CHAPTER 9 — NO PRETENDING
POV: Damon Blackwood
The darkness of the hotel room didn't erase Noah Bennett; it just cleared away the rest of the world, leaving his breathing on the other side of the nightstand as the only thing my body seemed interested in tracking.
I lay on my back, shoulder pinned by the wrap he'd reapplied with hands that were too careful, my skin still carrying the heat of his mouth and the frustration of stopping when stopping had been the right call.
The problem was that the right call rarely offered rest, and in those early morning hours it took the shape of two beds separated by less than three feet and four years of a war neither of us had won.
The entire hotel seemed to be sleeping, but the room stayed awake.
The air conditioning hummed low, the wet parking lot gleamed through the gap in the curtain, and Noah shifted now and then in the other bed, trying to find a position that wouldn't give away that he was awake too.
I knew that kind of silence. It wasn't restless sleep.
It was restraint. It was a man lying too close to something he wanted and too far from any honest excuse to touch it.
I should've felt satisfaction at that, maybe even victory, but what I felt was a deep, almost painful impatience, because every minute in that bed seemed to stretch out an interrupted kiss.
My shoulder bothered me, yes. The pain was there, aggravated by the game, by last week's fall, by my stubbornness, and maybe by the way I'd almost pulled Noah on top of me after the shower.
But the pain wasn't what kept me awake. What kept me awake was the sound Noah had made against my mouth, low and wrenched out of him, as if his body had betrayed a part of the story he still refused to tell.
It was the memory of his hand fisted in my shirt in the restricted hallway, of his knee sinking into the bed before he pulled back, of his voice saying he needed control for both of us.
The phrase irritated me because it was right.
It irritated me even more because it hadn't been enough to make me want less.
“You're awake,” I said into the dark, without turning to look, because looking at him might turn the observation into an invitation before I was ready.
On the other side, Noah stayed quiet for a few seconds, as if considering whether to pretend.
I could almost picture his expression—eyes open toward the ceiling, mouth tight, some ironic response being selected just to fill the space between us with something less dangerous than truth.
The mattress creaked when he turned his face toward me, and the sound crossed the room with indecent intimacy.
“You too,” he replied, his voice low and hoarse, the sound of someone who'd given up on sleep long enough ago that he couldn't fake it anymore.
“My shoulder hurts.”
“Partial lie.”
The response came too fast, too familiar, and in the darkness I found an almost-smile forming that I didn't let fully land.
Noah always had that irritating talent for hearing what I didn't say.
Before, it had felt like complicity. Now, it felt like invasion.
Maybe the difference lay only in what I needed to pretend in order to keep breathing without admitting that the entire room had become a question.
“You're assessing my pain in the dark now?” I asked, turning toward his shadow.
“I'm assessing your very limited ability to use pain as an excuse for anything you don't want to name,” Noah said, his voice carrying less irony than the words. “Your shoulder's probably at a five, maybe six if you moved around too much. The rest isn't injury.”
“And what is it?”
The question hung in the room like someone had opened a window in winter.
Noah didn't respond right away, and that delay told me more than any rehearsed answer would have.
I heard the sheet rustle as he dragged a hand over his face, then a contained sigh, heavy, tired.
The Noah from the arena would have cracked a joke.
The one from the hallway would have provoked me back.
The Noah in the dark seemed dangerously close to honesty, and that made me feel less victorious than exposed.
“It's what happened in the hallway,” he said finally. “It's what almost happened here. It's you pretending that asking if I'm awake has anything to do with your shoulder.”
Heat rose through my chest with a slow, heavy force.
I could deny it. I had enough practice to deny anything, even when my body was saying otherwise.
But the night had worn down the most useful part of my cruelty, and there was something about the dark that made lies feel more ridiculous.
Maybe because Noah wasn't looking at me.
Maybe because I didn't need to hold the right expression.
“I thought about the kiss the whole game,” I said, and the confession came out quieter than I wanted, but complete. “Before it too. After, on the bus. In the lobby. While you pretended the medical bag was the most interesting thing in your life.”
Noah exhaled slowly. His bed creaked when he sat up, and the silhouette of his body appeared against the faint light from the window.
He was wearing the white t-shirt he'd tried to sleep in, hair messy, shoulders tense.
My body reacted to seeing him like that with irritating precision: dry throat, breathing slowed, stomach tight under the sheet.
Noah sat on the edge of his own bed for a few seconds before speaking, and that small delay felt like a decision being assembled piece by piece.
“I shouldn't have kissed back,” he said, looking at the space between the beds, not at me. “In the hallway, here, at any point. I know exactly how many reasons there are for this to go wrong.”
“But you did.”
“I wanted to.”
His honesty hit me harder than any provocation.
I sat up slowly, careful with my shoulder, and faced him.
The distance between the beds seemed smaller now, ridiculous, a symbolic line that no adult with any sense should cross and neither of us could stop measuring.
Noah looked at me then, and the shadow didn't hide enough.
I saw desire there, yes, but also fear, anger, exhaustion, guilt.
Everything mixed together in a face I'd already hated in thought so many times that seeing it vulnerable almost felt like a trap.
“You're waiting for me to say it was a mistake,” I said.
“I'm waiting for you to turn this into a weapon before I even get a chance to process it.”
“Maybe I'm tired of weapons.”
Noah laughed without humor, but the sound died fast. He rested his elbows on his knees and ran his fingers through his hair, messing it up even more.
My gaze followed the movement against my will.
There was something indecent about how at ease he looked in that room, sitting there in a t-shirt and sleep pants, without the department jacket, without the clipboard, without any of the professional armor.
He looked younger and more dangerous at the same time.
He looked like the man I wanted and the boy who'd left me, and I didn't know which version did more damage.
“Don't say that if you're just going to pull me close and then call me a traitor when it's over,” he said, lifting his head. “I can handle your anger, Damon. That doesn't mean I'm going to let you use my body to dump four years of resentment.”
The words should have offended me. Part of me tried to ignite with them.
But there was an uncomfortable justice there, a line I might have already tried to cross without realizing it.
The kiss in the hallway had been born from jealousy, from provocation, from Ward putting his invisible hand where he had no right.
The almost in the bed had been born from desire, but also from frustration.
Noah was telling me he wouldn't be punishment or prize.
That if I came close, I'd have to be present enough to own what I was doing.
“Then set the rules,” I said, rising slowly.
Noah tracked my movement with his eyes. The light from the window caught his face as he straightened, and I saw his breathing change before his mouth opened.
He didn't pull back, but his body went alert, as if every muscle understood the conversation had left theory and entered the actual space between us.
I stopped in the narrow gap between the beds, close enough to touch if I reached out, far enough that the choice was still his too.
“No punishment,” he said, his voice firmer. “No using this against me tomorrow. No pretending I forced you to want this. No touching me to prove a point to Elias, to Julian, to yourself, or to whatever ghost is inside your head.”
“Noah.”
“And if your shoulder hurts, you tell me. Don't push through it, don't hide it, don't turn pain into pride just because you think stopping would mean losing.”
I wanted to kiss him in the middle of the list. I wanted to grab the back of his neck, silence that smart mouth, and prove that some rules could be obeyed with tongue, hands, my whole body.
But the part of me that had been learning, against my own will, the cost of not listening to Noah stayed still.
I waited until he finished, until his breathing betrayed that speaking had also been a way of holding himself together.
“My rule,” I said, low, “is that you stop hiding behind your job when you want something. If you want me to stop, I stop. If you want to keep going, say it like a man, not like a physical therapist.”
His eyes darkened. The provocation landed, but not because it diminished Noah.
Because it demanded the same honesty from him that he demanded from me.
He stood slowly, getting close enough that his t-shirt almost brushed my chest. The height difference made me tilt my head down; the history between us made me do it slowly.