Julian
The hallway outside feels colder than his room. Or maybe I just feel their absence immediately. I close the door nearly all the way, leaving it cracked so I can hear if Mila wakes, and stand there for a second with my hand still on the knob.
My pulse is already too high. My palms feel damp. I could still go to my own room or wait until tomorrow. I could keep doing what I always do, which is tell myself I’ll pick a better time for honesty and then magically never find one.
Instead, I turn left and head for Luca’s room.
The door is half open. I can hear low voices inside, Luca’s and Sage’s, and that almost stops me because I do not want an audience for this.
I stop in the doorway and knock once against the frame anyway.
Luca looks up from where he’s sprawled back on his bed in track pants and a Blackthorne tee, phone in one hand. His eyes find my face and sharpen immediately. He already knows this isn’t casual. “You good to talk now?”
I nod once.
Sage looks between us, takes one look at Luca, and closes his laptop without a word. “I’ll go,” he says, already standing.
I blink and lie. “You don’t have to.”
He gives me that soft, perceptive look of his that makes me feel simultaneously grateful and transparent. “Yeah, I do.”
Luca tips his head toward the door. “Thanks, Sunshine,” he says to his boyfriend, and the way he looks at Sage nearly makes me divert my gaze.
Sage slips past me on his way out, pausing long enough to squeeze my arm once—just quiet contact. Then he’s gone, and the door clicks shut behind him.
Luca sits up straighter against the headboard. He was clearly halfway into winding down for the night, but every bit of that disappears behind the captain look he gets when somebody he loves walks in bleeding on the inside.
I stay standing for a second because saying it standing feels easier, as if I can still bolt if I hate the way it sounds once it’s out. My hands are jammed into my pockets so hard my knuckles ache.
“I need to tell you something,” I start.
Luca’s expression doesn’t change, but his whole body stills. “Okay.”
“It’s bad.” I let out a breath that feels scraped on the way out. “And if I tell you, you’re gonna be pissed.”
One brow lifts. “I’m already pissed. That’s not exactly a barrier.”
Under any other circumstances, I’d laugh. Tonight, I just look at him and realize there’s no gentler door into this, so I stop trying to build one.
“I’ve been seeing someone.”
Luca blinks once. “That’s not the bad part.”
“No,” I say. “The bad part is who.”
I drag one hand through my hair and force myself to start at the beginning because if I jump to the end too fast, it’ll sound like a lie.
“It started months ago, before shit got really ugly with Eli. I was pissed at him, and jealous, and being stupid, and this thing with… with this person started because I was angry and wanted something that didn’t mean anything. That’s what I told myself, anyway.”
Luca’s face goes carefully blank in the way it does when he’s listening hard. “Who?”
I shake my head. “Let me finish.”
His jaw tightens, but he nods.
“It was a rush at first; that’s the most disgusting part.
I liked the secrecy. I liked being wanted by someone older who knew exactly how to get under my skin.
I liked not having to be the nice one, or the loyal one, or the guy waiting around for Eli to notice me while he was too busy playing house with a girl who treated him like shit.
It felt easy in the beginning. Dirty, but easy.
I told myself I was choosing it. That it was just sex.
That I wasn’t the pathetic idiot in love with his best friend if I had somewhere else to put all of that. ”
“Julian—”
“I know,” I snap, and then immediately regret the edge in it.
I scrub both hands over my face and start pacing because standing still is impossible now.
“I know it was stupid and selfish. I knew it then, too, not all the way, but enough. I just didn’t care because it felt good not to be the only one miserable for five fucking minutes. ”
The room is too quiet. Luca’s just watching me with that rigid, focused intensity that tells me the anger is coming but hasn’t picked a target yet.
“So then what changed?” he asks.
I laugh and stop pacing long enough to look at him.
“He got possessive first. Not all at once. Little shit. Questions about where I was. Why I didn’t answer quickly enough.
Who I was with. Why I smelled like a party.
Why I left something on read. It started out sounding flattering if you were dumb enough, which apparently I was.
Then it got controlling. Telling me where to meet him.
Telling me what I should and shouldn’t wear when I came over because he liked me better one way than another.
Acting like I owed him for his time and attention, for the fact that he’d chosen me in the first place. ”
Luca’s mouth goes flat. “Did he threaten you?”
I look at the floor for a second. “Not at first.”
He doesn’t let that pass. “Jules.”
“Yes,” I say, sitting down on his bed. “Yes, okay? He threatened me. Not always directly, sometimes it was just implication. Reputation. Team shit. Making it clear how bad it would look if somebody got the wrong idea. Making it clear I had way more to lose publicly while he had way more power privately.” My throat tightens. “And then it got physical.”
I can see the exact second Luca understands what I’m actually saying, because the air in the room changes. He sits forward, forearms on his thighs now, hands clasped so hard the tendons stand out. “What kind of physical?”
I almost lie to minimize it. Rough sex. Bad fights. Boundaries crossed. Something vague enough to let both of us pretend. The problem is I’ve come this far, and Luca knows me too well for me to get away with that. So, I force the truth out between my teeth.
“The kind that leaves bruises.” My voice sounds strange even to me.
“The kind where ‘no’ stops meaning shit if he’s angry enough.
The kind where I started checking my neck in mirrors before coming downstairs and making up stories for why my ribs hurt if anybody noticed I moved wrong.
The kind where I started planning my days around not setting him off and answering the phone even when I didn’t want to because ignoring him just meant I’d pay for it later. ”
He stands so fast the bed frame creaks. He turns away from me and plants both hands on the dresser, head bowed, shoulders rigid as steel cables. When he speaks again, his voice is lower. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”
“Because when a person with authority decides to make you feel chosen and trapped in the same breath, it scrambles your understanding of what counts as consent after a while,” I say.
“I didn’t want to make it real. I didn’t want anyone looking at me like I’m weak or dirty or stupid.
In the beginning, I wanted it, or thought I did, and after that, it got harder to tell where the line moved.
He has power, and I knew how insane it would sound.
I kept thinking I could end it myself if I just timed it right. ”
Luca turns back around, and I look up again. He’s furious, and not performatively. Not in a flash of temper that’ll burn hot and die. This is colder than that—a fury that locks into a person’s bones and waits for direction. “Who is it?”
There’s the last locked door, and it’s the ugliest one, because once I say it, there’s no putting the secret back into a shape that feels abstract. No more some older guy. No more somebody in authority. Just the dirty truth.
He must see that hesitation because he says, “Don’t protect him.”
I have to force myself to hold his gaze when I say, “It’s Coach Blakely.”
Luca doesn’t move or blink. The name drops and just sits there, ugly and impossible, and suddenly very real between us.
When he finally speaks, his voice is so controlled it’s almost scary. “Coach Blakely.”
I nod once.
“The basketball coach. Damien and Ryan’s coach.”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck,” he says quietly. He turns away and takes three fast steps toward the wall, both hands going to the back of his neck before one slams flat against the plaster hard enough to make me flinch. “No. No fucking way.”
I sit frozen on the edge of his bed while he paces like he’s trying not to black out from rage.
“He’s in the athletics department on campus. He’s around us. Around players. Around—” He cuts himself off and spins back toward me. “Jesus Christ.”
I say nothing because right now I don’t have enough room inside my chest for both his anger and my shame.
He starts pacing again. “This changes everything.”
I look down. “Yeah, I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” He spins back around.
“This isn’t just some abusive asshole with a big ego.
This is a coach. An authority figure. Somebody with access.
Somebody protected. Do you understand what that means?
For you. For the school. For every other player he has access to and every goddamn kid who walks into a gym with that man and thinks he’s safe because he’s the adult in the room. ”
The shame that was already coating everything in me thickens instantly. “I know.”
“Did he ever—” Luca cuts himself off, his jaw flexing. “Were you the only one?”
“I don’t know.”
Luca starts pacing again, which is somehow more unsettling than if he’d stayed still. He drags both hands through his hair and mutters, “Fucking unbelievable,” at the floor, then he stops pacing again and faces me fully. “Do you want out?”
“Yes.” The answer is so immediate it almost shocks me. “Yeah. I do.”
He nods once. “Okay,” he says. “Then we get you out.”
The certainty in his tone nearly knocks the breath from me.
I laugh softly. “You’re saying that like it’s easy.”
“I didn’t say it’s easy.” He sits down across from me in his desk chair, forearms braced on his thighs, eyes locked on mine. “I said we get you out.”
My throat works painfully around those words. His anger is still there, burning hard enough to light the room, but under it, there’s loyalty and concern. I don’t have a clean response to that, so I shoot to my feet and nod.
“Okay,” I say quietly.
“Okay,” he echoes, but his tone says he knows that okay is fragile and provisional and probably about to get ripped apart by reality.
He stands up and steps closer, then grips the back of my neck hard enough to feel grounding. “You’re not doing this alone anymore. Understand?”
I close my eyes for a second. “Yeah,” I say and laugh under my breath. “I’m going to lose my fucking mind if you start sounding like a therapist.”
Luca’s mouth twitches once. “Shame. I was about to ask you about your inner child, too.”
“Fuck off.” The laugh that leaves me then is small and wrecked and embarrassingly close to tears. I scrub a hand over my face before either of those things can turn into anything uglier.
“We do this carefully if that’s what you need,” he says. “But we do it. You hear me? And until we decide the next move, you don’t answer him.”
My stomach drops. “Luca.”
“No. Don’t fucking ‘Luca’ me.”
“Listen to me—”
“I am listening, Jules,” he interjects. “I’ve been listening. That’s why I’m telling you this ends now.”
“I know it ends now.” The words come out harder than I expect because for all the shame and confusion and self-disgust, there is one clean thing in me tonight. “I fucking know. But it’s not easy, because this man could literally kill my career before it even takes off.”
That checks him for a second. I take the opening and keep going before he can bulldoze over me again.
“I’m not defending him or making excuses.
I know what this is now, okay? Maybe I knew before and didn’t want to say it, but I know it now.
I just… I need to do this right. I need to not blow Eli’s life up worse in the middle of his shit or lose my scholarship.
I can’t trigger some mess that takes down the team before we’ve got proof, or a plan, or something stronger than me finally saying it out loud. ”
Luca stares at me for a long moment. Then he exhales through his nose, and some of the immediate violence leaves his posture, though not much.
“Fine. We plan. But you are not seeing him again. You’re done.
No more calls, no more meetings, no more letting him get you alone because he asks in the right tone. ”
“I’ll try,” I say, and this time I mean it.
He studies me before he eventually offers me a nod. “Tomorrow, we talk to Mara.”
My head jerks up. “Killian’s lawyer?”
“She’s already handling Eli’s mess, and this just became a bigger mess,” he says with a shrug. “We need to know what your options are, what reporting looks like, what the school can do, what the team can do, and how to keep you safe while we burn that bastard’s life to the ground.”
The bluntness of it would almost be funny if I weren’t suddenly so tired I could sleep standing. My throat tightens before I can stop it, and Luca sees that too but mercifully doesn’t comment. One breakdown per night is my current limit.
“You should sleep,” he says. “And if he calls tonight, you don’t answer. If he texts, you screenshot and send it to me.”
I blink at him. “That feels aggressive.”
“It is aggressive.” His mouth goes flat. “I’m in an aggressive mood. Get some sleep. We deal with the rest tomorrow.”
I almost tell him to go fuck himself because kindness at the wrong moment can feel like an exposed nerve. Instead, I nod once, because that’s all I can manage without my throat going dry.
Then I open the door and walk straight into the last fucking person I wanted to see.
Killian is leaning against the opposite wall, arms folded, and head tilted to the side. He isn’t pretending to have just walked by. He’s staring directly at me.
Fuck.
There’s no point in insulting Killian’s intelligence by pretending otherwise. “How much did you hear?”
He looks at me with that terrifying level of calm and says, “Enough.”