Chapter 19 Fish
FISH
My phone buzzes early in the morning. I’m still in bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying the kiss for the hundredth time since it happened.
Her back against the wall. My hand on her throat.
The sound she made when my mouth hit hers.
The way she grabbed my shirt like she needed me to stay upright.
“This is what I have wanted to do to you since.”
When I look down at my phone, I see a text.
Collette: We need to talk. Urgently.
My stomach drops. Urgently. That word doesn’t come with good news. She’s going to tell me I crossed a line. She’s going to say we can’t be friends anymore. She’s going to say the kiss was a mistake, and we need to pretend it didn’t happen and keep our distance and …
Fish: Okay. When?
Collette: Now. Where are you?
Fish: Home.
Collette: Are you alone?
Does she think I picked up someone in between her place and mine?
Fish: Of course.
Collette: Just wanted to check. Can I come over?
She’s never been to my place. Not once. The fact that she’s asking tells me this is serious.
Fish: Yeah. I’ll send you the address.
I launch out of bed and look around my apartment.
It’s not terrible, but it’s not guest-ready either.
There’s a hoodie on the floor, two empty water bottles on the coffee table, and my PlayStation controller is sitting on the kitchen counter for reasons I can’t explain.
I do a speed clean that would make my mother proud and put on a shirt that isn’t the one I slept in.
I brush my teeth twice because I’m paranoid.
I make coffee because I don’t know what else to do with my hands.
The buzzer goes, and I let her up. When I open the door, she’s standing there in sweats, hair in a messy bun, no makeup, looking like she rolled out of bed and came straight here. She also looks nervous, which makes two of us.
“Hey,” I say, feeling rather awkward.
“Hey,” she says as she walks past me into the apartment and stops in the middle of the living room, looking around. “This is your place?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s cleaner than I expected.”
“I cleaned it five minutes ago,” I confess.
“That tracks.” She almost smiles but catches it. She turns and faces me, and I can see it, the seriousness sitting behind her eyes. Whatever she came here to say, she’s been rehearsing it.
“Sit down,” I tell her, gesturing at the sofa.
“I’ll stand.”
“Okay.” I lean against the kitchen counter and give her space.
She takes a breath. “Last night.”
“Last night,” I repeat.
“The kiss.”
“Yes.”
“We can’t do that again.” She says it firmly, but her voice cracks on the last word, and that crack tells me everything. She doesn’t want to say this. She has to say this.
“We established that last night,” I tell her.
“I know.” She looks flustered. “I just wanted to make sure.”
I raise a brow at her. “That’s why you are at my apartment at ass crack o’clock on a Sunday.”
“Yes.” She shrugs.
“Do you want a coffee?” I ask her.
“Yes, of course,” she answers.
I make my way into the kitchen and start making us coffee. She takes a seat at the counter and watches.
“I like you, Fish.” The words land in my chest like a puck to the ribs.
“I like you more than I should, and more than is smart, and definitely more than is professional. But I can’t .
..” She drags her hand down her face. “My job. Your job. My brothers. The team. The internet already thinks we’re together.
If we actually got together and it went wrong, everything would fall apart.
My career, your friendship with Pierre and Felix, the locker room, all of it. ”
I busy myself with the coffee making so she doesn’t see how much her protests hurt me. I want to argue. I want to tell her I don’t care about any of it. But she’s right. She’s right about every single thing, and I hate it.
“And I need you to know there’s nothing wrong with you.” Thanks, I think. She stops and looks at the ceiling, like the right words are up there. “You’re one of my favorite people in this city, and I’m not willing to risk that.” Well damn, she got me in the heart with that confession.
I turn and slide the cup of coffee over to her. “I feel the same way,” I tell her, and I mean all of it. “You’re the first person I want to talk to when something good happens or when something shit happens. I don’t want to lose that.”
She gives me a small smile as she takes a sip of her coffee. “I don’t want to lose that either.”
“I like you, Collette,” I confess to her, which makes her stop. “Like, really like you.”
“Fish.”
I shake my head. “I know. It sucks. But you’re the first girl in a long time that I’ve liked. That … um …” I’m being vulnerable right now. “That I would have liked to date and bring home to my mom.” Tears well in her eyes. I walk around the counter. “Hey, why are you crying?”
Her lip wobbles. “Because you’re so fricken sweet when you’re not being playboy Fish. And it’s going to suck when you meet someone who makes you feel the way I do, but they can have you.”
I reach out and brush the tears from her eyes, but they keep coming, so instead, I cup her face and kiss her tears away from each cheek.
“The feeling is mutual. It’s going to suck when you meet someone that your brothers are going to be happy with.
” Those hazel eyes are my undoing, and I can’t help myself as I lean forward and kiss her.
Not like last night, last night was heat and hunger and wanting.
This is something else, it’s slow and gentle.
My lips barely brush hers, and she inhales sharply like I’ve stolen the air from her lungs.
My hand is still cupping her face, my thumb still wet from her tears, and I kiss her like I’m memorizing her.
The softness of her mouth. The way her breath shakes against mine.
The way her hand comes up and rests on my chest, not pushing me away, just holding on.
She kisses me back, and it’s the saddest kiss I’ve ever had.
Because we both know what it is. It’s not the beginning.
It’s not a promise. It’s a goodbye to something that never got the chance to start.
Every reason we can’t be together sits heavily between us, while our mouths say what neither of us is brave enough to say out loud.
Her fingers curl into the fabric of my shirt, and a tear slides down her cheek and onto my thumb, and I feel it like a burn.
I pull back just enough to press my forehead against hers.
Our eyes are closed, our breathing is uneven, and she’s still holding onto my shirt.
“That’s the last one,” she whispers.
“I know.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
Collette lets go of my shirt, smooths the fabric where she crumpled it, and pulls back. She wipes her face with the back of her hand and lets out a shaky laugh that breaks my heart because she’s trying to put herself back together in front of me.
“Okay,” she says. “Friends.”
“Friends,” I agree. And the word has never tasted so wrong in my mouth.
“I’ve got to go as I have brunch with the girls, and I need to head home and get ready,” she says, getting up out of the chair. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Anytime.”
“We’re going to be okay, aren’t we?” she asks, and I can hear the concern in her voice.
“Yeah. We’re good. I can handle having a new bestie,” I tease.
“Is Evan going to be okay with that?”
“There’s enough Big Fish to go around,” I joke.
This has her laughing, breaking the tension around her visit. I close the door and lean against it.
This fucking sucks. Right person, wrong time.
There’s a knock at my door. I forgot Evan was coming over to play video games, a normal Sunday activity if we aren’t playing. He’s brought a bag of bagels.
“Hey.” He nods as he enters my apartment. He goes straight to the kitchen and starts plating our food, then stills. “Did you have someone over this morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Is she still here?” he asks.
“No, but I need to talk to you about it.” My response earns me a brow raise, he’s intrigued.
He continues to plate our bagels, and then we head to the living room where the console is set up.
We settle on the sofa, and I take a huge bite of my salmon and cream cheese bagel.
Evan does the same, and we eat in relative silence for a couple of bites until it gets too much for Evan.
“Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?” That Russian accent is menacing.
“Something happened,” I tell him.
“No shit, you’re acting weird.” I glare at him. “Weirder than normal.”
“It was Collette who was here this morning.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head as if he doesn’t believe me or that he doesn’t want any part of knowing.
“It’s not that bad,” I tell him.
“Yes, it is. You do not sleep with a teammate’s sister. You know the rules,” he yells at me.
“I didn’t sleep with her,” I argue, defending myself.
“Huh.” His eyes narrow on. “You didn’t sleep with her?”
“I did kiss her a couple of times, and I may have slept over in her bed, so technically, I guess I did sleep with her.”
He sticks his fingers in his ears. “La la la la.”
“Fuck you. Come on, I need to talk to someone.”
He lets his hands fall. “I knew this would happen.”
“I like her,” I confess, he doesn’t look convinced. “No, Artem, I really like her.”
“Fuck.” He whistles.
“Yeah. Fuck.”
“Tell me,” he says, those dark eyes locked on me.
“It’s a long story.” Now I’m not so sure I want to share it with him.
“I have nowhere to be.”
“You might want to finish your bagel first,” I say, trying to buy me some time.
“Why?”
“Because you’re going to choke.”
He takes a pointed bite and chews slowly, waiting. The bastard knows how to weaponize silence.
“Okay, so you know how Fishlette was trending, and she asked me to dial it back, and we didn’t speak for weeks?”
“Yes.”
“And then the menswear campaign party happened, and we were fine again.” He nods. “Then Big Fish happened.”
“That was wild.”
“Tell me about it. I got to the arena and had no idea, so Collette pulled me aside and told me what had happened, so I didn’t find out in front of everyone.”
“That was nice of her.”
“Yeah. And then I touched her face.”
Evan stops chewing. “You touched her face.”
“Her lips specifically, with my thumb.”
His brows pull together. Yes, I know it sounds weird when I say it out loud like that. “Her lips.”
“It was a moment, you had to be there.”
“Glad I was not there,” he adds.
“I played like shit that night. Remember how I got hit from behind. She left the arena before the game ended because she was upset that I got hurt, and it reminded her of what happened to Felix.”
“She was worried.”
I nod. “Yeah. I called her after the game because she is usually there at the end chatting to us with her mic, and I was worried. She was upset on the phone and hung up on me, so I went to her apartment.”
“She lives on the same floor as Cap. Are you fucking mad?”
“I wasn’t thinking in that moment,” I explain.
“No shit.”
“We then talked, and things got flirty, and we were about to have a moment, but she stopped it. Said we’d ruin things. I tried to leave. She grabbed my hand and told me to stay.” I’m talking faster now. “She got tequila. We got drunk. Danced in her living room.”
A brow raises. “Twinkle toes.” He smirks.
“You’re just jealous of my moves.”
“I am not,” he answers bluntly. “And then?”
“We passed out, and I woke up in her bed.”
He swears in Russian.
“Nothing happened.”
“Bullshit,” he says.
“Honest.” He doesn’t quite believe me. “It gets worse.”
“How can it get worse?”
“Remember the away trip when we had our four-game winning streak, and Felix asked me to walk her home?”
“No.”
“Yeah, but it’s not entirely my fault. “In the elevator, she confessed she had a sex dream about me.” Evan doesn’t respond. “She then tells me in excruciating detail what happened. I was hanging on by a thread.”
“I can imagine.”
“Then she touched my face and told me I have beautiful eyes, then grabbed my shirt and kissed me.”
“Fuck.”
“And I kissed her back.”
“Of course you did.”
“She asked me to come inside. I said no.”
He stares at me for a long moment. “Good. You did the right thing.”
“She doesn’t remember any of it. I brought her coffee the next day to her room as we needed to talk about what had happened, and nothing, she didn’t remember anything.”
“Bet that sucked.”
“It did, but I didn’t want to mess things up by telling her.” Evan nods. “Then last night happened.” Evan waits me out. “She called me out on putting on my mask to her and dragged me to her room.”
“In the middle of the party?” I nod. “Her brothers were there.”
“I know.”
“You’re crazy.”
“About her, yeah,” I tell him. Evan shakes his head. “She must have had flashbacks about her drunk night because she asked me if she had done something embarrassing, and I couldn’t hold it in anymore, so I told her.”
“How did she take it?” he asks.
“She asked me to kiss her again.”
“Fuck,” he curses, running his hand over his shaved head.
“Yeah. Things got a little crazy. But it was one of the best kisses of my life.”
Evan whistles. “That good, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re so fucked.”
“I know,” I say, hanging my head in shame. “I like her. Like, really like her.” Evan just keeps shaking his head as if he can’t believe what he is hearing. “That’s why she came over this morning, to tell me she likes me too.”
“She did?” he asks, sounding surprised.
I nod. “But to also say it can’t go any further and that we shouldn’t kiss again.”
Evan stares at me. “That is a good idea. Too many complications with her.”
“I know, but …”
“It won’t work, her brothers will kill you, as will Emmett.” He’s right. It sucks, but is the same thoughts are going through my mind. “I’m sorry you like her.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve liked someone.”
He nods. “But she can only be a friend.”
“I know.”
“Good, now let me beat your ass.” He grins as he picks up the controllers.