Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Callaway
The car stops.
The driver brings me back to the present when he announces we reached our destination. Though, I don’t move right away.
I can’t.
Because my body hasn’t caught up to reality yet—hasn’t realized I didn’t kiss him, that I didn’t finally break the thing I’ve been holding together with denial and bad decisions and people whose names I don’t learn.
Fuck. Fuck. F-u-c-k . . . I almost kissed him.
Almost begged him with my mouth instead of my voice. I swallow, hard, and stare straight ahead like the windshield might save me from myself.
How fucking stupid am I?
I know better. You’d think I learned after the first time.
I learned it the night we crossed a line and never figured out how to step back over it. When I let Monty inside me and felt something crack open that never closed again. When I realized I could love two people at once and the world would still only give me space for one version of myself.
The version that only liked women—never men.
I almost begged him.
Begged.
For a touch. For his mouth. For something I wasn’t even brave enough to name. I know that for a few unbearable seconds, he almost gave it to me.
That’s the part that guts me.
I’ve been with women since then—men too.
I’m not confused about that. I never have been. I like women—love them, even. Their bodies, their softness, the way they touch me like they’re allowed to.
And men . . . men scratch an itch I pretend doesn’t exist. Discreet hotel rooms. Low voices. No names exchanged. No feelings invited.
My needs are always met quietly.
Because if I don’t let myself feel, I don’t have to remember what it was like to open my soul and watch it be rejected by the future before it even started.
But Monty—Monty isn’t a need.
He’s a memory. He’s the only man who ever made me feel seen instead of just used. The only one who touched me like I was something worth keeping. Like I wasn’t a secret, a phase, or a mistake to be folded away.
Like he could love me, and maybe he did at some point, but had to stop.
And Vesper . . . fuck.
Ves is love and all the good things I can never have in my life.
We were young, but what we felt was real.
I loved her. I loved him.
And I’ve spent every year since pretending those loves didn’t change me.
I adjust myself in the seat, painfully aware of my body’s betrayal, of how close I came to ruining everything.
My chest feels tight—not with panic, but with grief. Old, familiar grief. The one that settles in your bones and teaches you how to smile through it.
I drag a hand down my face and force air into my lungs like I can bully my body into behaving.
You almost kissed him in a fucking car, idiot.
Worse—you almost begged. Like some feral teenager with no sense and no pride, like you didn’t already learn how this ends.
Not again.
I can’t want him again.
Because wanting him means wanting a life that doesn’t exist. A life where we don’t choose silence just to survive it. A life where love doesn’t turn into a battle over the same woman because that’s safer than admitting we want each other too. The three of us as one.
And it means his rejection.
I can handle a loss on the ice. I can handle a trade. I can handle my mother’s smug phone calls and my father’s “think of the legacy” speeches.
I cannot handle Montoya Wade looking at me like I’m a mistake he refuses to repeat.
The driver opens the door. I roll my shoulders back and build my expression from scratch.
In a few minutes, I’ll be in front of cameras.
I’ll smile. I’ll charm. I’ll say words like opportunity, grateful, and excited to join the organization. I’ll sell a future I’m not sure I’m allowed to have. I’ll be controlled, polished, the version of Callaway Winthrop they paid for.
No one will see the part of me that almost cracked in the dark.
I glance at Monty—just once.
He’s already composed, jaw set, eyes forward, that familiar scowl that makes people step out of his way like he’s got the right-of-way in every room. Of course he is. He’s always been better at acting like nothing touches him, like he doesn’t bleed, like he doesn’t want.
It’s a coping mechanism he learned after his parents died, and he jumped from one house to another in foster care until they found his uncle. An uncle who tried his best but was just as stoic as Monty became.
It makes me want to grab him by the collar.
It makes me want to earn a reaction just to prove he’s human.
I don’t. Smoothly, I step out of the car and leave the ghost of my mouth behind, still hovering where his lips almost were.
Some things don’t have to happen to ruin you.