Chapter 10
Coast POV
The moment her bare hand touched the side of my face, my sternum felt like it was caving inward under a hydraulic press.
Her palm was small, warm, smelling faintly of sweet almond and the medicinal bite of arnica. Her thumb smoothed over the rough stubble along my jawline with a slow, tender pressure that sent a sharp shock down my spinal column.
For two seconds, I leaned into it. I let my forehead drop toward her shoulder, the exhaustion dragging at my eyelids, the iron cage I had kept locked for four years swinging wide open in the dark basement.
Then my survival instinct slammed the door shut.
I jerked back. The motion was so violent the wooden legs of the technician’s stool shrieked against the wet rubber matting.
Tallulah’s hand fell through the empty air, her fingers curling inward as if she had touched a live burner. Her dark eyes went wide, the pupils dilated until the amber warmth vanished into black, her chest rising and falling in quick, uneven hitches beneath her sweater.
I didn't say a word. I couldn't. My vocal cords were locked tight behind a throat that felt like it had been scoured with coarse salt.
I grabbed the elastic compression bandage, hauling the layers around my swollen ankle with vicious, punishing jerks until the clips bit into the weave. My hands were shaking. A fine, continuous tremor ran through the dense muscle of my forearms, my knuckles aching from the force of my grip.
I shoved my foot into the rigid carbon-fiber boot, cranked the industrial velcro straps until the composite shell pinched the bruised flesh, and stood up.
"Coast—" she started, her voice barely above a whisper.
"Get your coat," I rasped, cutting her off with a sound that tore like rusty tin from my chest.
I hauled my canvas duffel onto my good shoulder, turning my back on the treatment table, on the basin of warm water, on the small stool that still held the heat of her thighs. The air in Sub-Level 2 had turned thin and suffocating.
Outside, the Adirondack freeze had settled into a howling gale, sleet driving sideways through the yellow light of the parking lot lamps. Her ancient hatchback was buried under three inches of crusted slush near the perimeter fence, its windshield wiper arms frozen solid to the glass.
I didn't ask. I grabbed the strap of her messenger bag, took her elbow in a grip that brooked no argument, and marched her through the freezing slush toward my heavy black Ford truck idling in the captain’s stall.
"I can walk to my flat," she protested, her teeth clicking together from the bitter draft, her breath tearing away in ragged white ribbons.
"Shut up and get in the truck, Barry."
I shoved open the heavy passenger door, waited until she scrambled onto the high bench seat, and slammed the door with a concussive bang that rattled the ice off the window frame.
* * *
The cab of the truck was dark, lit only by the green luminescence of the instrument cluster.
The heavy diesel engine rumbled beneath the floorboards, a deep, rhythmic vibration that shuddered through the leather upholstery into the base of my skull.
The defroster was blowing hard, pushing dry, lukewarm air against the frosted glass, but the chill between the seats was thick enough to choke on.
The smell of her filled the confined cabin—damp wool, clean rain, dark roast coffee, and that faint trace of arnica cream still lingering on her skin. It pooled in my lungs with every breath I drew, a slow, corrosive poison that made the vein along the side of my neck throb with savage force.
My hands gripped the leather-wrapped steering wheel at ten and two. My knuckles were bone-white, the tendons across the backs of my hands standing out like heavy cables under the skin.
I drove through the campus gates, the tires grinding through the unplowed slush on the access road.
Neither of us spoke. Tallulah sat rigid against the passenger door, her hands clenched in the pockets of her oversized coat, her profile carved in pale, sharp relief against the dark passenger window.
The silence was an open wound, bleeding out between us.
Fix it, the voice in my head snarled. Put the wall back up before she tears the rest of you down.
"Don't flatter yourself about what happened back there," I said.
My voice was flat, cold, stripped of every ounce of the vulnerability she had witnessed forty minutes ago. It was the tone I used when I told an opposing forward he was leaving the ice on a stretcher.
Tallulah didn't move. Her head stayed turned toward the glass. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"It means you're a student running a protocol," I said, staring straight through the sweeping windshield wipers at the empty, snow-choked road. "You saw an athlete with a swollen joint and you did your job. Don't go making up a story in your head about what Julian said. Don't pretend you know me."
The silence returned for three heavy seconds, stretching until the fabric of it frayed.
Then Tallulah turned.
She didn't shrink back against the door. She unbuckled her seatbelt with a violent click, twisting her torso toward the center console, her face blazing with an anger so sudden and pure it seemed to ignite the cold air inside the cab.
"Pull this truck over," she said.
Her voice wasn't loud, but it had the deadly, razor-edged precision of a scalpel.
"We're three blocks from your flat—"
"I said pull over, Coast. Right now."
I slammed my boot onto the brake pedal. The heavy truck skidded slightly on the icy shoulder, the antilock system shuddering through the pedal before the tires caught the gravel bank beside the frozen reservoir. I shoved the transmission into park, the mechanical lever clunking hard into the gate.
I turned on her, my chest heaving against my seatbelt, the fury behind my breastbone detonating into blinding heat.
"What?" I growled, crowding the space above the console. "You want to walk the rest of the way in eight-below weather? Go ahead, Barry. The door is right there."
* * *
Tallulah didn't reach for the door handle.
She leaned forward, closing the distance between us until her face was inches from mine, her dark eyes flashing like lightning in the dim green glow of the dashboard. Her chest was heaving, her collarbones rising and falling in sharp, violent expansions beneath her sweater.
"You are an absolute coward," she whispered, each word landing like a fist against my sternum.
A muscle in my jaw jumped so hard my molars groaned. "Watch your mouth."
"No," she fired back, her hands gripping the edge of the center console, her knuckles white with strain.
"I am done watching my mouth. You act like this terrifying, untouchable monster on the ice.
You check people through the glass, you sneer at the administration, you treat everyone around you like they're dirt beneath your skates. But you're just terrified."
"You don't know a damn thing about me," I rasped, my vision narrowing to the rapid flutter of her pulse at the base of her throat.
"I know you carry Julian's wheelchair like it's a cross nailed to your back," she said, her voice cracking with raw, unvarnished truth.
"I know your father spent years convincing you that your only value in this world is as a blunt instrument.
And I know that the second someone touches you without wanting something from you—the second someone treats you like a human being instead of an enforcer—you panic and try to burn the room down. "
The air left my lungs in a single, concussive rush.
The raw, bleeding truth of her words struck my defenses like a blindside hit, shattering the last rational barrier holding me back.
I hit the red button on my seatbelt, tearing the strap away.
I lunged across the center console.
My right hand shot out, my large, calloused fingers sliding into the dark hair at the nape of her neck, tilting her face up with an unyielding, breathless pressure. My other hand braced flat against the leather of her seatback, trapping her small frame completely between my chest and the door.
Tallulah gasped, the sound catching behind her teeth as my body heat slammed into hers like a furnace. But she didn't pull away. Her hands came up, her bare palms flattening against the heavy cotton of my shirt, right over the scar on my collarbone, her fingers digging in to hold me in place.
"You think I'm panicking?" I growled, my voice dropping into a low, ruined rasp that vibrated directly against her lips.
Our faces were less than an inch apart. Her breath was hot, ragged, washing over my mouth with the scent of rain and coffee. Her pupils were completely blown, wide and black, swallowing the dark amber of her irises.
"I am losing my mind, Tallulah," I whispered, the words tearing out of me, stripped of all pride, all arrogance, all defense.
"I haven't slept a full night since the morning you walked into Thorne's office.
You're in my head every time I lace my skates.
You're in my blood every time I draw a breath.
I can't look at the ice without seeing your face, and I can't look at that table without wanting to tear your clothes off and drown in you. "
Her breath hitched sharply, her lips parting on a broken exhale. A delicate, rosy flush surged over her cheekbones, her eyelids fluttering as my thumb moved from the base of her skull to drag slowly, heavily across the soft curve of her bottom lip.
She didn't flinch. She leaned into the pressure, her mouth parting further against the rough callous of my thumb, her fingers curling tight into my shirt.
"Then stop fighting it, Coast," she breathed.
Her voice was a soft, devastating prayer in the dark.
Every muscle in my back locked into rigid stone. The blood hammered behind my ears like a war drum, screaming at me to close the final fraction of an inch, to crush my mouth against hers, to take the surrender she was offering and never let her go.
My lips hovered over hers. I could feel the microscopic heat radiating from her skin. My eyes dropped to her mouth, my head tilting, my jaw aching from the agonizing strain of holding my weight back.
A blinding flash of white and amber light swept through the cab.
The concussive, grinding roar of a county snowplow tore through the silence as the massive yellow machine lumbered past on the main road, its steel blade throwing a six-foot wall of gray slush against the driver's side of the truck with a deafening thrum-crash.
The intrusion hit us like a bucket of ice water.
My body jerked, my forehead coming to rest heavily against hers as the yellow strobe lights swept across the dashboard, exposing the raw, ruined hunger painted across our faces.
Neither of us moved. We stayed locked together in the cramped cab, our chests heaving against each other, our breaths mingling in short, desperate gasps that fogged the windshield until the outside world disappeared completely.
Slowly, agonizingly, I dragged my thumb away from her lip.
My hand fell from the back of her neck, my fingers trembling as I braced my weight against the console, pulling myself back into the driver's seat by pure, brutal force of will.
I stared through the wet glass at the dark, snow-covered road, my chest aching, my hands gripping the steering wheel until the leather groaned beneath my palms.
Act I was finished. The rules were dead. The professional lie had burned to ash right beside the frozen reservoir.
I didn't look at her. I couldn't. Because I knew with absolute, terrifying certainty that the next time my hands touched her skin, there would be no snowplow in the world loud enough to save us.