Chapter 8 #2
Finger-shaped bruising wrapped faintly around the inside of her wrist like somebody had grabbed her hard enough to leave marks behind. Cold tension buried itself low in my chest as Bliss kept talking, completely unaware my entire focus had locked onto her arm.
It was not accidental bruising. Finger marks were not random. It was a grip mark, and the certainty of that moved through me cold enough to kill every other thought in the room.
Bliss kept talking like nothing had happened, like I wasn’t staring at the faint purple shadows circling the inside of her wrist in a shape no treadmill, doorframe, or clumsy fall could explain.
She laughed at her own story about another drunk patron at The Sin Bin, cheeks flushed from the treadmill, ponytail slipping loose at the crown of her head, and for one brutal second the contrast made me feel sick.
All that brightness. All that motion. That warm, impossible mouth still trying to turn the world funny while someone had put his hands on her hard enough to leave evidence behind.
“You okay?” she asked suddenly, catching the way I’d gone quiet.
My eyes dropped back to the bruise before I could stop them. “What happened to your wrist?”
Everything about her changed, but not loudly.
Bliss didn’t fall apart where people could see it.
Her smile only flickered for half a second before settling back into place, but the warmth disappeared from her face like someone had shut off a light behind her eyes.
Her shoulders tightened. Her fingers moved to the treadmill controls, tapping once, twice, like she needed something to occupy her hands before they betrayed her.
Watching it happen felt like seeing a door close in real time.
She looked down too quickly. “Oh.” A soft, nervous laugh slipped out. “Nothing. It’s from self-defense class.”
I stayed quiet, not because I believed her, but because I wanted to hear the lie all the way through.
“You’re taking self-defense?” I asked carefully.
“Yeah.” She tucked a loose piece of hair behind her ear too fast. “It’s technically part of physical education this trimester.”
Her voice had gone lighter than normal, and I hated how easily I noticed the difference now.
“What happened?” I asked again.
“It’s probably just bruising from training.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes this time. “Nothing big.”
It was a lie. Not malicious. Not careless. Practiced. Somehow, that made it worse, because people only learned to lie that smoothly when they’d needed to survive the truth before.
I could have pushed harder. Every instinct in me wanted to.
I wanted to step closer, turn her wrist gently in my hand, ask who, and keep asking until the name came out.
But the guarded look in her eyes warned me immediately that moving too fast would make her retreat completely, and I was learning Bliss Bennett in pieces now.
She handled fear by burying it beneath charm and humor until nobody looked close enough to notice anymore.
So, I let it go outwardly, even though internally, not a chance in hell.
“Okay,” I said.
Her brows pulled together like she’d expected more from me. An argument. A demand. A scene. Maybe some part of her was braced for it, and that pissed me off almost as much as the bruise.
I reached for a towel and wiped my hands, forcing my voice back into something normal. “Speed down.”
She blinked. “What?”
“You keep talking and forgetting you’re walking uphill.”
Her eyes dropped to the treadmill screen, and sure enough, the incline had climbed two levels higher than where she’d started.
“Oh my gosh.” She hit the button fast, color rushing back into her cheeks. “This machine is aggressive.”
“You pushed the button.”
“Victim blaming.”
“That’s not what that means.”
“It’s treadmill violence, Cade.”
“Pip.”
“What?”
“You’re losing a fight to cardio.”
The corner of her mouth twitched, and some of the panic eased out of the room. Not all the way. Not enough. But enough for her to breathe without looking like she had to think through it first.
“You’re a terrible trainer,” she muttered.
“You’re still alive.”
“Barely.”
“Yet somehow still dramatic.”
She gave me a look and stepped off the treadmill, grabbing her water bottle from the cup holder. The bruise moved with her, faint but visible every time her wrist turned, and I made myself look away before my expression did something I couldn’t take back.
Because once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop noticing everything else.
The way she glanced toward the gym door when voices got louder upstairs.
The way her body tensed for half a breath before relaxing whenever someone slammed something in the kitchen above us.
The way she positioned herself where she could see the door without seeming aware she had done it.
The way her fingers slipped toward the pocket of her hoodie tied at her waist, searching for something that wasn’t there because she’d left her bag near the wall.
Somebody had taught her to live ready.
That kind of fear didn’t come from nowhere. It was trained into a person slowly, until their body learned danger before their mind had time to name it. Bliss had learned it so well she didn’t even seem to realize how often she obeyed it.
I started reracking plates because doing something with my hands was better than standing there with violence crawling under my skin. Metal clanked against metal, sharp and clean, the sound cutting through the low music humming from the speakers.
“You’re brooding,” she said.
“I’m lifting.”
“You’re brooding near weights. Different aesthetic, same emotional issue.”
I glanced over. She was trying to pull us back. I could see it in the joke, the tilt of her mouth, the forced lightness. She wanted the bruise gone from the room without having to explain how it got there, and for now, I let her have that.
“For someone who voluntarily walked into a gym, you’re very judgmental,” I said.
“I came here for research.”
“You wore workout clothes.”
“For immersion.”
“You got on the treadmill.”
“For atmosphere.”
“You complained the entire time.”
“To preserve my brand.”
Against my will, I smiled, and the relief that crossed her face made something in my chest ache.
The rest of the workout moved around us, but the ease from before never came all the way back.
Bliss still talked. I still answered. She told me Briggs had invited her to a team study night freshman year and then brought no books, only snacks and the firm belief that vibes could carry a person through biology.
I told her that sounded exactly like Briggs.
She said he once called mitochondria “the battery guys,” and I had to turn away because I laughed harder than I wanted to.
But every few minutes, my attention returned to her wrist. To the bruise. To the lie. To the fact that she had been scared of my reaction before she had been scared of the injury itself.
By the time she finished stretching, I had already built and destroyed four different theories, and every single one ended with somebody’s teeth on the floor.
I knew it was Luke. I didn’t know how yet, but I knew.
Not somebody who hurt her once and disappeared.
Not some random asshole from a party. This was bigger than that.
It explained too much. Her distrust around athletes.
The way she watched men before deciding whether to relax.
The way she treated hockey players like a species she had already survived and didn’t intend to study too closely unless she was holding a notebook between them and her body.
If it wasn’t Luke I’d put money on him being one of us. Hockey. The thought turned my blood glacial.
“What?” Bliss asked.
I looked at her. She was standing near the mats, one hand on her hip, the other holding her water bottle. Her face had softened again, but not enough. There was still strain around her mouth. A carefulness in her eyes.
“What?” she repeated, quieter.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
She narrowed her eyes. “That is my lie.”
“You copyrighted it?”
“I perfected it.”
The words should have been funny. They weren’t. She realized it as soon as they left her mouth, her expression changing before she looked away and bent to grab her hoodie from the floor.
I crossed the room before I could think better of it, slow enough not to crowd her, close enough that she knew I was there.
“Pip.”
Her fingers tightened around the hoodie.
“I’m not asking again tonight,” I said, and the air between us changed so quickly it felt physical. “I know you lied. You know I know you lied. I’m letting you have it because you clearly need me to, not because I believe you.”
Her throat moved.
I kept my voice low and even. “But don’t mistake me backing off for not seeing you.”
Her eyes lifted to mine then, and for one second, the look there nearly put me on my knees. Fear. Relief. Frustration. Something softer she tried to hide before I could name it.
“You see too much,” she whispered.
“No,” I said. “Everyone else doesn’t see enough.”
Her lips parted, and I wanted to touch her.
Not the way my body had wanted all night.
Not with heat. Not with the filthy, selfish hunger I had been fighting since she walked through the door in those leggings and attitude.
I wanted to take her wrist and cover the bruise with my hand like I could undo it by putting something gentler there.
I didn’t.
Because she hadn’t offered it to me.
Because I was not going to be another man who decided wanting access meant taking it.
So, I stayed still and let her choose what happened next. For a few seconds, she only looked at me. Then her gaze dropped, not to the floor, but to the space between us, like she was measuring it. Like she understood exactly why I hadn’t crossed it.
When she spoke, her voice was barely there. “It’s not your problem.”
Every violent thing in me rejected that sentence, but I made my face stay calm. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Her breath caught, and I stepped back before she had to.
The noise from upstairs crashed through the ceiling again, somebody yelling Briggs’s name like a warning or a prayer. Bliss blinked at the sound, then exhaled a shaky laugh.
“Your house is feral.”
“Accurate.”
“Do they always scream like they’re being murdered?”
“Only when Briggs is losing something.”
“So, yes.”
“Usually.”
That got me a real smile this time. Small, but real. I took it like a win.