Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Sammie
The door to the storage room clicked shut behind me with the softest sound, and somehow it felt louder than the horn that ended the game.
I walked the back hall with my fingertips grazing the cinderblock because my body needed something solid to argue with.
Every nerve still hums where Triston’s mouth had found mine—as if he’d written his name on the inside of my lips and the ink hadn’t dried.
I kept my head down, kept moving, but the world had tilted a few degrees.
The hall lights were too bright, the air too thin.
I caught a flash of my reflection in a trophy case as I cut past the lobby.
My hair mussed, cheeks high with color, jersey hanging on me like it had always fit.
His number stretched across my back. My face was a secret I could barely look in the eye.
Wayne’s voice rolled from somewhere near the main doors, low, familiar. Speaking with a trainer about a tight hamstring and a bus schedule. I pause behind a pillar until the conversation moves. I can’t walk straight into my father with this heat still burning along my mouth.
My phone vibrates once. I don’t have to check to know it is him. The buzz slides through me like a spark finding kindling.
You should have let me keep you.
Just words. Just shapes on a screen. But my breath staggers.
For a second, the corridor fades and only the press of him existed.
The wall against my spine, the rough scrape of paint, the steady bracket of his hands caging my head and somehow holding me together.
The kiss had been a claim and a benediction at once.
He hadn’t rushed; he’d taken his time like I was the only clock he intended to consult.
I type with my thumb, my hand stupidly unsteady.
We can’t.
The dots came up and vanished. Then:
We will.
It should have made me angry, the confidence, the certainty he wore like a second skin.
Instead the conviction steadied something that has been trembling since last Halloween.
It wasn’t that my fear vanished; it was organized.
It put its back against the door and crossed its arms and said: Then if this happens, it happens in light you can stand in. It happens with your eyes open.
I tuck the phone away, cross the lobby slowly, and slip out past a cluster of fans waiting by the rail for autographs.
A couple of rookies trot by in suits and damp hair, laughing, oblivious.
An usher props the outer door with his hip and whistles tunelessly at the night.
I hug myself and feel the stitched letters of KNIGHT press into my palm through the fabric.
It was like being branded in reverse: not skin seared, but heart marked.
Outside, the cold has teeth. Frost twines along the handrail and laces the cars in the lot like spider-work.
The breath in my chest comes out white and visible, proof I exist in this world.
The parking lot lamps throw long cones onto the asphalt.
In the far cone, a figure leans in the shadow between two trucks.
He doesn’t call my name. He doesn’t have to. There’s a pressure to the air when Triston is near, a subtle shift like weather. I could pretend not to see. But I move toward him anyway, drawn like a tide to the moon, annoyed at myself for being a body that obeys old laws.
He stayed put until I reached the edge of the light. Then he steps forward without hurry, like a man who never doubts that the ground will rise to meet him. His eyes skim my face and pause at my mouth. The corner of his own lifts as if memory was a taste.
“You should be inside.” I said, because normal sentences were all I had left to hold onto.
“I am inside.” He said, tipping his head toward the building behind me, as if the rink and I were the same thing.
It was nothing. It was everything. I swallowed and looked at the glow spilling from the glass doors. If Wayne turned and saw me here, jersey half-hidden under my coat, hair a little wrecked with victory that had nothing to do with the scoreboard.
“Walk me to my car.” I said, and made it sound like a challenge by accident.
He fell in step half a pace to my right so that his shoulder shielded me from the wind.
We didn’t speak. The lot makes its own music.
Every step was a negotiation between wanting and wisdom.
I didn’t trust either alone; together they form a rope I can use to cross from this moment to the next without falling.
At my car I fumble with the keys. He takes them gently, turns them in the lock, and puts them back in my open hand with a brush of fingers that was more instruction than touch.
“You shouldn’t have kissed me like that.” I said, because honesty was the only way to keep from drowning in the undertow.
His eyes warmed and sharpened at once. “There isn’t a version where I don’t.”
“I’m trying to…do this right.” The words were small and earnest and made of the girl who still believed rules could save her if she wrote them in neat lines. “Daylight. Lines.”
“We’re in a parking lot under six lamps.” He said. “If I wanted shadows, I’d have kept you in the room and swallowed the key.”
The image sends a shock through me, half terror, half longing so strong it makes my throat ache. “Don’t.” I said, and I hoped he heard the two meanings: don’t say things like that when I’m already undone, and don’t you dare let go of the part that can say it with a straight face.
He tilted, considering, and the seriousness that lives behind his control surfaces. “Okay.” The word is an agreement with himself as much as with me. “Daylight. Lines.”
“I don’t want to be your secret.” I said, because I need to say it somewhere the night could hear and hold me to it later. “My father—”
“—knows enough to know.” He finishes, with a grimness that wasn’t aimed at me. “He set his boundary. I won’t cross it with a smile and pretend it isn’t a lie.” He touched the hem of the jersey peeking from my coat. “You wore this in front of him.”
My face heated. “I wore it in front of everyone.”
He breathed out, slow, like the answer satisfied a hunger I hadn’t intended to feed. “Good.”
A door banged open at the far side of the lot.
We both turn. Assistant coaches spill out, laughing, keys flashing in their hands.
The regular end of a night anyone else would call a win.
Triston steps back half a foot, not away from me but into a posture that broadcasts distance from fifty yards.
It was a magician’s trick: the illusion of space with no change in gravity.
The coaches wave. He nods and I lift my hand and hope my smile looks like congratulations and not I’m wearing his name over my heart and can still taste him.
“Go home.” He says under his breath when the crowd thins, and the directive wasn’t dismissal but care smuggled through a single syllable.
“You, too.”
He reaches past me and presses the edge of the door so it swings wide enough for me to slip in. Then he leans, not touching, close enough that his voice could be quieter than the wind. “You’re going to feel me while you sleep.” He growls “Don’t fight it.”
“I won’t sleep.” I admit.
“Then keep the light on.” The restraint in him was a visible thing, muscles leashed, jaw careful. “Text me when you’re in your room.”
“I can’t—”
“That’s enough for now.”
He closes the door with a care that makes the latch sound obscene.
For a second we look at each other through the glass—me in a borrowed world, him in the one he’s built out of steel and discipline and the kind of want that doesn’t apologize.
He taps two fingers against the roof once, then steps back so I can pull away.
I drive with both hands until my knuckles whiten.
The car’s heater blows an uneven warmth at my shins.
The radio stays off because music would be more voice in my head that's already full.
All the way home I replay the kiss like a stone.
The first press, the part where I stopped thinking, the small sound he made when I pulled him closer, the moment when yours felt less like surrender and more like a shape I would choose again.
At the house, the porch light washes the steps in soft gold.
The front door was unlocked—on purpose, a policy, a promise.
I step into the smell of coffee and old wood and laundry soap, the smell of my entire life.
Dad sits at the table with his shoulders hunched, staring at nothing in particular in the way that means he’s thinking about everything at once.
“You okay?” He asked, which was our way of saying, say the part I can stand to hear.
“Yes.” I hung my coat. The jersey showed. His eyes catch it and his jaw clicks; then he inhales slowly and lets the air go, steadying the world with his hands where they lay on the table. “I came home through the front.” I added, because he needed markers for the map.
“Good.” His gaze flicked to my face, searching for harm like a medic. “Hungry?”
“No.” My pulse said yes, but not for food.
He nods anyway and stands to rinse his mug, the noise of the faucet filling a space words can’t. “Upstairs by midnight.” He says, not an order, a rope he tosses me so I can pretend we were still playing our old game.
“It’s already past.” I giggle, glancing at the microwave display.
“Then go now,” He says, and the corner of his mouth pulls like a man trying to be funny under a mountain that refuses to laugh. “Before I have to dock you pay.”
“From my generous salary as assistant snack wrangler.” I laugh, and the banter lifts and falls like a wave that didn’t reach the shore. I lean over and kiss his cheek. He catches my wrist as I pull back, holds it a second, then lets go.
In my room the light already glows because I always leave it on when the night is too heavy to navigate in the dark.
I shut the door and lean my forehead against it and let the breath out of me in a long, shaky line.
The jersey whispers when I pull it free of my coat, cloth catching on cloth with a soft hush.
I stare at my reflection in the window and the girl looking back at me is someone I recognize and don’t—softer at the mouth, brighter at the eyes, older in a way that has nothing to do with numbers.
My phone buzzes.
Home?
I sit on the edge of the bed, the springs complaining the way they always do, and typed:
Home. Light on.
Three dots. Then:
Good. Keep it on.
I set the phone face down on the quilt like it was a hot pan I can’t hold.
The room smells faintly of clean cotton and a candle I’d blown out earlier in the week; cinnamon, something darker underneath.
I lay back and stare at the ceiling until it blurs.
The kiss replays in my body rather than my head.
The way his breath steadies mine, the way my fingers learn the exact shape of his shoulders, the solid wall behind me and the equally solid wall of him in front, and the narrow hallway of space where something dangerous and holy walks between us and refuses to choose a side.
I try to be good. I try not to touch what I shouldn’t.
But my hands remember all on their own, the same way your foot finds the next stair in the dark.
The pulse begins with need as my fingers find my opening and slide in.
Heat gathers low and slow, not a blaze but a coal that wouldn’t go out no matter how I cupped my palms around it to starve it of air.
I press my eyes shut and tell myself daylight like a prayer.
But the heat coils inside me as I continue to think of Triston and our kiss, his voice, his smell, while my own fingers bring me to my peak.
My phone's buzzes, half startling me. I roll onto my side to read:
You’re thinking about me.
A ridiculous laugh slips out, half scandalized, half relieved.
Arrogant.
Knowing.
I don’t answer. I can’t without handing him the keys to a door I was still telling myself I’d keep locked when the sun was up. The phone flashes again anyway.
Sleep. You’ll need it.
I stare at the words until the edges are dull. There was a promise tucked inside them and a threat, and it soothes me that he didn’t bother to separate the two. I slide the phone under my pillow like a charm.
The house moves through its nighttime rituals, a pipe ticks, the heater shudders awake and sighs itself to stillness.
Wood settles, remembering the weight of all of us.
I was too aware of where Dad’s steps would land if he climbed the stairs and paused outside my door.
Too aware of which board creaks on the landing and how many strides it took to cross from the top stair to the rug’s edge.
The map of my home was written in my nerves.
The map of Triston was being inked in, line by careful line.
I must have slept because when I opened my eyes the light looked different.
The soft gray before dawn that makes everything look honest. For a second I didn’t know where the burn in my chest came from.
Then I did. I pull the jersey closer, as if it can dampen the ache.
It makes it worse in a way that feels like relief.
I sit up and reach for the notebook in my drawer. The one with nothing but lists that help me keep the world from spinning too fast. Tonight the list I write has no boxes to check, only sentences I need to pin to paper to stop them from running wild in my head.