Chapter 12
Sundays
Jax declared the following Friday a mandatory group outing, on the grounds that "everyone in this friend group has been through something heavy this week and we're going to dance about it instead of talking about it," and nobody had the energy to argue with the logic.
The whole group packed into the same downtown club from Beck's birthday, and within twenty minutes Nina had abandoned all pretense of standing near the bar, pulling Jax onto the dance floor by both hands, the two of them moving together with an easy, unselfconscious rhythm that made it obvious, watching them, that whatever was happening between those two had stopped being a slow burn and started being something neither of them was bothering to hide anymore.
Beck found Tessa near the speakers, pulling her close without asking, one hand settling low on her hip, and when the song shifted — something with a slow, heavy bassline, Rihanna's voice sliding low and unhurried over the beat — his whole body seemed to change with it, moving against her with an intent that had nothing careful left in it at all.
"You good?" he murmured against her ear, checking in the way he always did, even now.
"So good," she said, and meant it completely, letting herself sink back into him, hips moving in time with his, the old careful part of her almost entirely quiet for once.
"I need to tell you something," he said, close to her ear, his voice rough enough that she felt it more than heard it over the music. "I've been trying to figure out how to say it for weeks. I don't think I'm going to find a better moment than this one."
"Say it."
"I think I'm falling in love with you." His hands tightened at her hips, pulling her back flush against him.
"I've never said that to anyone before. I don't know how you're supposed to say it right, so I'm just saying it exactly like this, in the middle of a crowded bar, because I couldn't wait for a better moment to make it feel more official. "
She turned in his arms to face him, breathless, the music and the crowd and everything else falling away for one suspended second.
"I think I'm falling in love with you too.
I've been trying to figure out how to say it for just as long.
" He kissed her then, slow and certain despite the noise around them, and when he finally pulled back, forehead against hers, his voice had dropped even lower, rough with something barely restrained.
"If I don't get you home right now," he said, "this whole bar is going to have to watch me take you on a table right there, and I don't think either of us wants to explain that to Jax tomorrow."
She laughed, breathless, heat flooding through her at the raw want in his voice, and pressed herself back against him deliberately, testing exactly how much restraint he had left. "Is that a promise or a threat."
"Both. Entirely both." His grip tightened at her hips, unmistakable. "Say the word and I'm getting us a cab in the next ninety seconds."
"Take me home, Beck."
He didn't need to be told twice. They said quick, half-shouted goodbyes to a delighted, catcalling Jax and a laughing Nina, and the cab ride back to his apartment passed in a blur of heated glances and hands that couldn't quite stay still, both of them barely making it through the door before he had her pinned against it, every bit of the restraint from the dance floor finally, completely gone.
? ? ?
By December, Tessa had a Sunday routine again for the first time in nearly a year, and it looked nothing like the one she'd grown up with, and also, somehow, exactly like it, in the ways that actually mattered.
Beck's teammates had, without much fanfare, without any formal announcement, simply absorbed her into their orbit the way a gravitational field absorbs anything that gets close enough.
Jax made her a plate every Sunday when the guys cooked their ritual pregame pasta — too much garlic, sauce from a jar that would have made Poppi weep openly, but eaten around a crowded table with people talking over each other and stealing food off each other's plates without asking, six or seven different conversations happening simultaneously and somehow everyone still following all of them.
Something about the noise of it, the specific, particular chaos of too many people who loved each other crammed into too small a kitchen, made her chest ache in a way that was half grief and half something like coming home, the two feelings so tangled together by now she'd stopped trying to separate them.
"You're quiet," Beck said one Sunday, catching her staring at the table instead of eating, fork paused halfway to her mouth.
"It just reminds me of my family," she admitted, quiet enough that only he could hear it over Jax's ongoing argument with the team's captain about the correct amount of red pepper flakes. "In a good way. Mostly. Some days it's mostly good."
He reached over, under the table, and laced his fingers through hers, not making a thing of it in front of everyone, not turning it into a moment that required acknowledgment, just letting it be a small, steady fact between them while the noise continued around them uninterrupted.
Toni and Nina became regular fixtures at those Sunday dinners too, folded seamlessly into the noise within a few weeks, Nina getting into a running argument with Jax about the correct pasta shape for a given sauce that lasted, at this point, three straight weeks and showed no signs of resolution, Toni trading hockey trivia with the team's captain like she'd been part of the group for years instead of months, occasionally winning bets that resulted in someone owing someone else a milkshake.
"I like this," Toni told Tessa quietly one Sunday, watching the chaos from the doorway of Beck's kitchen while they waited for the garlic bread to finish.
"I like watching you build something instead of just surviving something, which is mostly what I watched you do all last spring. It's different. Good different."
"It doesn't fix the other thing," Tessa said, the honesty coming easier now than it used to. "The aunts. The cousins. None of that's better, none of it's even close to better."
"I know." Toni squeezed her hand. "It doesn't have to be, for this to still count as good, real, worth having.
You're allowed to build a whole life even with a wound that never fully closes, Tessa.
That's not betrayal to the family you lost. That's just what surviving actually looks like, most of the time, for most people.
Nobody gets the clean version where everything heals on schedule. "
Tessa thought about that a lot, in the weeks that followed, turning it over during long walks to class, during quiet moments before falling asleep.
She still hadn't heard from her cousin Mia beyond that single apology text back in March, months and months of silence since.
Her mother and aunts were, as far as she knew, no closer to speaking than they'd been the week of the funeral, maybe further apart if anything, entrenched now in positions that had calcified with time.
Some wounds, it turned out, simply didn't heal on any timeline you could plan around or wait out patiently, no matter how much time passed.
But sitting at a too-crowded table with too much garlic and a boy's hand laced through hers, surrounded by a sister who'd never once wavered and a best friend who'd crossed states to keep a promise, Tessa understood, slowly, gradually, the way you understand something true only after living inside it long enough, that she didn't need the old house rebuilt in order to have a home.
She was building a new one. Room by room, dinner by dinner, patient conversation by patient conversation.
And this one, unlike the old one, she got to choose exactly who lived in it.
She was about to find out just how much that choosing would cost her.
? ? ?
It was Beck's phone that buzzed first, that same December, a number he didn't recognize, and he almost let it go to voicemail before something made him pick up out of idle curiosity.
"Beckett? Sal Moretti. I'm Connie's husband — Tessa's uncle, technically, by marriage anyway. I got your number off a mutual friend, hope that's not too strange."
Beck sat up straighter on his bed, instantly wary in a way he couldn't have explained if asked. "Uh. Hey. What's this about?"
"I do marketing, mostly regional stuff, and I saw some tagged photos of you online. Good following for a college athlete. I've got a client who might be interested in a campus ambassador situation, if you're ever open to that kind of thing."
"I appreciate it, but I'm not really looking for anything like that right now."
"No pressure at all. Just wanted to put it on your radar. Family's family, right? Even the complicated kind." Sal's voice had an easy, practiced charm to it, the kind Beck recognized uncomfortably well from his own old playbook. "Take my number down. No rush."