Page 50 of Break Away
He looked at me once more, his eyes saying everything the rules forbade.
Then he turned and walked toward the cooler, his team, and the world where tonight was only a summer memory.
I stood there feeling the ache between my legs, the tender scrape on my back, and the weight of his stare still warming my skin.
No tomorrow, I thought as I touched the place on my neck where his stubble had burned.
The hand he had held still felt empty, and I knew with sinking, terrifying certainty that I was already lying.
I blink, and the memory slowly loosens its hands from my throat, leaving me alone in my bedroom with my phone dimming against my chest and the ghost of lake air still moving over my skin.
That was the problem with thinking about Easton. One memory never stayed one memory. It opened a door, and then all the others came rushing through like they had been waiting for permission—the lake, his room, my apartment, the back hallway at The Sin Bin, dark corners, locked doors, whispered warnings, and his hands on me like he knew exactly where I ended and every lie began.
My rules became a game between us, and I let him break them one by one.
The number of times that man took my body and broke my rules should have scared me more than it did. No names, no lights, no getting me naked, no asking why. I handed him the list like it could protect me from him, and every time he crossed one of those lines, it was because I had already moved it and trusted him to notice.
Some sick, terrified part of me trusted Easton before I ever admitted I loved him.
I was his in every way except the one that mattered.
I gave him my body, my trust, my nights, and the softness I only allowed myself when darkness made me brave enough to stop performing. I gave him pieces of myself I had sworn no man would ever touch again, and then when daylight came, I acted like he had imagined the whole thing. I pretended I had not been right there with him and treated him like he was pathetic for believing what I was too scared to say.
So I made the man I loved my enemy.
I made him hate me because I couldn’t tell him the truth. I couldn’t tell him my fear had names, faces, and trauma that knew how to put its hands on my throat from years away. I couldn’t tell him he was paying for another man’s mistake because that mistake had destroyed my life before Easton ever entered it.
Darian broke me while his friends raped me, rooting one another on and getting off along with him as I lay there helpless and unconscious, all of them knowing it was being recorded.
Bile rises, turning my stomach, and I force the hateful memory back down.
I rebuilt myself brick by brick with sharper edges, higher walls, better locks, and enough attitude to make sure no one ever looked too closely at the girl trapped behind it all.
I thought I was building something that would keep me safe.
I never thought it would be the thing that cost me him.
4
Easton
By noon, Hockey House smelled like bleach, lemon cleaner, cold pizza, and fear. The fear was mine, but the bleach was Briggs’s fault.
He had been given one job, which was to clean the downstairs bathroom without turning it into a public-health incident, and he had somehow managed to use enough product to make the hallway smell like a motel pool desperate to cover the scent of regret.
I stood in the kitchen with a trash bag in one hand and a rag shoved into my back pocket. My headache came from closing North Cut Rink after midnight, sleeping four hours, and waking up to clean a three-story house full of athletes before my mom and sisters arrived. A house my mom still thought I lived in.
“Lawson,” I called toward the hallway. “If you mixed chemicals in there, I swear I’ll let Coach Little find your body.”
Briggs appeared in the archway wearing rubber gloves, a backward cap, and the expression of a man offended by sanitation. “I did not mix chemicals. I created a cleansing environment.”
“You created a smoke agent.”
“I created sparkle.”
Ryan leaned against the counter with a coffee in one hand, his dark eyes tired from the drive in and his tattoos disappearing beneath the sleeves of his hoodie. He looked less like a guest and more like the kind of guy who didn’t live at Hockey House anymore but would still show up before anyone had to ask.
“You created fumes.”
