27. Julian
Julian
Nobody looked at me with disgust.
Nobody flinched or blamed me. Nobody mocked me or made it dirty—not that I thought they would, and it should help more than it does.
Instead, I’m sitting in here with my skin buzzing too tightly, every nerve still lit up from finally telling them, and all I can think is that this is permanent now.
They know. Every one of them knows. Tomorrow, when I walk into the kitchen, every stupid, ordinary thing in the house will happen in the shadow of the fact that they know what was done to me.
My mind keeps trying to tell me that they’ll look at me differently, that they have to, even though nothing in the room tonight suggested disgust. Shame doesn’t care about evidence. Shame just wants a place to live.
I’m sitting there turning that over and over when Eli stands in front of me and says, “Come on.”
I look up at him, still feeling half stripped, and blink. “Where?”
“Upstairs.”
There’s no room in his voice for argument, but it isn’t hard either.
It’s just direct in that Eli way that’s gotten sharper lately.
He holds his hand out for me, and I stare at it for a second longer than I should.
I don’t know what he sees on my face then.
Maybe all of it: the nerves, the shame, or the fact that even with him next to me, some part of me is still braced for the aftershock.
Whatever he sees immediately softens him.
“Jules,” he says more quietly, and that alone nearly takes me out. “Come with me, please.”
I get up before I can think too hard, but Eli doesn’t say anything until we’re in his room with the door shut behind us.
The second the latch clicks, all the noise of the house dulls to a distant hum.
Mrs. Alvarez left a few minutes ago, and Mila is asleep in her bassinet.
She’s got one tiny hand up beside her face, looking absurdly peaceful for someone who has ruined all our sleep schedules for three straight months.
The lamp on Eli’s nightstand is on low, throwing warm light across the bed, the dresser, and the chair with the duck blanket draped over it. The room feels safe in a way I don’t know how to accept tonight—safe and close and too honest.
I stop just inside the door and let out a breath that sounds wrong the second it leaves me. “They know.” I laugh once, but it’s hollow. “They all fucking know now.”
His brows pull together slightly. “Julian.”
I shake my head and start pacing because standing still feels impossible.
“No, I know this is good. I know this is what needed to happen. I know I’m not supposed to be losing my mind because they were good about it and nobody said anything stupid and Killian basically has Blakely’s execution already scheduled for after the season.
” I drag both hands through my hair and keep moving. “I know all of that. I just—fuck.”
The word cracks a little at the end. I hate that.
Eli stays where he is for a second, just watching me. “Then what’s wrong?” he asks softly.
I stop pacing long enough to look at him, and there’s too much in me to sort cleanly. “They’re going to look at me differently now.”
His face changes immediately—sadder, maybe, because he hears exactly how much I mean it.
“No, they won’t,” he says.
I laugh again, already halfway to angry and not even sure at whom. “You don’t know that.”
“I do,” he says, taking one step toward me, “because I know them and I know you, and none of them just heard that story and walked away thinking less of you.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean, they know now,” I say, and my voice drops lower without my permission.
“They know I let it go on. They know he got in my head, but I still went back and didn’t stop it sooner.
They know I’m the kind of person that can get trapped in something like that and then keep showing up for it like a fucking—”
Eli is in front of me before I finish the sentence.
He gets both hands on me at once, cupping my face in his big hands. The contact stops the whole spiral hard enough that I forget what I was saying.
“Don’t,” he says, and there’s more command in his voice than I’m used to from him. “Do not finish that sentence by turning yourself into something filthy because somebody hurt you.”
I stare at him. My whole body is keyed up enough that even his hands on me feel bigger than they should. Heat spreads low under my ribs in a way that would be embarrassing if I wasn’t also one bad second away from cracking in half.
He sees all of it.
His expression softens, but his hands stay where they are. “Babe,” he says, quieter now, “listen to me.”
I swallow hard, and not only because of what he just called me.
“They are going to look at you differently,” he says, and the words hit so wrong at first that my whole chest goes cold again. Then he keeps going.
“They’re going to look at you like somebody they should’ve protected better.
They’re all furious because you’ve been hurt and carrying it under the same damn roof they’ve been laughing in and eating in and calling home.
” His thumb moves once against the side of my neck.
“That’s different, yeah. But not in the way you’re scared of.
Nobody downstairs thinks you’re weak or that you asked for it.
They know Blakely manipulated and abused you, and they’re not blaming you for it. ”
The conviction in his voice nearly undoes me, and I look down because suddenly holding eye contact feels impossible.
“I don’t know how to stop feeling this way,” I admit.
Eli’s hands leave my face only so he can hook both arms around me and pull me in.
I go still for half a heartbeat, then my forehead drops to his shoulder and my hands fist in the back of his shirt.
He’s warm, solid, and smells like soap and that clean Eli smell I know too well now.
The second I let myself lean, the shame in me loosens one impossible inch.
“I hate this,” I say into his shoulder. “I hate that it’s in the room now.”
“I know.”
“I hate that they know.”
His arms tighten. “I know, babe.”
“I hate that I’m this… big fucking athlete, and yet I still managed to get abused.”
Eli kisses the side of my head and sighs. “I know.”
Every answer is the same, and somehow that helps. He isn’t correcting the feeling or trying to logic me out of it. He’s just there, holding me through it, and I think maybe that’s what I needed more than anything else. Not reassurance, exactly. Something sturdier. Presence. Proof.
“Being a man doesn’t make your consent automatic,” he whispers my own words from weeks ago back to me. He keeps his mouth near my hairline, one steady hand sliding slowly up my back. “And being built the way you are doesn’t make you immune to any of it either. Abuse is abuse.”
My eyesight starts to blur with tears, and I find myself unable to reply to that.
“Being strong doesn’t mean he didn’t hurt you, and being an athlete doesn’t mean you should’ve been able to stop it.
It just means some piece of shit saw all that and still thought he had the right to take what he wanted.
” He draws back enough to look at me then, his eyes bright and hard and heartbreakingly certain.
“None of that makes you weak, Jules. It makes him a predator.”
I fold into him again, silently crying—each tear feeling like a fucking release. My people know, and I know they didn’t judge me, but that doesn’t take the shame away. Not yet, at least.
We stay that way for a while, long enough that my breathing evens out and the panic stops scraping so hard at my ribs.
His hand continues to move slowly up and down my back in a rhythm that is more soothing than he probably realizes.
Or maybe he realizes it exactly. I don’t know anymore.
I only know that by the time I lift my head, the room feels less tilted.
Eli doesn’t step away. He’s close enough that the front of our bodies still touch, and I can see the concern in his eyes give way to something warmer the second he realizes I’m not shaking anymore.
“You okay?” he asks.
It’s a stupid question; we both know that. It’s also the only question either of us ever really asks, when what we mean is: are you still with me right here, right now, in this exact second?
“Better,” I say honestly.
His mouth softens. “Good.”
The air between us changes with that one word.
I feel it happen. So does he. The whole room seems to tip from one kind of intimacy into another.
My hands are still gathered in the back of his shirt.
His arms are still around me. His face is inches from mine.
The shift is so natural and so dangerous that I almost laugh at its absurdity.
“You calm me down too easily,” I murmur, because saying something feels safer than just standing there wanting him.
Eli leans in and rubs his nose against mine. “You say that like it’s a complaint.”
“It could be,” I whisper.
“It’s not, though,” he replies. “Is it?”
I don’t know who moves first. Maybe both of us do; at this point it doesn’t matter. One second, we’re looking at each other in the low light with all this heat and tenderness and exhaustion braided together between us, and the next, his mouth is on mine, and the rest of the room falls away.
The kiss hits harder than it should, probably because I’m still raw from everything downstairs or perhaps because comfort is a gateway drug where Eli is concerned.
Whatever the reason, the first press of his mouth to mine is enough to pull a sound out of me that I do not have time to be embarrassed by before he kisses me again.
This isn’t the sweet, tentative morning kiss from a few days ago. This is heat with nowhere else to go. This is my body still keyed up from confession and fear and the relief of not being hated, and his body wrapping around that and turning it into something else entirely.
One of his hands slides back to my neck, fingers in my hair now, and the pressure of it sends a sharp pulse of want straight through me.
I drag my hand under the hem of his shirt and feel the hard warmth of his stomach under my palm. Eli goes still for half a beat, then exhales into my mouth like I’ve just hit some live wire under his skin.
Right. Good. Not just me then.
The kiss deepens again, slow enough to savor and heated enough to make the whole room feel smaller around us.
His body is strong and solid against mine, but nothing in it feels looming or dangerous.
I let myself have that fully for one suspended, impossible stretch of time—the taste of him, the warmth of his hand at my neck, the way my own nerves finally stop buzzing from the confession downstairs and reorganize themselves around something I actually want.
Then Mila lets out one sleepy, escalating whine from the bassinet.
We both stop instantly.
Eli drops his forehead against mine and laughs under his breath, the sound rough and helpless and so warm it almost makes me kiss him again just to hear it a second time.
“She has the timing of a tiny mob boss,” I mutter.
He lets out another breath of laughter and turns his head toward the bassinet. “That’s my girl.”
The fondness in his voice warms my fucking heart. I look past him just enough to see Mila wriggling in her sleeper, one little fist waving free of the blanket.
Eli glances back at me, still too close, his mouth pink from kissing. “You good?”
The question makes me smile this time without even trying. “Yeah,” I say honestly, because for the first time all evening, I am. “I’m good.”
He studies me for one more second just to be sure, then kisses me once before stepping back toward the bassinet.
I lean against the door and watch him scoop Mila up with practiced arms, his whole face changing the second she settles against his chest. The keyed-up, brittle feeling I dragged upstairs with me is gone.
Not solved or fixed forever. But gone for now, burned off by truth and anger, Eli’s arms and his mouth, and the simple, impossible fact that I am not alone in any of this anymore.
Mila makes one happy little sound against his shoulder, and Eli looks over at me with that half smile that’s already going to ruin me for the rest of my life.
“Stay with us?” he asks.
I push off the door and cross back toward the bed, feeling oddly light in my own body for the first time since the living room. “Always, Liefling.”