Chapter 29
Bliss
By the time my last class ended, I had learned absolutely nothing except that Professor Simpson owned too many cardigans and my brain had officially become a Cade Mercer documentary with adult content and emotional consequences.
Which was deeply inconvenient because I was supposed to be taking notes on narrative framing, not mentally replaying the way Cade looked at me in my bed before practice like he had already decided I was his and was only waiting for me to stop being emotionally allergic to facts.
I walked across campus with my backpack slipping off one shoulder, white clouds dragging low over Kimball Falls like the sky had gotten tired and decided to nap on the rooftops.
Students moved around me in clusters, laughing beneath Fury banners and early fall trees that had started turning gold at the edges, but I barely registered any of it.
My body was in northern Michigan. My brain was still trapped in my bedroom before sunrise with Cade’s mouth against my wrist and his voice telling me he was off the market whether I was ready to call him mine or not.
Off the market.
The phrase had been living inside my brain all day like it paid rent.
It was awful and incredible. Make it make sense.
It was the kind of thing a girl should be able to process privately without her stomach doing Olympic gymnastics in public, but apparently my organs had formed a cheer squad and chosen Cade as their captain.
Every time I tried to think about something reasonable, like class or assignments or whether I had enough gas to make it home without financially negotiating with the universe to miraculously fill my Jeep, Cade cut through all of it.
Cade leaning over me. Cade kissing me slow.
Cade listening to the worst things and somehow not looking at me like I was ruined.
Cade seeing the joke before I finished making it.
Cade knowing which ones were shields and which ones were just me being absolutely hilarious.
That was the part making me lose my mind.
Not the sex.
Okay, fine, also the sex.
The sex was absolutely not helping.
But it was more than that. It was the way he met me every single time.
If I threw sarcasm at him, he caught it and threw it back sharper.
If I hid behind something stupid, he knew where the door was and knocked anyway.
If I said I hated him, he heard the part under it.
If I tried to make myself smaller, easier, less complicated, he looked at me like I had personally offended him by attempting bad math in front of his engineering major.
By the time I reached the ABC apartment, I was so worked up that I almost walked past my own door.
Aura opened it before I could get my key all the way into the lock.
She looked me up and down once, took in my flushed face, my messy hair, and whatever expression was currently betraying my entire bloodstream, then stepped back without a word.
“Oh no,” Charm called from inside. “She has the sex face.”
I froze in the doorway. “I do not have the sex face.”
Charm sat cross-legged on the couch in a matching lounge set that looked too expensive to emotionally support anyone, a glossy magazine open on her lap and a bag of sour candy beside her. “Baby, you look like you discovered a new religion and it has hockey thighs.”
Aura shut the door behind me. “Charm.”
“What?” Charm lifted both hands. “I’m happy for her.”
“You’re harassing her.”
“I’m celebrating her body’s victory.”
I dropped my backpack near the door and covered my face with both hands. “I hate living here.”
“No, you don’t.” Charm patted the cushion beside her. “Sit down and tell us everything.”
“I’m not telling you everything.”
Aura moved toward the kitchen, already reaching for the iced coffee in the fridge because she was a best friend and knew I was a menace for an iced mocha. “Then tell us enough to explain why you look like you’re trying not to levitate.”
I sat beside Charm and immediately pulled a throw pillow into my lap like it could protect my dignity. It could not. My dignity had been missing since Cade used his knee to spread my legs in my own bed while I threw all reasoning out the window.
My face heated all over again.
Charm’s eyes widened slowly. “Oh, this is going to be good.”
“It’s not.” I squeezed the pillow harder. “It’s actually terrible.”
Aura handed me the coffee and sat on the arm of the couch, one leg tucked beneath her. “Define terrible.”
I took a sip, buying time, but they both just stared at me with the patience of women who had known me long enough to weaponize silence.
So I cracked.
“It’s unbelievable,” I said, and the words came out in one breath, fast and horrified and way too honest. “Like, actually unbelievable. Not normal. Not regular college-hookup unbelievable where you’re like, wow, that was fun and now I need Gatorade.
I mean the man understands assignments I did not even know were assigned.
He looks at me like he’s studying for a final he intends to ruin the curve on, and then he says things, and touches me, and I forget basic government structures. ”
Charm pressed both hands to her chest. “I have waited my whole life for that exact paragraph.”
“You’re welcome.”
Aura’s mouth twitched. “Government structures?”
“I couldn’t have named the three branches last night. Like, who is the president again?”
“In all fairness,” Charm said, “could you before you were dickmatized?”
“Not the point.”
Charm leaned forward, practically sparkling with gossip-fueled joy. “Does he talk?”
I stared at her.
She gasped. “He talks.”
“Charm.”
“He looks like he talks.”
Aura sighed into her coffee. “Can we please not make that sentence worse?”
“No, because I need to know if Cade Mercer is silently intense or verbally devastating.”
My entire body went hot, and Charm nearly fell off the couch.
“Oh my gosh,” she whispered. “Verbally devastating.”
I shoved the pillow over my face. “I’m moving out.”
Aura pulled the pillow down just enough to see my eyes. “No, you’re not. You’re going to stop hiding behind throw pillows and tell us why you look happy and terrified at the same time.”
That stole the giddy laughter right out of me because there it was.
The terrifying part.
I lowered the pillow into my lap and looked at the coffee sweating between my hands.
The apartment was warm and bright around us, the neon lips on the wall glowing pink against the afternoon gray outside, Charm’s perfume mixing with vanilla candles and the faint scent of popcorn someone had made and abandoned.
This was the safest place in my life outside my dad’s house.
The place where I had cried over bad grades, laughed until I snorted during reality shows, curled into Aura’s side when nightmares got too loud, and let Charm paint glitter on my eyelids before forcing me out into the world because sparkle was armor.
If I could say it anywhere, I could say it here.
“He knows me,” I whispered.
Neither of them moved.
I swallowed, staring down at my cup. “Not the version people get because it’s easier.
Not just the jokes or the loud or the whatever manic pixie ESPN disaster people think is happening here.
He knows when I’m hiding. He knows when I’m deflecting.
He knows which jokes are real and which ones I use so people stop looking too close. ”
Aura’s face softened and Charm’s teasing disappeared completely.
“And he doesn’t make me feel stupid for it,” I said.
“He doesn’t do that soft thing where people look at you like you’re a cracked antique they’re scared to touch.
He just… meets me there. Like if I’m weird, he gets weird.
If I’m scared, he gets steady. If I’m trying to run, he blocks the exit and says something annoyingly accurate. ”
Charm smiled faintly. “That sounds intoxicating.”
“It is.” My throat tightened around something too big for one breath. “And the sex is so good it should be studied by scientists with clipboards and protective eyewear, but that’s not even the part making me spiral.”
Aura tilted her head. “Then what is?”
“He stayed.”
The words came out smaller than I wanted.
“He saw the worst parts last night,” I said. “Not all of them, but enough. He saw the Nevers. He saw the moth. He saw me ugly cry in a way no woman with good mascara should ever be witnessed, and he didn’t act like I was too much.”
Charm reached for my knee.
“He looked at me like…” I stopped because saying it felt like stepping off a cliff with no promise of ground under me. “Like I made sense.”
Aura’s voice was quiet. “You do make sense.”
“Not to everyone.”
“Yes, you do,” she said. “To anyone who knows you, you make sense. Cade is just seeing it from a side you have never given anyone since you were fourteen.”
That was the problem.
That was exactly the problem.
Cade Mercer was not supposed to make me feel understandable. He was supposed to be hot and dangerous and temporary. He was supposed to be the fun bad decision with dimples and a hockey schedule. He was not supposed to sit beside my pain and somehow make the room feel less impossible to survive.
Charm squeezed my knee. “So, what’s stopping you?”
I laughed once, but there was no humor in it. “Other than crippling fear, emotional damage, and my deeply inconvenient survival instincts?”
“Start there,” Aura said.
I looked between them, and my smile faded. “I never want to give myself to someone fully like that again.”
The truth settled heavy between us.
“I know Cade isn’t Luke,” I said quickly, because their faces changed and I needed them to know I knew. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t look at Cade and see him. Cade is nothing like him. Cade is… Cade is so much more than him that comparing them feels insulting to basic oxygen.”
“Then why?” Charm asked softly.
“Because Cade could hurt me in a way Luke never did,” I whispered.
Aura’s brows pulled together.