Chapter 15
Every Part
The Kingston Hockey Winter Formal fell on the first Saturday of February, and Nina treated the shopping trip for it like a full military operation, dragging Tessa and Toni through three different malls over two weekends until she found, in her own words, delivered with total seriousness, "the dress that ends this conversation permanently, no further debate necessary.
" It was deep red, fitted through the waist, the kind of dress Tessa would never have picked for herself a year ago, back when she was still dressing to disappear rather than to be seen, back when every mirror felt like an interrogation she was destined to fail.
"You look unbelievable," Toni said, adjusting the strap, stepping back to admire the full effect in the dressing room mirror. "Beck is going to walk into a wall. I mean that as a literal prediction."
He very nearly did. He showed up to pick her up in a suit that fit him a little too well, dark grey with a tie Tessa would later learn Jax had helped him pick out after four separate rejected options, took one look at her standing in the doorway of her dorm, and just stopped talking mid-sentence for a solid five seconds, something visibly short-circuiting behind his eyes.
"I had a whole thing prepared," he finally said, recovering. "A whole compliment, rehearsed and everything. It's gone. Completely gone. You erased it from my brain on contact."
"That might be the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me, and you didn't even finish the sentence."
The formal itself was loud and glittering and packed with the entire athletic department in various states of formalwear, Jax in a bowtie that was somehow crooked within the first ten minutes despite three separate attempts by different people to fix it, Nina holding court on the dance floor with three of Beck's teammates simultaneously, teaching them a dance she'd apparently learned from a video that had gone viral the week before, Toni sneaking Tessa a single approved sip of champagne with a conspiratorial wink toward their table.
Beck barely let her leave his side all night, one hand at the small of her back nearly the entire evening, dancing with a kind of unhurried confidence that made her laugh every time he spun her, badly, on purpose, just to see her smile, entirely unconcerned with looking cool in front of his teammates.
Near midnight, during a slow song, he pulled her close and said, quiet, just for her, voice low under the music.
"I know we've only been doing this a few months.
But I want you to know something. I've been to three of these formals before this one.
This is the first one I've actually wanted to be at instead of just enduring for the sake of team bonding. "
"Smooth. Very smooth."
"I mean it though." He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, thumb lingering against her jaw for a moment. "You make ordinary things good, Tessa. That's not a small thing. That's actually the whole thing, if I'm being completely honest with you."
She rested her head against his chest and let herself be danced around a crowded gymnasium under cheap string lights someone had strung up that afternoon, thinking that somewhere along the way, without her fully noticing it happen, she had stopped bracing for the moment this would all fall apart, and started, instead, just living inside it, fully, without the constant background calculation of exit strategies.
She had no idea how soon that bracing instinct was about to be tested again, and how much harder it would be to quiet the second time.
? ? ?
It started as a stupid, offhand comment, the kind of thing Tessa said so automatically she barely noticed she was saying it.
They were tangled together on his bed on a lazy Sunday afternoon in mid-February, sunlight slanting through the blinds, Beck tracing his fingers along her arm, when she shifted self-consciously and said, "Ugh, don't, my arms are so flabby, I hate them," already reaching to pull the sheet higher. He went still.
"Say that again."
"What?"
"That thing you just said. About your arms." He propped himself up on one elbow, fully alert now.
"It's not a big deal, I just—"
"Say it again. I want to actually hear it properly."
"I said I hate my arms." She felt her face heat, pulling the sheet up further. "Everyone has stuff they don't love about their body, it's not a whole thing."
"Okay." He sat all the way up, decided. "What else."
"What do you mean, what else?"
"What else do you hate. Give me the whole list. I'm not letting this go."
"I'm not doing this."
"Tessa." His voice was gentle but immovable. "You've dropped little comments like that one for months now. I've let them go because I didn't want to embarrass you. But I'm done letting them go now that I've noticed the pattern. Give me the list. All of it."
"Fine," she said, quiet, the word costing her something.
"My arms. My legs. My thighs — they touch, they've always touched, since I was twelve, Tyler used to make this face whenever I wore shorts, never said anything, just this face—" She stopped herself, throat tight.
"My teeth, they're crooked, I never got braces because everything happened right when the family stuff with Poppi fell apart.
My chin. I don't even know what's specifically wrong with it, I've just hated it since I was thirteen. "
He didn't say anything right away. He just moved, slow and deliberate, until he was kneeling over her, sunlight striping across both of them, and took her left arm in both his hands, turning it gently, examining it like something worth studying, and pressed his mouth to the soft skin on the inside of her elbow.
"This arm," he said, low, lips moving against her skin, "held my hand across a rink two hours after I taught you to skate for the first time in your entire life, gripping so hard you left marks that lasted two days, and I have never in my life felt more trusted by anyone than I did in that moment.
" His mouth moved slowly up, along the inside of her forearm, to the crease of her elbow, to her shoulder.
"I don't hate this arm, Tessa. I think about this arm more than I probably should admit out loud, the way it feels wrapped around me at three in the morning when neither of us can sleep. "
"Beck—"
"I'm not done." He shifted, hands sliding down to her thigh, and she felt her breath catch as his mouth followed, slow and unhurried, pressing open kisses along skin she'd spent years covering up on instinct, skin that had never once been touched with this kind of deliberate, unhurried attention.
"These thighs," he murmured against her skin, working his way lower with each word, "are my actual favorite place in the entire world to be.
I could tell you that in a hundred different ways, list reasons, make a whole speech about it, but I think you'd believe it faster if I just showed you instead, properly, without rushing. "
She gasped, back arching slightly off the mattress, one hand coming down to tangle in his hair, every old, tired voice in her head going quiet under the sheer weight of his attention, unable to compete with the physical evidence of how much he clearly meant every word.
He kissed his way down her legs next, unhurried, deliberate, murmuring against the inside of her calf, "and these legs walked away from a party twice, scared out of your mind for reasons I understand a lot better now, and I chased both times, and I would chase a hundred more times if that's what it took, because I was never once going anywhere, not really, even when you couldn't believe that yet," and by the time he made his way back up her body, she was trembling, not from cold, every nerve ending awake and singing.
He kissed her mouth last, slow and thorough, framing her face in both hands the way he always did, thumbs finding her jaw.
"These teeth," he said against her lips, smiling now, "are crooked and I love them exactly the way they are, because when you laugh — really laugh, the ugly, snorting kind you try to cover with your hand, not the polite, careful kind you use around strangers — I get to see all of them, every single one, and it's my favorite sound in the entire world, better than any goal horn I've ever heard.
" His thumb traced her jaw, slow and reverent.
"And this chin — I have no idea what you or some cruel twelve-year-old thinks is wrong with it, but it's the exact thing I look at every single time I'm trying to work up the nerve to kiss you, the thing my eyes go to first, so as far as I'm concerned, it's doing its job perfectly, better than perfectly. "
"You're going to make me cry."
"Good," he said, low, pulling her fully against him, skin against skin, every place he'd just spoken to now pressed against every place he wanted, deliberate and unhurried in the way he approached everything that mattered to him. "Cry if you need to. I'll still be here after, same as I was before."
What followed was slower than anything they'd done before, his attention returning again and again to every place she'd just confessed to hating, until each one had been rewritten, kiss by kiss, into something she couldn't quite remember hating at all.
Afterward, wrapped in his arms, she pressed her face into his chest and let herself, finally, completely, believe him.
"I've never done that before," she admitted, voice muffled against his skin. "Let someone actually look. All the way."
"I know." He kissed the top of her head. "Thank you for letting me be the first."
She fell asleep like that, tangled in him, every hated part of herself held instead like something worth keeping.
This was the real thing. She was sure of it now, for the first time in her entire life.
She had no idea a football player at a dining hall table was about to test exactly how far that certainty went.