Chapter 34
thirty-four
SOPHIE
I can’t remember Mike’s skin ever feeling this cold.
The thought hits me as my fingertips rest against his shoulder blade, finding none of the furnace heat that usually radiates from him after sex. I know his body’s rhythms—how he runs hot after orgasm, how he unconsciously pulls me closer in his sleep like I’m something precious he might lose.
Not this morning.
This morning he lies beside me like winter, and maybe that’s fitting.
Maybe we’re both frozen in this moment before everything changes.
Gray dawn filters through my blinds, striping his sleeping face with shadow. 5:17 a.m. according to the alarm clock that’s watched us fuck and fall headfirst into whatever this is, but ‘this’ feels different now, since my mom was admitted again and since we had that talk at the lookout.
Forty-two hours. That’s how long she was admitted this time. Steroids dripping into her veins, infection counts dropping, everyone pretending this is normal. Dad actually hummed while signing discharge papers—some ancient Springsteen song about glory days—and Hazel yammered on about butterflies.
And Mike?
Mike was a fucking fortress.
The whole time.
He appeared with coffee exactly when we needed it. He taught Hazel card tricks when her energy threatened to explode. He knew when to lace his fingers through mine and when to step back, let me breathe. He was everything a partner should be and everything that anyone would kill to have.
Everything that’s going to disappear in six months.
The certainty of it sits in my chest like swallowed glass.
Some NHL team will draft him—Chicago or Calgary or any of twenty cities that have different time zones to mine.
He’ll pack up a bag, kiss me goodbye with promises we both know have expiration dates, and become someone else’s view in someone else’s bed.
Stop. Fucking stop.
My mind screams at me to stop catastrophizing, to live in the moment like I was a few days ago. But I can’t. Because Mom got sick again. And because this is what my brain does at five in the morning most of the time. It runs scenarios, calculates probabilities.
It remembers, now clear-headed after the overdose of Mike-induced happiness.
“Sophie,” Mike’s voice, rough with sleep, pulls me back. “Your brain’s so loud I can hear it from here.”
I hadn’t noticed him wake up or his breathing change, but as his arm tightens around my waist, automatic, the gesture cracks something inside me.
I feel a tear well in my eye and I silently-but-angrily scream at my body to make it go away, to make everything what it was two days ago, to fix me and this fucking situation.
“Sorry.” I finally manage, voice mostly steady. “I was just?—”
“Overthinking?”
Now his eyes open, that warm brown that makes my chest tight. Even in the gray light, I can see him cataloging data—the tension in my shoulders, the way I’m holding myself carefully separate despite being naked in his arms—and readying himself to give me whatever I need right now.
“Come here,” he says.
“I’m right here.”
“No, you’re not.” He shifts, propping himself up on one elbow.
The sheet slips down to his waist, revealing the constellation of bruises I left on his chest last night when everything felt desperate and necessary.
“You’re somewhere else. Somewhere that’s making you look at me like I’m already gone. ”
The accuracy of it steals my words, as I realize this is what happens when you let someone in this deep. They learn to read your catastrophizing like scripture, and Mike already has a PhD in me. And, as he takes in more of me, his eyes narrow slightly, that tiny crease appearing between his brows.
“Coffee?” I say, desperate to change the topic, because I know that any further scrutiny right now will lead to a place I desperately want to avoid.
“Sophie.”
“I could make that French press you like. Or we could go to that place on Maple that does the lavender lattes you pretended not to love last week?—”
“Sophie.” Firmer now, his free hand coming up to cup my jaw. His thumb brushes the corner of my eye where apparently my fucking body has decided to betray me, not listening when I shouted at it to make that stupid tear go away. “Talk to me.”
The gentleness undoes me. Because I want this to be Mike—patient, steady, present Mike who shows up and stays up and holds up everything that threatens to collapse, and who makes me believe in futures.
But I know it’s temporary, for me at least, a mirage that is enticing for a while but ultimately barren.
Because he’s going soon.
“I need…” My voice cracks, and I have to swallow past the glass in my throat. “We need to talk.”
Something flickers across his face—not fear exactly, but a sharpening of attention—and he goes stiff. But he doesn’t pull away from me, and he doesn’t close off. He just waits, giving me space to detonate whatever bomb I’m building, kind and considerate as always.
I sit up, needing distance to think straight. The sheet pools around my waist and I catch him noticing, the way his eyes track the movement before returning to my face. Even now, even in this moment, he wants me. The knowledge makes everything harder and easier simultaneously.
“I love you,” I start, because that’s the foundation everything else is built on.
“I love you too,” he says, with no hesitation, like breathing.
“No, I mean—” I rake my fingers through my tangled hair, searching for words big enough. “I love you in a way that terrifies me. Like you’ve rewired my entire nervous system and now everything routes through you first. Is that completely fucked up?”
“Is it fucked up that hearing that makes me want to kiss you until you can’t breathe?” His voice drops. “Because if it is, we’re fucked up together.”
“Mike, I’m trying to be serious.”
“So am I.” He sits up too now, matching my position, and the symmetry of it—both of us naked and vulnerable in the gray dawn—feels significant. “But go on.”
“After this week, after watching Mom hooked up to tubes again.” My voice hitches, and I have to pause, breathe through it. “All I could think about was you.”
“Sophie—”
Fuck, why is this so hard? “I kept thinking about how you were there. How you knew exactly what everyone needed without being asked. How you made Hazel laugh with that stupid magic trick until she forgot to be scared. How you held my hand in that exact pressure that keeps me grounded.”
“That’s what you do when you love someone,” he says simply, but I catch the slight tension in his shoulders now, like an athlete reading a play developing.
“Is it, though?” The words taste bitter. “Because Jimmy said he loved me, and when shit got real—when Mom got diagnosed and I needed to move here—he calculated the inconvenience and decided it wasn’t worth restructuring his five-year plan.”
“I’m not?—”
“I know you’re not.” I cut him off because if I don’t get this out now, I’ll lose my nerve. “You’re better in every way that matters, which is why I can’t do this.”
His brow furrows. “Do what again?”
“Fall so deep that when you leave, it destroys me.” I sigh.
“Because you will leave, Mike. Some team is going to draft you and offer you everything you’ve worked for, and then you’ll be gone and I won’t survive it.
” The words strangle themselves in my throat.
“Mike, I need you, or I need to walk away from you, I?—”
“Hey.” He reaches for me, but I hold up a hand.
“Please. Let me finish.” I take a shuddering breath, tasting salt and fear. “I need this to be real. I need to know we’re building something that lasts longer than your NCAA eligibility. I need—” My voice drops to barely a whisper. “I need you to stay.”
The silence stretches between us like a held breath.
Somewhere outside, a car door slams. Not far from here, students are waking or just going to bed after parties, faculty are getting in their car to drive to the office, and baristas are serving lattes.
The world goes on, while mine balances on a knife’s edge.
“You’re asking me to give up the NHL.”
It’s not a question.
Not an accusation.
Just an acknowledgment of the size of what I’m requesting.
“I’m asking you to choose us.” The words spill out desperate and raw.
“To choose building a life here instead of chasing one that takes you away. Is that so wrong? Wanting the person I love to be here for Sunday dinners and random Tuesday catastrophes and all the mundane shit that makes up a life together?”
He doesn’t respond right away, and I don’t blame him, because I know I’m asking for a lot.
But it’s what I need to ask for if he wants a future with me.
There’s no other way I can protect myself, and protect us, and I hope like hell he sees that I’m asking him to choose something instead of lose something.
“OK,” he says after a long while, his voice is carefully neutral, like he’s reading terms and conditions. “If that’s what you need, then OK.”
Something cold slides down my spine. This should feel like a victory—I asked for everything and he’s giving it to me, security and certainty and stability—so why does it taste like ash?
“I should go.” He’s already moving, swinging his legs out of bed, reaching for his jeans crumpled on my floor. “Maine has a thing this morning.”
“It’s five-thirty in the morning.”
“Early thing.” He pulls his shirt over his head, and I lose the map of bruises I left on his skin. “He needs help with—something.”
I watch him dress with mechanical efficiency, this beautiful man who thirty seconds ago agreed to reshape his entire future for me. Who’s now moving like he can’t leave fast enough.
“Mike—”
“I love you,” he says from my bedroom doorway, not meeting my eyes.
Then he’s gone, and I’m alone in sheets that smell like him, in a bed that’s still warm from his body, trying to understand why getting everything I wanted feels exactly like losing everything that matters.