Chapter 24 - Tessa
The soft glow of our first time dimmed when I woke up, and my phone notifications were out of control. Kenzie's texts were the most unhinged.
Kenzie: Does this mean I finally have a sister?
Me: I am so confused right now.
Kenzie: I bet that kind of afterglow would lead someone to assume your brains got scrambled a little bit.
Me: Oh my God, Kenzie, what are you talking about?
That is when Kenzie sent me link after link after link to a picture of me, asleep in Nate's arms, with the caption 'social official.' Then everyone was commenting on our newly announced relationship and what that meant for the Kodiaks.
I had come out of the washroom, in Nate's shirt and nothing else, wandering through his penthouse trying to find the man I didn't know if I wanted to clobber or pin down for round two.
I found him, wearing dark sweats that hung low on his hips, showcasing his sculpted masterpiece of a body. I stopped for a moment to take him in, dazed by flashbacks of what it felt like to be claimed by him.
Focus, Tessa, we are... Confused? Mad?
I pushed past the memory of Nate grunting into my hair just a few hours earlier, "What is 'social official'? And why is there a picture of me in your bed all over the internet?"
Nate turned to face me, and my heart did that pitter-patter thing that she loved to do in his presence.
The late morning light bathed him in an ethereal glow, his dark blonde hair looked deliciously messy from where my hands had dug into it not long ago, and he had a few days' worth of rough scruff on his face.
He looked relaxed, at peace, if not a little sheepish at the question I just lobbed his way.
So different from how I had found him standing at the same windows not twenty-four hours ago.
He flashed me a beautiful smile and started to prowl towards me.
"Nate?"
"I couldn't help myself."
I barked out a laugh at how sincere he looked as he continued toward me. "Couldn't help yourself from taking a picture of me in your bed and then sharing it with the world without my permission?"
The look on his face was purely predatory, and it made me squirm a little. I clenched my thighs and tried to focus on the whole point of this conversation.
Nate stopped right in front of me, and the smell of us and sex surrounded me.
"I had to." He smirked.
"Had to?" I parroted, trying to stop myself from jumping him.
Nate brushed a hair back from my face and smirked, "It is the equivalent of marking you, or clubbing you and dragging you back to my cave, or pissing all over you."
I couldn't help it, a snort bubbled its way out of me, "What?"
"In my world, Tessa, it tells everyone that you are mine and I am yours. It tells everyone that I am off the market and that you are my girl."
"And that is necessary?" I asked.
"Very," he responded, and I didn't know by the look on his face if he was serious, but then he said.
"I know you like your privacy, and I will never post anything that compromises you.
But I had to tell the world that you owned me now, that I had the most incredible girlfriend, and I wanted to scream it from the rooftops.
I figured that it was more effective to do it this way than actually going on the roof. "
"Nate." I sighed as he pulled me flush with him, and I could feel the heat from his bare skin through the t-shirt I was wearing.
He trailed a hand down my back and cupped my ass cheek, a growl slipping past his lips when he touched my bare skin. In the next moment, I was up in his arms, and I instinctively wrapped my legs around his waist. Nate started walking back towards his bedroom.
"Nate, I need to shower and eat and..."
He cut me off with a bruising kiss and didn't stop his movement forward. "We will shower, and then I will make sure you are fed."
And we did. We showered together, which led to sex up against the tiled wall, brunch led to sex on the kitchen island and me trying to get ready to leave because I had to catch up on chores and do groceries back home led to another round of sex in Nate's room.
And somehow, here we are nearing the end of August, and the edges of my life and his had blurred in ways I didn’t see coming.
My toothbrush appeared next to his without ceremony.
A drawer opened, and there were my scrubs, my worn tee with the bleach stain no one but me loves.
He gave me half a closet like it was a foregone conclusion and kept sliding things onto the hangers: an oversized Kodiaks hoodie, a whole collection of his jerseys.
Dresses, I had no idea where I would ever find a place to wear them, and he smirked, saying I could wear them to bed as long as he got to see me in them and then out of them.
“Nate, this is crazy, I don't need all this, one jersey would have been good, and where am I going to wear all these clothes... I think my wardrobe here is bigger than the one I have at home... What's next, a horse?” I questioned.
“Baby, I would buy you a horse in a heartbeat if I thought you wouldn't get mad,” he said. “And I already told you; I want you to have everything you need here so you are always comfortable.”
I stared at him, mouth open, until I recovered, "No large animals, Nate. I feel like that is a year two kind of commitment, not month two." Had we even been together two months? "And those dresses do not scream comfort."
He pulled me close and pressed soft kisses to my neck, "You will have lots of places to wear those dresses during the season, and you are going to look so good in them."
Before I knew it, we were tumbling into his bed, and the obscenely overstocked closet was forgotten.
In the mornings, he’d roll out of bed hot and mussed, kiss the curve of my neck like a promise, and go.
I learned his pre-season schedule by the sound of his footsteps.
The penthouse would go quiet after the door shut, and I’d drift for thirty more minutes until I forced myself to make the drive back to Hawthorne Ridge.
One morning, I was up first. I made coffee the way I like it, indecently strong, a splash of cream, and scrambled eggs in his too-nice pan that made me feel nervous I might damage it. He came out of the shower with a towel low on his hips and grabbed a cup after kissing my temple.
“You’re going to ruin me for road trips,” he said, voice still gravelly. He leaned on the counter, watching me like the scene itself did something to his pulse.
“Pretty sure hotels have coffee makers, Nate.”
“Not like you.” He stole a piece of egg off my plate. I slapped his hand, which he obviously enjoyed. His fingers skimmed my waist, barely there, and heat shivered all the way through me. There was something obscene about domesticity with us, like every normal thing was newly scandalous.
He rested his forehead between my shoulder blades. “Stay tonight?”
“I have a full day out on the truck with Dr. King today; it may go late,” I said into my mug. "And then an early morning tomorrow at the clinic.”
He didn’t argue. Just kissed the spot below my ear that makes my spine loose. “Then I’ll drive up after. Even if it’s late.”
“Nate...”
“Even if it’s late,” he repeated.
While I loved spending any time I could with Nate, I was happiest when I escaped the city noise for dirt and horses and the quieter rhythm of things that grow.
Maggie let me take over her kitchen like I’d been born there. We chopped tomatoes for late-summer canning, talked seed catalogues for next year, and argued over whether zucchini bread should have chocolate chips.
Kenzie sat at the island, eating whatever passed her by, saying that it was her way of contributing.
Everything smelled like the sun on wood and the faint clean of laundry drying on the line.
Nate showed up that day, grinning, a takeout bag dangling from one hand and a Kodiaks cap pulled low. “Brought offerings,” he said as we pulled me in for a kiss.
Kenzie swooned, and Maggie had the biggest smile on her face that I had ever seen.
“You keep showing up like this, and people are going to start thinking you work here,” I teased, taking the bag. It was the good Greek place from Summit City I loved, the one that made tzatziki so garlicky it could make a grown man weep.
He hugged his mom and Kenzie and then locked eyes with me. “You’re here, aren’t you? That is where I want to be.”
We ate on his parents' back porch. He watched me more than he ate. I pretended not to notice and failed.
“You’re staring,” I said around a mouthful of my pita.
“I can't help it,” he sighed. “I need to remember every moment with you for when I’m on the road. For when I miss you and my heart is sad.”
“Your heart is safe,” I said, my heartbeat picking up.
He leaned back on his chair, eyes half-lidded under his cap. “No, it's not.”
I swallowed hard and looked away so I could regain control over my emotions. This man... I don't think it was his heart that was in danger.
Nights bled into routines I didn’t think I’d ever want: him asleep on my couch with his arm flung over his face after a long training session, while I folded clothes; me sleeping on his chest while whatever game he was studying ran on mute.
Sometimes he’d come home wrung out, body hot and temper short from pushing past where he should’ve stopped, and I’d pull him into my shower and run water over both of us until the lines around his mouth softened and he remembered how to breathe.
He has scars. Tiny pale lines on his knuckles, one jagged one low on his ribs. The first time I traced it, he caught my wrist.
“Hit from behind,” he said. “Ribs took the boards.”
“How old?”
“Rookie year.”
I kissed the end of it, and he made a sound I’d never heard from him before. Not quite a laugh. Something that belonged to the part of him that doesn’t have to be captain.
He called me between drills, breath still uneven.
I texted him barn selfies with a goat trying to eat my braid.
He showed up at a shelter vaccination morning with coffee and didn’t react when a puppy peed on his shoe.
He learned the names of my clients’ horses like they were teammates.
He asked where I was late at night because it soothed something in him to know I wasn’t on a dark back road alone.
“Make sure your location stays on for me,” he said once, sheepishly. “I have never been this resistant to starting a season before. I just… like knowing where you are, even if I am thousands of miles away.”
Now and then, a slight static pricked my skin, nothing I could point to.
A conversation cut short when I walked up.
A camera where I didn’t expect one. Jamie cheerfully asked for a photo, then another, and another.
“People love you,” he’d grin, and maybe that should’ve made me nervous, but Nate would kiss the side of my head, and I’d believe the truth of that more than the mention of follower counts.
One night near the end of August, back home, he stayed over at my place. No skyline, no elevator, no paparazzi or excited fans, just crickets and the hum of the old fridge and the way the night air moves differently through my screens.
We ended up on the couch, my old, beat-up one that smells faintly like cedar and time. Nate had his arm around me, his thumb tracing lazy circles against my shoulder, our legs tangled under a blanket.
He nodded toward the recliner I never touch. “You ever sit in that?”
I followed his gaze. “No,” I said softly. “It was my dad’s.”
A pause, quiet but full. “And the envelope?” he asked, voice gentler than I’d ever heard it.
“Letters I used to write him,” I said.
Nate didn’t say anything. He just pulled me a little tighter against his chest, the kind of hold that says everything words shouldn’t try to fix.
For a while, we just sat there, the TV flickering soundlessly across the room, his heartbeat steady against my chest.
Later that night, he fell asleep on my side of the bed, one hand fanned across the space between us, his lips parted, breath slow.
In sleep, he looked younger. Softer. The lines of captain and son and public figure washed off him, and all that was left was the man who makes my heart beat differently.
I lay there in the dark and let it all soak in. The realization crested over me with a gentle kind of warmth.
I love him.
It didn’t crash, didn’t blaze. It seeped in, quiet as soft spring rain, until everything felt rinsed and a little new.
It was there in the early mornings, in the way he says my name when he’s laughing, in the possessive tilt of his chin when someone looks too long, in the way we always seem to gravitate towards each other, no matter who was around.
My chest tightened at the realization that in such a short time, Nate had gotten under my skin and buried himself deep in my heart.
He made a small sound, rolled closer, and found me without opening his eyes. His hand slid to my waist like it had always belonged there.
He is everywhere now, my mornings, my truck bed, my grocery lists, my skin, and for once, that doesn’t feel like something I need to protect myself from. It feels like sunlight through a window I didn’t realize had been boarded up for far too long.
I tucked the sheet up over his shoulder and pressed my mouth to his hair. “Okay,” I whispered to the dark and to myself and to whatever comes next.