Chapter 4
EVAN
Evan didn’t last long.
He spent days pretending the film room hadn’t happened.
Walking through the facility like his skin wasn’t buzzing, like he couldn’t conjure the taste of Finn’s lips by closing his eyes.
He went to work. Answered emails. Sat through meetings with his father and nodded at the right moments and said the right things while his brain played the same three seconds on repeat: Finn’s fingers fisting in his shirt, Finn’s voice saying you like it like it was that simple.
The discipline held for exactly as long as Evan didn’t have to see Finn in person.
Then practice let out on a Tuesday afternoon and Finn came down the hallway in sweats with his bag over his shoulder, flushed from the ice, and their eyes met for two seconds that Evan felt in every joint of his spine.
Finn didn’t smile. Didn’t stop. Just held the look and kept walking, and that was worse than a smile would have been, because a smile Evan could have written off as performance.
The look was just Finn being certain, the way Finn was always certain, and Evan had stood in the hallway afterward staring at the fire exit sign and wondering at what point during those two seconds he had stopped breathing.
He went home. Ate dinner at the kitchen table. Graded his own composure on a scale of one to ten and gave himself a generous six.
You left a mark on my neck.
The text arrived late, while Evan lay in bed with the lights off.
He read it six times. Didn’t respond. Spent the next hour imagining what that mark looked like, purple and red at the center, the impression of his teeth in Finn’s skin, evidence that couldn’t be denied or explained away.
Evan had done that. He had bitten Finn Holloway hard enough to leave a bruise, and his fists clenched in the sheets at the thought, wanted to see it, wanted to put his lips there again and feel the bruise give under pressure.
A possessive part of him he hadn’t known existed was proud of it. That scared him most.
Then Evan did the thing he’d spent fifteen years not doing. He got in his car and drove to Finn Holloway’s apartment.
He hadn’t planned it. Hadn’t decided. One moment, he was sitting in the facility parking lot with the engine off, reading the text for the seventh time.
You left a mark on my neck. The overhead light in the parking structure was flickering, a moth bouncing off the housing, and Evan watched it instead of starting the engine because starting the engine meant deciding, and he was not going to decide to do this.
Evan turned the key before the rational part of his brain could lodge a formal objection.
The engine caught, the headlights carved two pale beams across the parking structure wall, and he sat there for another ten seconds with his foot on the brake and his jaw clenched, giving himself one last chance to put it in park and walk back inside. He didn’t take it.
Evan could have turned around at any intersection between the facility and Building C.
Six places where a U-turn was possible, six places where the rational version of himself could have grabbed the wheel.
He passed all six. His grip on the wheel was white-knuckled and his pulse was not, and the gap between those two facts was where his entire professional identity lived.
Building C, unit seven. He’d pulled the address from the emergency contact database, a fireable misuse of student records that he’d stopped pretending was administrative around the time he memorized the unit number.
Evan sat in the lot long enough for the engine to tick cool, the leather creaking under his palms.
He was thirty-eight years old. He had spent his entire career not doing things like this.
He had a system for not doing things like this, and the system had worked for fifteen years, and now he was parked outside a student apartment complex at ten o’clock at night because a twenty-one-year-old had sent him a text about a hickey.
He should turn around and drive home and pretend he’d never come here at all.
Evan sat with that thought for exactly as long as it took for the parking lot light to flicker twice more. Then he opened the door, stepped out into the night air, and closed it behind him with the measured control of a man who had already accepted that control was the only thing he had left.
The walk to unit seven took forever. The complex was the kind of place student athletes lived in: three stories of beige siding, balconies cluttered with grills and folding chairs, the faint bass of someone’s music leaking from a second-floor window.
Cool air pressed against Evan’s face while sweat prickled along the back of his collar, and somewhere below the stairwell a dog barked twice and stopped.
His dress shoes were too loud on the concrete walkway.
He could hear every step, each one a decision he was failing to reverse, and by the time he reached the third floor his heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
He knocked before he could talk himself out of it. Then he stood there, under the buzzing porch light with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled from a workday that felt like it had happened to someone else, and waited for the worst idea of his life to open the door.
Footsteps inside. A pause. The entrance swung open and Finn was standing there in gray sweatpants and nothing else, hair damp from a shower, that sandy brown gone wet and catching the light from the doorframe.
No flinch. No double take. Just Finn half-smiling, dimples and all, like he’d known this was coming before Evan did.
“Took you long enough.”
Evan opened his lips and what came out was: “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
The cocky angle of Finn’s expression loosened. His jaw went slack for half a second before it reset.
“Good.” His voice was easy, unhurried. “I can’t stop thinking about you either.”
“This is a mistake.”
“Probably.”
“I came here to tell you it can’t happen again.”
“Okay.” Finn leaned into the doorframe, arms crossed over his bare chest. The mark on his throat was visible, faded to yellowish green at the edges but unmistakable. Evan’s gaze caught on it and stayed. “So tell me.”
“I—” His throat closed. “I can’t.”
“I know.”
Finn reached out, grabbed the front of Evan’s shirt, and pulled him inside. The entrance kicked shut and the apartment was unlit except for the kitchen, and Finn’s palm was on his sternum, and the air smelled like soap and laundry detergent and steam.
Evan was pinned to the closed entrance. Finn was six inches away. Shirtless. The mark on his throat visible even in the half-light, and Evan’s lips went dry looking at it.
Then Evan was kissing him, and the decision he’d spent the entire drive not making was apparently something his body had made for him the second Finn’s palm landed on his sternum.
He didn’t remember deciding to do it. One second Finn’s palm was on his sternum and the next Evan’s lips were on his, and Finn kissed him with the same force. Finn’s fingers came up to frame Evan’s face, and the noise he made into the kiss sent Evan’s hips forward before his brain caught up.
“Fuck.” Finn pulled away an inch. “Evan.”
Evan kissed him again. Walked him backward until Finn hit the wall beside the entrance.
The impact made Finn grunt, and Evan swallowed it, pressing closer, pinning him there with his weight.
Finn’s skin was warm and damp from the shower and Evan could feel his heartbeat everywhere they touched, fast and reckless, matching Evan’s own.
“This is insane.” The words came out into the kiss. “This is so fucking insane.”
“Yeah.” Finn was already working at Evan’s belt. “Do you want to stop?”
“No.”
“Then shut up and fuck me.”
Evan’s thumbs found the hollows above Finn’s hipbones.
His blazer was on the floor somewhere behind him.
His vehicle was in the lot and his phone was in his pocket and every piece of infrastructure that held his life together was somewhere else, and he was here, choosing this.
Choosing Finn’s skin under his palms and Finn’s breath on his face and the wreckage that would follow.
Finn dropped to his knees.
Finn didn’t ask. Didn’t wait. He got Evan’s belt open and his slacks down and took him into his throat in one fluid motion, and Evan’s head cracked into the wall.
His hand found Finn’s hair and fisted. Finn’s tongue pressed flat along the underside of his cock, and the wet heat of it made Evan’s thighs shake.
Finn pulled to the tip, sucked once, then took him deep again, his throat opening, his nose brushing the base.
Evan’s hips jerked forward and Finn took it, pressing Evan’s thighs wider apart, his jaw working, spit slicking down to where his fist wrapped around what his lips couldn’t reach.
Then Finn hummed around him and swallowed, and Evan’s vision went white at the edges.
“Finn.” His voice came out raw. “Finn, stop. I’m going to—”
Finn pulled off, looked up at him with spit on his chin and his eyes blown, and smiled. “Bedroom.”
Evan pulled him to his feet and kissed him, tasting himself on Finn’s tongue, salt and musk and the obscenity of it.
Finn walked him down the hall without breaking the kiss, steering blind, one palm on Evan’s chest and the other fumbling for the doorframe.
They hit the bed and Finn dragged him down.
“Turn around,” Evan said.
Finn rolled onto his stomach and looked over his shoulder with a grin that punched the air out of Evan’s lungs. “You going to fuck me in my own bed?”
“Yes.”
“About time.”