Chapter 30 - Aleksey | Eight Weeks Later #2
“Almost. Lunch stayed down by about two seconds.”
“A personal best.” He laughed. “Anyone giving you trouble?”
“Veteran named Clarke. But he’s alright. I think he’ll really test me tomorrow.”
“You’ll pass.” Karter didn’t say it like a question.
“How are classes?”
He groaned and dragged both hands down his face. “Organic chemistry is going to bury me alive.”
“You passed last semester. Shame I’m not there to fail it for you.”
Karter snorted. “Yeah, you really brought your A-game to biology. I pretty much carried your ass.”
“You got an A in that class too, so technically I helped.”
“That’s not how my tutoring you works.”
“It worked for me,” I winked at him, “But don’t worry, you’ll pass this year as well. I’m sure of it.”
“Yeah, right.” Karter’s grin flickered. “Elliot said I shouldn’t worry about it so much, too. He’s been hovering lately. Some legacy freshmen wouldn’t shut up at lifts today, kept asking why I wasn’t at the parties, and Elliot made them run extra laps.”
A short breath pushed out of me. “Four states away, and I’m still the one who wants to put them through the glass.”
“You’re not even on the team anymore.”
“Doesn’t mean I forgot how to throw a hit.”
Karter chuckled, but it came out softer than his usual deflection. “Elliot handled it. He’s trying.”
“I know.” I shifted the phone to my other hand. “Still, don’t have to like it.”
The surrounding apartment still felt too quiet. No thin walls letting me hear Karter moving on the other side. Only the refrigerator’s low thrumming sound from the kitchen.
On the screen, Karter shifted, and his hand came into frame, fingers curled around the edge of his phone.
I knew exactly how his palm would feel, the callus worn smooth at the base of his thumb from playing hockey.
Those hands had pressed flat against my bare chest, back in the attic, more times than I could count.
The memory forced my gaze off the screen and up to the ceiling.
“Hey, you okay?” Karter asked.
“Yeah,” I dragged my gaze back to the screen. “Just missing you.”
A grin pulled at his mouth. “You’re not getting sappy on me already.”
“Shut up.”
We kept talking. Stupid things, mostly. The dining hall had switched coffee suppliers, and Karter swore the new stuff tasted like dirt.
I told him about the frozen dinner I’d eaten over the sink, and he made me describe it in detail just so he could tell me it sounded disgusting.
The street outside his window was quiet.
The street outside mine wasn’t. Still, we filled the silence anyway.
Around eleven, Karter rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I should crash. I’ve got six AM lifts tomorrow.”
“Go to sleep then.”
He didn’t hang up, though. The phone stayed propped, and he stared at me through the lens with that look he got when he was working up to something.
“I love you,” he said.
“I know.”
He leaned forward, his face filling the screen. “Don’t forget that when it gets hard up there.”
Karter was getting to know me too well.
“I won’t forget.” I waited a beat. “I love you too. See you on Friday.”
A real smile broke through. “Friday.”
He hung up first, and the screen went dark. I set my phone on the floor beside my bed and lay back in the quiet, letting the sound of Karter’s voice settle somewhere in the back of my mind.
My last thought before I dropped off to sleep was the sound of him saying Friday, and I held onto it through every morning skate and conditioning drill that week, every night ending the same: a text from Karter, a reply from me, one day closer.
I’d never looked forward to anything the way I looked forward to Friday.
Friday afternoon, I blew out of the training facility after the last practice of the week, and threw my bag into the passenger seat of the used truck I’d bought with my first paycheck.
It was nothing flashy, just a solid vehicle of my own that ran. The drive to Ridge Cross took hours, most of it flat highway through farmland that all looked the same in the dark, and by the time the campus exit came up, my shoulders were locked tight from gripping the wheel.
I pulled onto the main road past the athletic complex and the old brick dorms, the sun dipping low enough to turn the rooftops orange. My phone sat in the cupholder with my last text still open: Almost there.
Karter had replied to my text message with a single red heart.
An hour ago my brain had been running through every worst-case scenario: the long summer, the distance, whether Karter would wake up and realize I wasn’t worth the drive.
Then my truck’s headlights swept across the front steps of his new building to find Karter sitting right there on the concrete, wearing the gray hoodie from the night I finally came back to The Ice House.
And suddenly, every stupid thought bled out of me before I pulled into park.
Karter stood up as I killed the ignition.
I didn’t think. I was out of the truck and crossing the grass before he made it down the steps, and then he was right there and my hands were on him and his mouth was under mine.
I kissed him hard, putting all the frustration of weeks of texts and too many nights alone into the way I gripped the back of his neck and held him there.
He made a sound against my lips, something caught between a laugh and a breath, and his fingers twisted into the front of my jacket and pulled me closer. I kissed him until my lungs burned. Then I kissed him again.
“You’re still mine,” I whispered the words against his mouth.
Karter’s lips curved into a smirk. “Should think so. You drove all the way here just to kiss me.”
“Maybe I drove all the way here for the pizza.”
“The dining hall doesn’t serve pizza on Fridays.”
“Then yes, I drove here just for you.” I pulled back just far enough to look at him, the nearby overhead streetlight catching the gleam in his eyes. “Maybe I’ve been counting down the days.”
Karter’s smirk flickered. The fingers twisted in my jacket tightened, and he didn’t bother playing it cool. “I missed you so much,” he said, quieter now, the joke stripped out of it.
“Same.” I kissed him again, quick and hard, then let my forehead rest against his.
I breathed him in before we even made it through the door. Neither of us spoke as we moved through the dorm hallway, past the bulletin boards and the closed doors with whiteboards scrawled full of inside jokes I didn’t know.
Karter’s single room was at the end of the hall.
The door clicked shut behind us, and I pulled him close and pressed my palm flat against his chest, right over his heart.
The steady beat of it pushed back against my hand, and for the first time in months, there was no lock between us, no thin wall, no bus ride or hotel checkout or goodbye hanging over our heads.
“Home,” I said.
Karter covered my hand with his, lacing his fingers through mine, his thumb brushing across my knuckles.
“Yeah,” Karter replied softly, his eyes locking onto mine. “You are.”
THE END... I hope you loved reading ‘Legacy Next Door’!