I said I was surviving her.
Caught on the truth in her face when she said I was doing a terrible job.
Caught on the fact that I wanted to drag her back to my table, drag her into my lap, drag my mouth down the long line of her neck until we both forget what a mess we’ve both made to what could be the most beautiful thing,
And under all of that—
Isa.
Steady, beautiful, kind Isa.
Isa, who did not ask to be the person I reached for while trying not to drown in someone else.
I miss a shot so badly it catches back iron and ricochets wide.
“Vale,” Coach barks.
I grab the rebound and toss it back out.
“Again.”
But even Coach’s voice can’t cut through it now. By the time practice ends, I know what I have to do.
I hate it.
That’s how I know it’s honest.
I text Isa from the locker room with my towel hanging around my neck and sweat still cooling on my skin.
Need to see you…
She answers faster than I deserve.
3 my place?
No heart.
No joke.
No softness.
Maybe she already knows.
Maybe girls like Isa always know.
The sun is dropping by the time I get there.
Stanford looks offensively beautiful at sunset. Gold light on sandstone. Long shadows across the quad. Bikes cutting through the pathways. Students laughing like nobody’s life is quietly cracking open near the fountain.
I get there early, stand with my hands in my pockets and watch the water move, trying to find the right words and hating every single one of them.
There is no right way to tell a good girl that she was never really going to win against a ghost you tried to bury alive.
Footsteps sound behind me.
I turn.
Isa is walking toward me in black leggings and a cream sweater, hair up, face bare. No armor tonight. No extra gloss. No sparkle turned on for effect. Just Isa.
Which somehow makes this worse.
She sees my face and stops a few feet away.
“Oh,” she says softly.
Just that.
One word.
And already I know she knows.
“Yeah.”
The fountain hums between us.
For a second neither of us moves.
Then she closes the distance, folds her arms, and tips her chin up in that brave, composed way girls like her master because the world rewards them for bleeding neatly.
“Tell me straight.”
No scene.
No trembling lip.
No performance.
Just courage.
It would be easier if she screamed at me.
Instead I give her the truth.
“I like you,” I say.
Her mouth twitches.
“That’s never a good start.”
“No,” I admit. “It isn’t.”
I drag a hand through my hair and exhale hard.
“You’re smart. You’re easy to be with. You’re…” I look at her, force myself not to look away. “Good.”
She lets out a short breath through her nose.
“.. but?”
I don’t bother pretending not to understand.
“Stella,” I say.
The name lands between us like something alive.
Isa’s eyes flicker once.
Nothing more.
“Is it always going to be, Stella?”
There’s no venom in it.
That’s somehow worse.
I nod.
“Yeah.”
She looks past me for a second, toward the path cutting through the grass, like maybe she needs something in the distance to focus on so she doesn’t have to focus on the exact shape of this ending.
Then she looks back at me.
“Did you ever really choose me?”
That one goes in clean.
No way around it.
No polished answer.
No version that lets me keep my dignity.
“I think I wanted to.”
She laughs, but it’s small and joyless.
“Ouch.”
“I know.”
“No,” she says quietly, “I don’t think you do.”
And fair enough.
Because I’ve spent most of my life being praised for damage I knew how to hide.
I take a step closer, not enough to crowd her, enough that she’ll hear me clearly. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Don’t,” she says immediately. “Don’t hand me that line like this is some generic breakup scene in a bad streaming show.”
I wince. “I’m serious,” I say. “This isn’t about you lacking something. It’s about me being honest too late.”
She studies my face.
“What changed?”
Everything.
Nothing.
A girl in a coffee shop with sunlight in her hair and my self-control in a chokehold.
The fact that I am so tired of being a man who reaches for the safer option when the truth gets expensive.
I look down at the stone edge of the fountain, then back at Isa.
“I’m trying to stop living in halves.”
Something shifts in her expression.
“And I was the half?”
“No.” The answer comes fast because that matters. “You were the version of my life that looked clean.”
Her eyes flash. “That’s not better, Tristan.”
“I know.” My voice roughens. “I know. That’s the whole point.”
The water behind us keeps moving.
A bike bell rings in the distance.
Somebody laughs on the steps.
Normal life.
Wrong moment.
Isa drops her arms and lets them hang at her sides.
“I knew,” she says.
The words are quiet.
Certain.
My chest tightens.
“Knew what?”
“That I was never really the thing under your skin.”
I close my eyes for half a beat.
Because she’s right—she deserves better than my silence now.
“I knew every time her name came up and your whole face changed,” Isa says. “Every time you got too still when she walked into a room. Every time you looked like you were trying not to look.”
I say nothing.
What can I say?
Sorry I thought wanting a different life hard enough could make it true?
“You’re not a bad guy,” Isa says after a second. “That’s the annoying part.”
I look at her.
She gives me a brittle, tired smile. “You’d actually be easier to hate if you were.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.” She swallows. “And I know you mean it. But you still let this happen.”
“Yeah.”
Her gaze sharpens. “So what now? You run back to Stella?”
There it is.
The ugliest question.
The one everyone asks when they think love is a hallway with two doors and all you have to do is pick one.
I shake my head slowly.
“No.”
Her brows pull together.
“No?”
“I’m not ending this because I have some perfect ending lined up with her.” I hold her gaze. “I’m ending it because you deserve more than me standing here with one foot still somewhere else.”
For the first time since she arrived, something in Isa’s face softens.
Not because it hurts less.
Because it’s finally honest. I go on before fear can clean up the truth.
“I don’t know what happens with Stella,” I say. “I don’t know if I get that. I don’t know if I deserve that. But I do know I can’t keep doing this with you while every real part of me is still tangled up in her.”
The fountain water catches the last gold light.
Isa looks down.
When she speaks again, her voice is smaller.
Not weak.
Just unguarded.
“I hate that I respect that.”
A humorless laugh slips out of me.
“Yeah. I’d hate that too.”
That gets the smallest smile from her. Then she draws in a breath and squares her shoulders like she’s putting herself back together piece by piece.
“So say it clearly.”
I go still.
She lifts her chin.
“Not the nice version. The real one.”
I nod.
My mouth feels dry.
“This isn’t fair to you,” I say. “And I can’t keep seeing you when I know you’re not the girl I would bleed for.”
Isa shuts her eyes.
Just for a second.
When she opens them, they’re shiny, but she doesn’t let a single tear fall.
That kind of composure wrecks me in a different way.
“Thank you,” she says tightly. “That’s awful. But thank you.”
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing like you can retroactively make this noble.” She looks at me for a long beat, then shakes her head once, almost to herself. “You know what your problem is?”
I almost smile despite everything. “Several things come to mind.”
“You keep trying to become the version of yourself that makes the most sense on paper.” She steps closer, not intimate, just direct. “And in the process, you make a mess of real people.”
That lands deep because it’s true.
It always has been.
I hold her gaze.
“I’m trying to stop.”
Isa searches my face, maybe looking for the lie, maybe trying to decide whether she wants there to be one.
Apparently she doesn’t find it.
“Good,” she says.
Then she looks away toward the darkening quad and lets out a long breath.
“If you go after her—” She glances back at me. “Do it in daylight.”
The words hit somewhere low in my chest. Because she sees it. Not just the wanting. Not just the history. The wound.
The fact that Stella was something I once let happen in the dark and then failed to defend when the lights came on.
Isa sees all of it.
And instead of using that to humiliate me, she hands me the truth like a blade and trusts me to finally do something decent with it.
I nod once.
“I know.”
She steps back then, like a girl with too much dignity to let herself linger where she isn’t chosen.
“Isa—”
She lifts a hand.
Not angry.
Not cruel.
Just done.
“Don’t ruin it by trying to comfort me now.”
So I stop.
Because she’s right.
Again.
She picks at the cuff of her sweater once, then meets my eyes one last time. The fountain keeps moving. The sky deepens toward blue-black. Campus lights flicker on one by one. Then Isa gives me the saddest little smile I’ve seen in a long time.
“Good luck.”
Then she walks away.
No scene.
No tears.
No backward glance.
Just grace.
I stand there long after she disappears down the path, hands hanging useless at my sides, chest carved out, knowing I did the right thing too late.
And in the silence after Isa, there is only one thing left, bright and merciless and impossible to outrun:
Stella.
Not as fantasy.
Not as punishment.
Not as the girl I keep finding in coffee shops and training rooms and every room I enter before I’m ready.
As truth.
The one I keep trying to deny because I know exactly how much damage truth can do when you mishandle it.
I drag both hands through my hair and look up at the darkening sky.
Choosing myself was supposed to make things clearer.
Instead it’s stripping everything down to the bone.
No Isa.
No safe option.
No clean little distraction to hide inside.
Just me.
My game.
My future.
My mess.
And one girl I have wanted in too many versions, for too many years, with too much of myself on the line to keep pretending she isn’t the piece that never stopped missing.