Chapter Nine #2
"It's about you." He said it like it tore out of him.
"It was about the team a month ago. Now it's about you, and I don't know how to make it stop being about you, and that terrifies me more than Voss ever has.
Voss can take my draft. He can take my back, my scholarship, the whole— I made my peace with them taking all of it a long time ago.
I never made my peace with them having something to take that I actually—" He stopped, breathing hard.
"I didn't have anything they could really hurt me with.
That was the whole point of me. And then you walked into a stadium and now I do. "
The room went still.
I'd been bracing for the fight. I was good at the fight. The fight was armor. What I wasn't braced for was the truth, dropped between us bare, a man who hoarded his words spending all of them at once.
"Cade—"
"I haven't slept," he said, lower now, the fury collapsing into something rawer.
"Since the parking lot. I keep seeing Mercer angling that phone at you, and I can't—Sloane, I have spent my whole life being the thing that stands between people and the hit.
It's the only thing I'm for. And now there's a hit coming for you, and you're walking toward it, on purpose, smiling, and I cannot—"
I crossed the room and kissed him to make him stop.
It worked the way a match works on something that's been soaked in gasoline for a month.
?
This kiss wasn't the careful one.
The careful one had been him asking. This one was both of us answering, and it had nine days of fear in it and a parking lot and a hardware store two hundred miles away, and his hands came up into my hair and mine went under his shirt to actual skin, the heat of him, the ridge of muscle and the catch of breath when my nails found his lower back and he hissed—I filed that, something there, and let it go for later—and he walked me backward until I hit the wall and the picture frame next to my head went crooked and stayed that way for a week because neither of us was going to fix it.
He kissed me like a confession. Down my throat, and I had my leg hooked around his and his hands had decided where they lived now, and I'd stopped being able to think in full sentences, which never happens to me, words are the one thing I always have, and he took them, he took the words right out of my head with his mouth, and somewhere in the middle of it I understood that this was the most dangerous thing I had ever done and that I was not going to stop doing it.
He pulled back first—he never pulled back first, that was my move, and the fact that he was the one doing it told me how scared he still was. His forehead came to mine. We were both wrecked, breathing like the parking lot, his heart slamming under my palm.
"We have to have a rule," he said.
"A rule." I laughed, shaky. "You want to negotiate. Now. Against the wall."
"If we don't have a rule, we get caught, and if we get caught, it ends you.
" His thumb traced my jaw, gentling, the contrast that always undid me.
"So. No contact. In public. Ever. We don't talk at games, at practice, on campus, in front of anyone.
You don't text me your story. I don't text you anything they could find.
No names—if you ever have to refer to me in your notes, in your head, anywhere, I'm not a name, I'm not Cade, I'm nobody.
We are not a thing that exists where anyone can see it.
" His voice dropped. "Whatever this is, it lives behind closed doors or it doesn't live.
That's the only way you get to keep your story and I get to keep you.
No strings anyone can pull. No names anyone can print. No contact anyone can photograph."
"No contact," I repeated. The phrase did something cold and thrilling down my spine. "That's a hell of a rule for a guy who just walked me to his truck in front of God and Dale Mercer."
"I'm aware I'm the worst possible person to propose it." A ghost of that almost-laugh. "Propose it anyway, Sloane. Please. Help me keep you safe in the one way I know how."
I should have said no. I should have said this is insane, you cannot quarantine a feeling, secrets like this don't stay secret, they metastasize.
I knew all of that. I'd reported on what secrets do to people; I had a whole investigation founded on it.
I knew, standing there with his thumb on my jaw, that a rule like this isn't a wall around a thing, it's a pressure cooker, and I knew exactly what comes out of a pressure cooker when it finally goes.
Instead I reached up, and I straightened the collar of the shirt I'd just had my hands under, smoothing him back into the wall he showed everyone else, and I said:
"No contact." I kissed him once, soft, sealing it like a deal I already knew we'd break. "Starting tomorrow."
"Starting tomorrow," he agreed, and didn't leave for three more hours.
We made the rule that night. I want to be clear about that, because of everything that came after, because of the hotel and the article and the thing he said to me in the rain that I'm still not over.
We made the rule.
We were the ones who broke it first.
?