Chapter Eighteen
? Holly ?
I woke to warmth that didn’t belong to me.
For one calm, impossible second, my brain didn’t question it.
Didn’t brace. Didn’t run. It just…existed.
Wrapped in heat and steady breath and quiet safety.
Then the world clicked back into place. Jackson’s arm was draped across my waist, his chest solid against my back, our bare skin pressed together like it was normal.
My heart forgot how to beat correctly. I tried easing out from under his arm—slow, careful, the kind of stealth move you make when you’re sneaking back into the house at two a.m. and praying the floorboards don’t rat you out. But his fingers twitched, then curled against my hip.
“Holly?” His voice was gravel-soft, heavy with sleep.
I froze, halfway upright and looking like a raccoon caught stealing chips.
“Hi,” I croaked. Smooth.
He blinked himself awake enough to register me hovering like a guilty ghost. “You ok?”
Two words. That was all. No panic, no suspicion, no pressure—just checking in. It made everything inside me twist. “I didn’t want to wake you,” I muttered, which wasn’t even close to the truth.
“You didn’t. But you also don’t have to sneak out like you’re escaping a hostage negotiation.”
Heat burned up my neck. God, kill me now. “I wasn’t sneaking. I was…relocating.”
His mouth twitched. “Real stealthy.”
I groaned into my hands. “This is so embarrassing.”
“Why?” he asked, gently tugging one hand away from my face. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Something in my chest pulled tight—like a knot that had been there for years suddenly got tired of being knotted. I pulled my knees up, leaning against the ancient headboard. “Last night was…a lot.”
“Yeah,” he agreed quietly. “For me too.”
That startled me enough to look at him. Really look. The nervous edges around his eyes, the careful space he kept between us, like he didn’t want to spook me.
“For you?” I asked.
He nodded once. “I’ve never been trusted with anything like that.”
My throat tightened. “I feel stupid. Like my brain thinks I deserve an award for…lying here. Not freaking out. Like—‘congrats, Holly, you touched someone without imploding.’”
His expression softened, a small, genuine thing. “Seems like a big deal to me.”
I stared at my hands, cheeks hot. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Sometimes the stuff that works doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
Something inside me shifted. A tiny click. A quiet easing I didn’t know I’d been waiting for.
“Do you regret it?” he asked.
“No.” The answer came without hesitation. “I just don’t know what to do with it now.”
“Me either.”
I got up and pulled my sweatshirt over my head. “I should go. Before your mom wakes up and thinks I broke in to steal your innocence or something.”
He huffed a laugh. “She wouldn’t notice if a marching band set up in the living room.”
Fair. I hesitated in the doorway. “Last night…mattered. Even if it feels stupid to admit that.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” he said firmly. “It was brave.”
That word hit in a place I didn’t let people touch. I swallowed, nodded once, and slipped out. “See you around, Jackson,” I said softly.
His answering smile was small, real. “Yeah, Malibu. You will.”
Next thing I knew, he had left for training.
And I’d barely wrapped my head around the idea of starting college before my father was pulling strings, making phone calls, greasing palms—whatever it took to make sure I didn’t have to set foot in a dorm.
“It’s not negotiable, bug,” he’d said in that surgeon’s tone of his, clipped and precise.
“You’re not ready for that environment.”
For once, I didn’t argue. He was right. Throw me into a building crammed with strangers, and I’d either lock myself in my room until spring or pick a fight with the first girl who breathed too loudly. Probably both.
So instead, I stood in the middle of a two-bedroom apartment on the edge of Athens with the keys digging into my palm and the overwhelming sense that I didn’t deserve any of it.
Polished hardwood floors. Granite counters.
A balcony big enough to throw parties I’d never host. School was still a couple of months out, but my hammering heart hadn’t gotten the memo.
There was nothing to freak out about…yet.
Maria whistled low when she walked in, Jewel bouncing on her hip. “Girl, this place is bigger than my whole house.”
I was sitting cross legged on the floor and guilt immediately churned in my gut. “I know. I feel—”
“Stop.” She turned so fast she almost tripped. Her eyes snapped, sharp as knives. “Don’t you dare apologize. You hear me? Don’t. You didn’t steal this. You didn’t cheat for it. You use it.”
I blinked, caught between shame and gratitude. “But—”
“Shut the heck up,” Maria cut in, smirking now. “Seriously. You’re not allowed to feel bad for something that makes your life easier. You’ve had enough hard already.”
Jewel gurgled as if seconding the point, reaching sticky fingers toward my face.
I laughed, the sound rusty but real, and let Maria boss me into hanging curtains and rearranging furniture until the apartment felt less like a showroom and more like a home.
We made a game out of it. Maria held up two sets of curtains and crouched down in front of Jewel like it was a royal decree.
“All right, princesa, left or right? Which one’s worthy of our girl here? ”
Jewel squealed, grabbed a fistful of the left panel, and promptly stuffed it into her mouth.
Maria cackled. “Done. Decision made. You can’t argue with baby logic.”
I shook my head, smiling in spite of myself. “So my décor is going to be determined by whatever tastes good to an infant?”
“Exactly,” Maria said, already climbing onto a chair to hang the chosen set. “Kid’s got better instincts than either of us.”
For the first time since I’d walked into the apartment, the knot of guilt in my stomach loosened. It wasn’t about how much I had compared to her. It was about filling the space with people who made it feel alive. And with Maria and Jewel in it, my apartment finally felt like it belonged to me.
Still, when Maria left that night, the silence pressed down like a weight. I curled up on the couch, staring at the neat rows of books I hadn’t read yet and the perfectly folded blankets I didn’t want to use. Everything felt too clean, too empty, too much.
The days blurred after that. I bounced between the clubhouse, my apartment, quick visits with my parents, and afternoons at Maria’s—Jewel babbling on the floor while we folded laundry or cooked together.
And then there were the damn mixers. Every week another glossy flyer or email telling me I had to show up to some “welcome event” if I wanted the “real college experience.” If the real college experience meant warm soda, sticky floors, and people shouting in my ear, then I’d take a hard pass.
I went to two out of obligation before swearing off them entirely.
And always in the background, Jackson. Gone for training, unreachable except for the rare text that hit my phone like a lightning strike. Our moment on the porch had changed everything. Our moment in his room had changed me.
I’d never admit it out loud, as that involved witnesses and feeling, but I missed him. Missed the calm in his voice, the way his gray eyes saw right through me, the way he made silence feel safe.
I ached for another kiss. Not the fairytale kind.
The real one. The inconvenient, ruin-your-dignity kind.
Which was entirely his fault. At night, when things got too quiet and my brain tried to drag me back into old patterns.
Clenched hands. Tight breaths. That rush of heat behind the eyes that I refused to let fall.
And then something new happened—something I pretended wasn’t happening.
My brain went looking for the memory of Jackson’s arm around me.
Not the kiss. Not the heat. The weight. That slow, steady rise and fall of his chest under my cheek.
The grounding of his heartbeat. The way he didn’t rush or expect anything. Just…existed.
It was ridiculous. Silly. EMDR-without-the-beeping levels of nonsense. But the tightness eased. My hands steadied, my lungs didn’t fight the air I filled them with. Damn. Should’ve sent myself a copay.
By the time classes started in earnest, life was chaos in the usual way.
Lecture halls crammed with bodies, professors droning about syllabi, endless lines at the coffee shop.
I sat in the back with my notebook open, hood pulled low, trying to disappear into the noise.
Some days I managed. Others, I couldn’t stop my hands from trembling, couldn’t block the memories when a stranger’s laugh hit too sharp, too close.
But I kept showing up. One day at a time, one class at a time.
There were moments that surprised me. Like the day my history professor fired off a question about the Reconstruction Amendments.
The room went dead silent, two hundred students ducking their heads.
Against my better judgment, my hand went up.
My voice shook, but the answer came out clean, and the professor gave me a quick nod of approval before moving on.
I sat there grinning like an idiot, heat crawling up my neck, and fully aware I was acting like a toddler given a dollar in a candy store.
It was the tiniest thing, but for once, I didn’t feel invisible.
Other days, doubt hit harder. I’d leave class with a headache, staring at the flood of students around me, wondering if I belonged here at all. If I was only fooling myself into thinking I could be normal. If I’d made a mistake choosing this path.