Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jason
The Post-Fuck Hospitality Clause
There’s a thigh on me.
A bare fucking thigh—draped casually across my stomach like I’m her mattress and emotional support animal rolled into one.
An arm slung over my chest as if she owns me.
Her hair’s under my chin, her breath slow and even, and I swear she smells like my shampoo.
Which means at some point last night, she used my stuff without asking.
Which shouldn’t be hot.
Newsflash: It absolutely is.
Scottie Crawford, queen of “I’m not staying,” passed out on my couch before the coffee even brewed. Her exact words—“I just need a shot of caffeine, and I’m outta here”—were punctuated by a yawn she tried to disguise as a breath. News flash: she stayed.
Now she’s curled up against me like this is something it’s not—like we’re a thing. As if mornings start this way all the time. Her hair doesn’t smell like my pillow, and her knee isn’t resting on mine. We didn’t just make a thousand rules to avoid this exact moment.
Except last night was not soft. Or focused—and thank fuck it wasn’t a dream.
It was sweat and steam and fingernails on my back. Her lips pressed to every inch of me like she was writing her name in heat. She’d kissed me like she meant it, fucked me like she needed it, and then fell asleep like I hadn’t just had a complete mental and physical systems shutdown mid-orgasm.
Honestly? I’m still rebooting.
I don’t even know what happened to me. One minute we were arguing, the next she was in my lap, riding me like a goddamn pro athlete—and I mean that literally, because hello, Olympic hips—and now here she is, wrapped around me like it’s always been this way. Like I’m hers.
And, yeah, my brain is short-circuiting from that alone.
But then I blink up at the ceiling, bracing for it. The aftershock. The ache. The burn in my knee, the one that usually arrives like clockwork after I so much as walk up a flight of stairs too fast—let alone go full sex marathon with the woman who drives me out of my fucking mind.
Except . . . it’s not there.
I shift my leg.
Nothing.
Stretch it out cautiously. Flex my quad.
Still nothing.
No pull. No twinge. No pain.
I stare at the ceiling like it’s got the answers, like maybe this is one of those dream sequences where everything feels too good to be real, and then I wake up, and she’s gone, and my body’s still broken.
But she’s here. She’s breathing against me, warm, real, and . . . it seems like I’m not broken.
Which might be the scariest part of all.
Not when I carried her. Not when I stood in the shower for ten minutes holding her up with one arm and washing her hair with the other.
Not when I walked across the apartment barefoot and towel-wrapped, half-hard, and fully fucked out, just to make her tea—which she refused because she needed coffee.
And now?
My knee feels . . .fine.
I look down at her, at the way her fingers twitch slightly in sleep like she’s dreaming of something tense or important. Or maybe she’s dreaming of me. She did call me a smug bastard—or something like that—somewhere between orgasm number two and three.
Still.
My knee is fine.
No snapping. No shift. No fire shooting up my thigh or down into the bone like a warning flare.
I flex again, slower this time, testing the truth.
It holds.
Holy shit. It actually holds.
It’s like my body—this beat-up, rehab-scarred, surgically reassembled machine I stopped trusting months ago—just raised a middle finger at every fear I’ve been dragging around like a second skin.
I should be celebrating. Shouting. Launching into a Rocky-style victory montage.
Instead, I freeze. The realization hits me harder than the injury ever did.
Fuck.
It was never just the pain.
It’s never been about the fucking knee.
It’s the fucking fear.
The cold, creeping kind that wakes you up at three in the morning whispering, What if you’re not him anymore?
The guy who won the Cup. Who fought for every goal, every shift. The guy whose teammates leaned on him counted on him to hold the line. That guy didn’t flinch. Didn’t hesitate.
That guy wasn’t afraid.
But I was.
I am fucking afraid that if I try and fail, I lose everything.
Afraid that if I try and succeed, I still might not feel whole again.
Afraid that maybe this whole fucking time, I’ve been so focused on proving I’m still that player I forgot how to be a person.
Scottie was right. So was Dr. Parker.
I wasn’t recovering—I was hiding. Hiding behind pain. Hiding behind excuses. Hiding behind the idea that maybe if I didn’t try, I couldn’t fall.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I shift again, just to feel the muscle respond. It’s sore, yeah. I’ve pushed it. But it’s there. It’s alive.
I can come back.
The guy I was? He’s not dead. Just . . . buried. Under fear. Under guilt. Under layers of ego and stubbornness.
And this—this moment where I realize the only thing holding me back was me—feels so fucking raw, I don’t know what to do with it.
So, I turn.
Scottie’s still tucked against me, her breathing slow and warm against my chest. She smells like my shampoo, sex, and sleep. Her fingers are curled into the fabric of my shirt as if she doesn’t want to let go.
I press a kiss into her hair.
Not because I’m trying to be sweet.
Not because I think it’ll make the moment better.
But because my chest is pounding like I just broke away, deked out the goalie, and slammed the puck top shelf in overtime. The crowd’s roaring in my head, but it’s not pain. It’s adrenaline. It’s clarity. It’s something dangerously close to awe.
She didn’t just push me to heal.
She made me see.
And fuck me, that might be scarier than the knee ever was.
I gently ease out from under her, careful not to wake her. She shifts and murmurs something sleepy but doesn’t stir. I grab the brace off the nightstand, still in the spot I left it yesterday when I was trying to have a normal fuck night—even if I had to endure the pain.
For a second, I wonder if I should wear it, just slip it over, strap it, and . . .
“Really?” comes a voice from the pillow. Raspy. Disbelieving. Sharp as ever, even before coffee.
I turn.
Scottie’s propped up on one elbow, hair a mess in the most distracting way possible, eyes half-lidded and squinty, voice low and scratchy from sleep and sex and whatever the hell last night was. She looks like temptation wrapped in my oversized Mammoths shirt and a whole lot of attitude.
“You’re putting the brace back on?” she rasps, blinking at me like I just announced I was joining a boy band.
I freeze, one strap half-fastened, caught mid-act like guilty twelve-year-old sneaking cookies. “I—uh?—”
She lifts a brow. Just one. Which is worse than yelling.
“I was just—” I glance at the brace, then back at her. “Trying to figure out if I still need it.”
She lets out a disbelieving breath and sits all the way up, the sheet pooling in her lap. “You’re fucking kidding me, right?”
I open my mouth.
She points at me. “No. No, Jason Tate. Do not even try it. You carried me. Across the apartment. With a smug little smirk on your face, like it was nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing. She was wrapped around me, her mouth on my neck, whispering filthy things between giggles while I tried to remember how to breathe and not collapse with her naked in my arms.
“If you lie and say it hurt,” she says, narrowing her eyes, “I swear to God, I’ll . . . I don’t know, call your mom.”
“I’m not lying,” I mutter, caught, the strap still dangling from my hand. “It didn’t hurt. At all.”
Her expression shifts—not softer precisely, but less full of fire. “And yet, here you are, strapping it on like you’ve got something to prove.”
I look down at it again, suddenly aware of how automatic it is. How natural. Like brushing my teeth. Like guilt. “Muscle memory,” I offer.
“Bullshit memory,” she counters, and now she’s crawling across the bed toward me, the shirt riding high on her thighs. “You’ve been using that thing like it’s armor. It’s not your knee that’s scared, Tate.”
She’s right in front of me now, eyes locked on mine. “It’s you. You’re scared about a future without a dream, but the thing is that you get to write and rewrite your dreams as many times as you want. One thing doesn’t define your entire existence.”
Fuck, she’s right. Not sure why I thought that if I stop being Jason Tate, hockey player, my life is over. Over. Her words are about to wreck me. I could kiss her for it or set the brace on fire. I could do both.
Her words hang between us like static, buzzing in my chest. It’s not your knee that’s scared, Tate. It’s you.
I’m about to respond—say something clever or deflect with a joke, anything to avoid the way she’s looking at me. But she moves before I can.
She leans in like she’s about to kiss me. I brace for it.
Instead, she slides off the bed.
Onto her knees.
Fuck.