Page 25 of Break Away
Easton stood near the bar with his water untouched in front of him and his face carved into something colder than anger. “You move on fast.”
The baskets burned against my palms, but I didn’t set them down. “You spent seven months acting like I’m beneatha conversation as you fucked your way through KFU’s endless supply of puck bunnies, and now you have thoughts on my timeline?”
His eyes flashed. “I have thoughts on your pattern.”
“My pattern?”
“You like men who follow your rules even when you’re the one breaking them.”
The words were a slap with witnesses.
For one second, I was seventeen and back in a hallway beneath buzzing fluorescent lights, hearing laughter curl around my name, feeling eyes on my body from boys who thought seeing me in a video I never consented to meant they knew how to touch me. For one second, my throat closed around a version of myself I had buried beneath lipstick, grades, rage, and rules.
Then Bliss’s voice cut through the memory.
“Easton,” Bliss said, and there was no softness in it now. “Stop.”
Cade moved beside him. “She’s right.”
I didn’t need saving. I wanted him to bleed too.
I stepped closer, still holding the baskets, and kept my voice steady because if it shook, I would never forgive myself. “You don’t get to do that.”
His jaw tightened.
“You don’t get to take what I survived, when you don’t know what I survived, twist it into a personality flaw, and throw it at me because you’re mad I didn’t love you back in that moment.”
The silence after that was vicious.
Easton’s face changed just enough for me to know he understood where he had stepped, even if pride kept him from looking down at the blood.
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
“No, you just aimed close enough and hoped it hit.”
Ryan’s voice came low from the bar. “Wade.”
Easton’s eyes didn’t leave mine. “You think I’m the only one who knows where to aim?”
“No.” My laugh came out thin and sharp. “I know I aimed first. I know what I said that night. I know I hurt you, and I know I earned your anger. I do not owe you endless access to punish me in public because my apology didn’t come until after you severed the tie between us.”
His hand flexed around the glass. “You apologized after I stopped being useful.”
That hit me to my soul because he knows nothing.
I lifted my chin even though my chest felt cracked open. “You really believe that?”
“I believe what you showed me.”
“I showed you panic.”
He nodded. “And I showed myself to the door.”
“And you slammed it so hard the whole house shook.”
The old heat flared between us, ugly and alive. It wasn’t tenderness, not yet. It was too angry for that, too bloodied, and too crowded by everyone watching and every word we had failed to say when it could have saved us.
It was still heat. Still connection. Still the awful truth that Easton and I could turn a sports bar into a battlefield because we had never learned how to stop wanting each other after the war started.
