Chapter 9
Caleb
I own one suit, and it fits me like a threat.
I’ve spent forty minutes of the Valencia U’s Booster Gala wearing it against a pillar, holding a club soda I have no plans to drink, doing the one thing I’m good at in a room like this. Watching.
Coach Dixon’s dead center, working the money, the men who keep a program like ours breathing. I keep him in the corner of my eye the way you keep an eye on a dog you haven’t decided about yet.
I came here to torture myself, if I’m honest about it. Two weeks of pulling back. Short answers, Tuesdays that ran late, that in actuality didn’t, a text Sunday, I still haven’t really answered.
I came to stand in a corner and watch her work the edges of the room in her favorite gray sweater and tonal colored earbuds, the smartest person at a party that has no clue she exists.
That was the plan.
I had it all mapped out.
Then the doors at the back open, and Jasmine Dixon walks in, and every plan I’ve ever made lies down and dies.
The hoodie’s gone. There’s no gray sweater. The sleeves she lives inside, gone. She’s in an ice blue dress that stops just above the knee and skims every curve she’s been hiding from the world.
Fuck me.
She is incredibly gorgeous.
Her hair is down for the first time since I’ve known her, styled in a loose style around a face she usually spends all her energy hiding.
There’s no clipboard. No earbuds. Just her, walking into the party on purpose…or should I say with a purpose. To completely annihilate me.
I can only imagine what this display is costing her. Nobody else can see it. They see a knockout in blue, but I see the tight grip around a little gold clutch like it’s a life preserver.
I see her chin up at that stubborn angle she uses when she’s bracing for impact. I see her eyes doing the scan thing she does, clocking who’s in the room, where the bathrooms are, and locating the exits.
She’s scared shitless, but she walked in here anyway.
She didn’t do it for the boosters. She didn’t do it for her father, who glances over, double-takes at his own kid, and goes right back to his conversation.
She did it knowing I’ve spent two weeks pulling back from her an inch at a time. And the message lands loud and fucking clear.
You don’t get to decide this for me, Adams. Look at what you’re missing.
She finds me. Of course she does. Looking for each other is the one thing we’re both good at.
She crosses the room slowly, with a slow switch of her hips, and stops a polite, professional, completely unconvincing three feet away.
“Long time, no see,” she says.
“You’re not wearing a hoodie.”
“Who would wear a hoodie to a gala?” Her thumb works the clasp of the clutch, open, shut, open, shut.
“You look…amazing.”
She ignores the compliment and gets right to it.
“You’ve barely spoken to me in two weeks.”
“I know.”
“Practice ran conveniently late eleven times?” she rhetorically asks. “I counted you know.”
“I know you did.”
“So is this the part where you end it? Because I’d like it done fast, if so. I don’t do slow.”
“It’s not that.”
“I thought we were cool.”
“We are.”
“Then what is it, Caleb?”
And then a tray goes down somewhere behind her, glass shatters, and she flinches like a gunshot went off. I watch it tip.
Between the mood lighting, the volume of the live band, and two hundred conversations blending together like a noisy symphony, she’s been holding herself together by her fingernails since the door.
“Come on,” I tell her.
“I can’t just leave, I’m here with my father.”
“You’re about to lose your shit in a blue dress in front of the whole booster club. Service hallway. Now. I’ll go first.”
I peel off the pillar. She follows ninety seconds later. The hallway behind the ballroom is concrete and dim and blessedly quiet, the band just a thump through the wall, and the second the door shuts, she sags back against the cinderblock and breathes like she’s been underwater.
“Better?” I ask.
“Don’t.” Her eyes are shut. “Don’t take care of me in a hallway and then go back to two weeks of nothing. Pick one. I can do either. I can’t do both.”
It’s official.
I hate myself.
“I pulled back because I’m scared.” It comes out rough and almost too loud for the small space. “There’s a scout from Carolina. He could hand me the only future my family’s ever gonna get, and one mistake could end it.”
“I’m a mistake?”
“That’s not what I meant. Your dad sat me down and called you fragile, called you a thing he manages, and I had to sit there and eat it because the second I open my mouth to tell him who you actually are, he will know. All of it. And he will pull the rug right from under me.”
Her eyes are wide now.
“I told myself staying away from you was the smart thing,” I say. “The grown thing. It wasn’t. It was just old bad habits kicking in. You leave before the fire you start can reach somebody you love.”
She goes very still. “Somebody you what?”
I didn’t plan to say it. It hasn’t been long enough to say it. I haven’t earned the right to say it, but I’m saying it any damn way.
“You put on one hell of a dress and walked into the worst room in the world because I was too much of a coward to say all this to you earlier. The least I can do is be brave in a hallway.”
I kiss her. This one’s nothing like the careful one in the conference room or the easy ones we’ve shared on the couch. This one’s got two weeks of silence behind it.
She comes off the wall and into me, both hands fisting my lapels, kissing me back like she’s furious and forgiving me in the same breath.
I slide a hand into her thick curls and the other flat on the cinderblock so the wall doesn’t bruise her, and she makes the sound, the one I’d burn everything down to keep hearing.
It gets away from us fast. Her hands under my jacket, my mouth on the bare shoulder that dress has no business exposing, her gasping my name, my actual first name, the one she’s only used once.
“Caleb.”
I carefully lift the hem of her dress and slide two fingers up the inside of her thigh.
She gasps.
This is not the time or place for this, but I have to know. Is she wet for me?
Holy fuck.
Soaked right through the cotton crotch of her panties.
I bend to my knees to pay homage to a place I hope to spend a lot of time in…under her skirt and between Jasmine’s thighs.
“Caleb,” she says my name again, but it sounds fuller, richer.
She likes this.
That means I like it more.
I slide the crotch of her panties to the side and make a beeline for her clit. I don’t have time to do everything I want to do to her…for her, because we’re in the middle of a fucking fundraiser.
So I get busy.
And it knocks the wind out of her.
“Oh, my God!”
Her knees buckle from the sudden pleasure of me alternating between sucking on her clit and licking her clean. Damn, she tastes amazing. I knew she would.
I know I need to stop this before I take her right here in the fucking hallway. She’s so responsive that my dick protests what my brain knows is the right decision.
But the bigger head prevails, and I make myself stop.
I stand back up.
Lips moist from her pleasure. Forehead to hers. Both of us wrecked.
“Why’d you stop?” she asks.
“Not here,” I say gruffly. “Not against a wall with your father ten feet away. When it happens, you get a door that locks and a whole lot more of my attention than two hundred boosters will let me give you. You deserve the best of me, baby.”
She nods against my forehead, shaking, but there’s a contented smirk on her face.
“Okay,” she whispers. “But no more two weeks of radio silence. If you’re scared, you’re scared next to me. New rule.”
“New rule,” I say, and I’ve never meant anything more.
“For the record,” she says, still catching her breath, “I had a whole speech ready for when you finally grew the balls to end it. I rehearsed it in the car.”
“Yeah? How’d it go?”
“Very dignified. I came off extremely unbothered and a little above it all.”
“Good thing I didn’t end it, then.”
“Good thing,” she agrees, and I feel her smile against my jaw, and I swear it does more to me than what we just did.
Then we both hear it. The ballroom doors, voices spilling closer, somebody calling for the coach’s compliance officer because they want to move her seat to table nine.
She moves first. I watch her do the thing I hate most in the world. She straightens the dress, smooths her face, and packs all of it away in about two seconds flat.
“Go,” I say. “I’ll wait, then come out the other way.”
She slips back into the noise. I give it a minute, then follow, and I find her already at her father’s side, talking to some grey-bearded booster who’s staring at her like she’s a piece of chicken.
I want to fuck him up.
He’s got a hand on her shoulder, steering her toward a table, talking over her head to Coach, and she’s nodding at whatever they’re both saying, invisible again.
I know her father isn’t a bad man, but he doesn’t even look at her while he talks. And he doesn’t notice that a man twice her age is eyeballing her.
Does she even see it?
As I stand here in my bad suit, I finally get it. I’m not just up against a man who can kill my career. I’m up against twenty-three years of a girl being told the only safe way to be loved is to disappear.
But this is the thing, I want to play hockey because I love the sport and I’m good at it. I also want to help my family. But I’m also done helping Jasmine disappear.
There’s got to be a way for me to have both.
And I’m going to find it.