Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
STELLAN
“What, you think I’m into that? It isn’t like that, and he knows it. He’s not stupid enough to fall for me.”
Matt’s words kept knocking around my head, staggering through the darkest corners of my mind. Because, fun fact: yeah, I was. I was stupid enough to fall for him.
Like a fool.
Outside Naomi’s windshield, Seattle mimicked my mood—dark streets, a thin sheet of mist hanging low enough to soften streetlights into smudges. No rain, for once. Just damp air and winter chill.
We’d done it. We’d passed the fire test. Several people had asked for follow-up conversations, one wanting more numbers by Monday, another asking whether we’d consider a pilot partnership with a youth employment nonprofit. The Cascades foundation director wanted to sit down with us next week.
Huge. Massive. I should have been vibrating out of my skin.
Instead, I felt… hollow. Stupid.
Naomi said something about the woman in diamonds—Jane? Josie? I took a second too long to answer, brain lagging three steps and one overheard conversation behind. “Yeah,” I said, “right,” because agreeing with Naomi typically worked for me.
This time, not so much. She glanced over, one hand steady on the wheel. “Okay, babe. You were set to eleven for most of the night, and suddenly you’re at three. What’s wrong?”
Passing headlights slid over us, caught the line of her cheekbone and the slight crease between her brows. No little grin, no tease. Just Naomi, softened by concern.
I exhaled through my nose. “I’m an idiot, apparently.”
She went quiet for half a second. “Matt,” she said then.
“Yeah.” I stared straight ahead, my lungs squeezing tight. “I knew what this was, okay? I knew. And I still—”
Threw myself face-first down a cliff.
I caught the words before they could trip off my tongue, finished with a shrug and a shake of my head. “Just, you know. I…”
“That doesn’t make you an idiot.” Naomi’s voice had gone slightly sharper, as if to defend me from myself. “Human, maybe. Yeah. But not an idiot.”
“Maybe.” I watched the city slide by. “But I don’t…” Fuck. “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
She took a moment to change lanes, the heater humming warm around us. “Hide from the world?” she asked then.
“It’s not about the world.” My laugh veered thin and ugly. “I know what his life is. I get it. I’m not asking for a grand gesture or whatever.” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “But even his parents don’t know he’s gay.”
I could still hear it—Matt’s easy tone just hours ago, when we’d finished getting dressed in his bedroom. “I just haven’t told them,” he’d said, like it barely mattered, like he was so used to sorting his life into neat little drawers he no longer noticed the cost.
And then tonight, walking straight into something I hadn’t been meant to hear but maybe needed to. The way he’d gone cold and flat in denial. “We’re not friends or anything.”
Hardly a shock. Just confirmation that Matt was ready to protect his closet, that he’d lie if someone pressed him on it.
So, no. The words hadn’t changed anything. They’d just peeled back the cover on how easy it would be to become a footnote in his life. Someone who belonged in his bed, sure, but nowhere else.
“What are you going to do?” Naomi asked, voice quiet and eyes on the road.
I counted breaths—two, three, four. They rattled around the empty space in my chest where joy should be, triumph at how we’d held our own tonight, how this could turn a small, stubborn idea I’d had two years ago into something bigger.
I felt tired instead. Like I’d been wrung out and left hanging, mourning something I had yet to even lose.
“Break it off,” I said. The words scraped on the way out. “Before I fall any deeper.”
It hurt, even just the thought of walking away from this. From Matt. But staying would be worse. I hadn’t spent half a childhood learning how to disappear in other people’s houses just to settle for half a life.
Naomi didn’t reply. Just kept driving, one hand reaching across the console to take mine. I blinked back tears and told myself tomorrow would feel different, that this was just another bump in the road.
It didn’t feel that way.
He kissed me before I even got my coat off.
No hello, just one hand on the back of my neck and his mouth on mine. Like he’d been waiting all day, maybe since yesterday, since the moment we’d stepped out into the public. My coat slipped off one shoulder, and he dragged it down the rest of the way, let it drop to the tiles.
“Hi,” I managed, and I—I had come to end it. I had.
“You”—his voice dipped low, a little rough—“were fucking incredible last night.”
God.
I can’t keep doing this. I’d rehearsed it in my head the whole way here. I can’t. I’m sorry.
My body didn’t care.
Matt kissed me again, mouth warm, hands big and sure. I can’t. Didn’t matter. I let him back me down the hallway before I really knew I was moving. Work shirt tugged free of my waistband, buttons undone, his breath unsteady as he bracketed my hips.
“Couldn’t stop watching you,” he muttered. His mouth dragged along my jaw, and I hitched in a breath, thought, I can’t, and didn’t say a fucking word. Kissed him instead.
Bedroom, somehow. Lights still off. My shoes gone, his T-shirt on the floor. Me on my back for a second, then he dragged me half up the bed with him looming over me as the city glowed through the windows and on his naked shoulders.
No grace to it. Just a straight fall into bodies and skin and the one thing that still felt easy.
He kissed me like he meant it—mouth open on my throat, my stomach. Hands skimming my sides, and a low, breathless sound when he pushed into me. Familiar by now, and my ribcage ached with it because, fuck, I didn’t want to know him this way. Didn’t want to love how this felt. Didn’t want to—
No.
He fucked me like the world outside had dropped away and it was only this—this room, his body and mine.
Us. One hand braced by my head, the other on my shoulder, fingers digging in as if he meant to leave a mark.
A memory. My name kept catching in his throat, and I came with my face turned into his pillow and his mouth open against the curve of my jaw.
He followed seconds after, hot breath and heat and hands clutching at me like we were real.
For a while, pulse settling and breath slowing, we stayed tangled. His arm was heavy over my waist, and this… This was the problem. Because for a few stupid, wonderful minutes, things felt simple. We fit. He held me like I belonged—in his arms, his bed, his life.
If only.
He pressed a lazy kiss under my ear. “Shower?”
Half-asleep around the edges, barely even a question. Routine. Because that’s what I did, wasn’t it? I stayed. Brushed my teeth in his bathroom and borrowed a T-shirt and woke up in his bed.
I stared at the wall he’d yet to paint over, all colors gone gray in the dark. My lungs couldn’t seem to fit enough air in. “Matt.”
He made a small, content noise, like he hadn’t yet caught my tone. I shifted away, enough to put some space between us.
Necessary. Still brutal.
It got his attention. “What?” he asked, abruptly more awake.
Fuck.
I sat up, reached for the sheet because the room felt a little too cold now that my blood ran slow and sad. Matt pushed himself up on one elbow, hair a mess, lips parted around a half-expressed thought. Gorgeous. Not mine, though. He’d never been.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said quietly.
Silence sliced through the room. He blinked, confusion soft on his face. Then it seemed to land, and everything about him tightened. “You… what?”
He didn’t sound angry, didn’t sound like anything, really. Just thrown.
I dragged in a breath and looked away. Easier, just a little. “I can’t keep doing this.”
“Stellan.” He sat up fully now, angled himself toward me. “Because of what I said last night? I handled that badly, okay? Cole just—he came out with it, and I…”
“Panicked,” I finished, low. “Yeah. I gathered.”
“That’s not—fuck.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “No, yeah, that’s what happened. I panicked. But I didn’t mean it like that.”
“We’re not friends. It’s not like that. He’d be stupid to fall for me.”
I swallowed, throat burning. “Okay. Then how did you mean it?”
He looked at me with eyes gone dark and liquid, like there was a version of this where he just needed to reach for the right words and we’d be fine.
“I meant…” He exhaled, chin tipping down. “I meant you’re you. You’re…” A moment twisted in the silence. “Why would you settle for what I can actually give you right now?”
It hurt because it cut exactly right.
I gave a tiny nod, everything else about me draped in lead. “Yeah.”
His eyebrows pinched. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, Matt.” I reached for air and found just enough to keep my chest from caving in. “You’re right. That’s exactly it.”
He stared at me, shadowed and silent, beautiful.
I forced my gaze away. Swung my legs over the side of the bed and grabbed my boxer briefs off the floor because if I didn’t, if I let myself look at him for any longer, I might stay.
“Stellan.” The mattress shifted behind me. “That’s not what I—”
“I know,” I cut in, shoving one foot through, then the other, fingers shaking. “I know you’re not trying to be cruel. That’s not the issue.”
“Then what is?”
I found my shirt in the dark more by instinct than sight. “The issue,” I said, “is that I overheard enough to remind me what’s real.”
He got out of bed then, too. Naked and serious, shadows dripping down a body I could have recognized by touch alone. “You overheard part of a conversation,” he said. “The worst possible part of it.”
“Yeah.” I found my pants. “But maybe that’s—you know. Maybe that’s not actually the issue either.”
Because last night hadn’t invented the problem. It had only made it impossible to keep pretending I could live inside it.
He went quiet.