Prologue #3
Her lips parted, and for one stupid, brutal second, I let myself believe something might come out.
I didn’t need her to say the same words. I wasn’t that naive. I didn’t need her to hand me love wrapped up pretty and clean when nothing between us had ever been pretty or clean.
I needed something honest. Something real. Something that proved I hadn’t spent almost a year loving a girl who only wanted me when the lights were low and no one could hold her accountable for the way she looked at me.
Nothing came.
I waited anyway because apparently, there was still one pathetic piece of me willing to stand there and bleed for a maybe.
Five seconds became ten, long enough for my heart to beat so hard I felt it in my throat and for her silence to fill every corner of the room until there was no space left for hope.
Then she lifted her chin.
“You’ll be back. You get in your feels and throw a fit, but you come back, East.”
The words landed soft and certain and cruel in a way I didn’t think she even meant.
Meaning it would require admitting she understood what she was doing. It would require looking at me and seeing a man instead of a habit. A body. Her secret. Something she could put down and pick back up whenever the ache got too deep.
I looked at her then. Really looked at her.
At the girl standing in my shirt with her scratches on my skin and my name still shaking in her voice. The girl I had loved in pieces for almost a year while she called it fun and I called it everything.
I wanted to believe I saw it register, that she knew she had pushed too far and I was tired of her shit. That I wasn’t another guy waiting around for whatever version of herself she decided to give me when loneliness finally cornered her.
I wanted to believe the fear in her eyes meant she finally understood, but I couldn’t build one more thing on what I wanted to believe.
Not with her. Not anymore.
I stepped back. “No,” I said. “I won’t.”
Her face changed then.
Finally.
The smallest crack split through all that beautiful armor, and I almost hated how badly it hurt to see it.
“Easton,” she whispered, her eyes widening. “Easton.”
I shook my head because if she said my name like that again, I might ruin everything I had just survived and prove her right.
Stay.
One more kiss and she would understand. One more intense fuck and she would look at me and see the truth. One more moment where she woke the fuck up and called this anything but a hook-up.
Wishes like that were for fools, and so was I.
“What does that mean?” she asked, her voice smaller than before.
I laughed once, low and empty, because she really had no idea what she had just done. Maybe that was the worst part. Maybe the girl standing in my shirt genuinely believed she could keep cutting me open and still find me waiting with my hands out.
“It means I’ll give you one better.”
I grabbed my hat from the dresser and pulled it on, taking an extra second to smooth the bill because I needed something to do with my hands that wasn’t reaching for her.
She watched the movement like it confused her, like she was finally beginning to understand this wasn’t another one of our fights. This wasn’t me pushing until she snapped back.
This was my worst quality. My cut-off game was vicious.
I could love someone with every fucked-up, loyal, bleeding part of me, but if I reached done, I was done. I could wish them the best, hope they healed and thrived, and still want them to stay the fuck out of my life.
I looked at the girl in my shirt one last time.
“You can experience what casual means to me.”
Then I opened my bedroom door and walked out without another word, leaving her in my shirt, in my room, and in the wreckage of the secret she never believed I would be strong enough to end.
It took several months for Aura to learn exactly what casual meant to me, and I made sure she felt every second of it.
I didn’t call or text her. I didn’t return the messages asking if we could talk or telling me she was sorry. When she asked to talk, my reply was simple. No. Her apology stayed on read.
I didn’t show up outside her apartment when I knew Bliss and Charm were gone and she was alone with whatever the fuck she felt after I left my bedroom that night.
I didn’t ask whether she was okay, missed me, or regretted standing there in my shirt with my confession hanging between us and saying nothing until it was too late.
Instead, I became every ugly thing she never knew I could be.
I took girls home from parties while she watched from across the room. Not because I needed them or because any of them meant a single fucking thing. Most of the time, I barely remembered their names by morning. Sometimes I didn’t let them make it to morning at all.
It was cruel and empty and exactly the kind of shit I would have called another man pathetic for doing, but I did it anyway because Aura’s face went still every time some pretty girl laughed against my shoulder.
I wanted her to see it and understand she wasn’t welcome near me anymore—not in my room, my bed, or the hallway outside my life, waiting until she got lonely enough to knock.
At parties, I made her feel it. I cut through rooms without looking at her, or worse, looked directly through her like she was furniture somebody had dragged in and forgotten to move. If she got sharp with me, I got sharper. If she threw attitude, I threw it back meaner.
If some guy put his hands near her waist, I smiled like I didn’t care while something black and violent twisted behind my ribs.
The only place I mostly left her alone was the Sin Bin.
Even I had enough decency not to fuck with her while she worked for tips, carrying trays and smiling at drunk alumni and idiot freshmen who thought her flirting for a bigger tip meant she might actually take them seriously.
Like hell I would ever stand for her moving on.
I kept my mouth shut there more than anywhere else because Bliss would have murdered me with a bar blade and Cade would have helped her hide my body. Everywhere else, Aura got the version of me she thought she wanted.
Casual, cold, and done.
By the end of spring semester, she stopped coming to Hockey House unless Bliss forced her. By summer, I had moved out.
That was the part nobody understood.
They thought I moved because I needed quiet, because North Cut was closer, or because my schedule was hell between workouts, summer classes, shifts at the rink, and driving home whenever my mom needed help with Skylar or Vivi.
All of it was true enough to sound convincing, but none of it was the reason.
The reason was that my room still smelled like her if I let myself remember hard enough. I kept seeing her on my bed in my shirt, standing there with fear in her eyes and pride in her mouth. Every wall in that house had heard me love a girl who treated me like a secret she could survive losing.
The kitchen. The stairs. The back porch. The hallway outside my room where I used to catch her wrist and pull her inside before anyone could see too much.
Hockey House had become a museum of all the stupid ways I had let Aura Clarke matter.
So, I packed my shit into trash bags, ignored Briggs calling me dramatic, and found a shitty apartment on the wrong side of town where the pipes knocked like they had unresolved trauma and my upstairs neighbor vacuumed at two in the morning.
It was ugly but cheap, even with the possibility of stumbling across a hypodermic needle in the parking lot.
It was mine.
Most importantly, Aura had never touched it.
By the time the new season started, I had made the apartment mine, buried everything else beneath work and hockey, and convinced almost everyone I was fine.
Now I stood inside The Furnace with a C stitched over my chest and the entire team pounding their sticks against the boards like they had any idea what kind of pressure that letter carried.
Coach Little’s hand had landed heavily on my shoulder ten minutes ago.
“You earned it, Wade.”
Maybe I had earned it by showing up first and leaving last. By playing through bruised ribs and a half-torn shoulder.
By keeping freshmen from getting eaten alive by upperclassmen with more ego than discipline.
By dragging Briggs out of his own head after bad games, keeping Rider from fighting every asshole who looked at him sideways, and making sure nobody forgot Cade Mercer almost died and still came back meaner.
Maybe I earned it because I had nothing left to give anyone else, so hockey got the best of whatever survived.
“Captain Wade,” Briggs said behind me, his voice too bright, too fake, and too Briggs. “Sounds disgusting. I hate it.”
I turned from my stall and gave him a look. “You cried.”
“I had allergies.”
“You said, and I quote, ‘Our baby boy is a man now.’”
Rider snorted from the next stall, tape caught between his teeth. “He did. Voice cracked and everything.”
Briggs pointed at him. “You shut your emotionally unavailable lumberjack mouth. This is a private moment between me and the coldest bastard I know.”
Ryan leaned against the lockers with his arms crossed, dark eyes steady in the way they always were.
Ryan showing up for this meant something. His schedule was insane now that he played for the Flint Frost—a frozen ice team—and the travel was just as insane on the semi-pro side. He didn’t waste words unless they mattered.
“You good?”
I hated that question more than I hated most people.
“Fine.”
Cade sat two stalls down with one skate unlaced and Bliss’s pink scrunchie around his wrist like he didn’t know half the team had noticed. He lifted his eyes.
“That means no.”
“It means fine.”
“It means you’re about to do that thing where you pretend pressure doesn’t exist until you look like you want to put your fist through drywall,” Cade said.
“I always look like that.”
“True,” Rider muttered.
Briggs dropped onto the bench across from me and braced his elbows on his knees. His hair was damp from the shower, and his expression finally lost the humor.
“Move back into the house.”
“No.”