Page 100 of Break Away
“I didn’t touch him.”
“Congrats. Low bar cleared.”
I looked back out the windshield.
Ryan let the silence stretch again, but my head had already gone somewhere else, back to Hockey House what felt like a million months ago. Bliss had been recovering upstairs while Cade walked around like his skin had been replaced with live wire. Private security stood outside, Bennett brothers came and went, and the entire house moved carefully around a girl who hated being treated like glass.
Charm and Aura stayed because Bliss needed them, sure, but I needed all three of them safe. None of the girls wanted to be alone. Fear had teeth, and everyone in that house could hear them clicking inside the walls.
Aura let me save her that once.
She was in my room when I got back from practice that night.
That should have been enough to stop me in the doorway, but the thing that really caught me was the light. The lamp beside my bed was on low, throwing amber across the comforter, her bare legs, and the black Fury sweatshirt slipping off one shoulder like she had accidentally made herself at home in my clothes.
Aura had rules. Too many of them. No lights. No names. No getting naked. No questions that reached too close to the parts of herself she kept locked down tight.
She carried those rules into every room like weapons, yet somehow, she was sitting in mine with the door open behind me, the lamp on, her laptop balanced across her thighs, and my hoodie folded beside her like she hadn’t already stolen the sweatshirt she was wearing.
She didn’t look up when I entered, but she knew I was there.
Aura noticed everything—a shift in tone, a change in posture, a lie before it fully left someone’s mouth. If she didn’tacknowledge me entering my own room, it wasn’t because she had missed me.
She had decided I could wait.
I leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Comfortable?”
Her fingers kept moving across the keys. “Your mattress is less tragic than the couch.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t thank you.”
“You’re in my bed.”
“Observant.”
“In my sweatshirt.”
“It was cold.”
“There are blankets downstairs.”
“There are also men downstairs.”
My mouth twitched. “You say that like a disease.”
“In this house? It’s at least a preexisting condition.”
I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. The click was quiet, barely more than the latch settling into place, but Aura’s fingers stopped moving. Her eyes lifted to mine for the first time, sharp and dark behind the glasses sliding down her nose.
I kept my hand on the knob. “You want it open?”
Her chin lifted like the question annoyed her, but she didn’t answer immediately. The radiator knocked inside the wall, and somewhere downstairs, Briggs laughed too loudly before immediately lowering his voice like he remembered Bliss was asleep. The whole house had been moving that way for days, every sound cut in half, every man inside it trying not to be the reason she flinched.
“No,” Aura said finally.
I released the knob. “Then stop looking at me like I trapped you.”
