Page 49 of Final Drive

She looks down at the tea again.

“I’m not asking you for anything tonight,” I say. “I’m not rushing you or pushing you or filling in a line on Tyler’s form. I just needed you to know this was never strategy for me.”

She sets the glass on the nightstand. Her hands aren’t steady.

“The others,” she starts. “Do they feel the same?”

“Every last one of them. Gray’s too proud to say it out loud. Tyler could probably turn it into a spreadsheet before he’d find the words. Cameron acts like wanting anything too much might kill him.” I pause, thinking about Eli. “And Eli watches you and Jackson like the two of you are the answer to a question he hasn’t figured out how to ask yet.”

Her eyes come back to mine.

“We’re eight idiots, Reese. None of us has ever been good at sharing anything, and somehow we’re all figuring out we’d rather make room for each other than ask you to choose. It’s a mess, but it’s real.”

“I don’t want to be passed around like a form to be signed.”

“I know.” I put my hand out slowly, giving her all the time in the world to move, and take hers when she lets me. “So don’t let us do that. Tell us to slow down. Tell us to back off. Tell us to get out of your room. Just don’t shut us out because you’ve decided we don’t want you, because that’s the one thing in this house that isn’t true.”

She doesn’t answer right away. I can feel her pulse going under my thumb.

“I don’t know what I need,” she says. “Everything happened so fast. One minute we’re having the best practice of the season and the next my face is on the internet and everyone’s talking about claiming timelines.”

“And you went missing somewhere in the middle of it.”

She nods, eyes shining.

“Then we start there.” I squeeze her hand. “You’re not a problem to be solved and you’re not a crisis to manage. You’re the woman I’ve been falling for since the week you turned up and refused to be scared of us, and I don’t much care who knows it.”

A tear gets loose and I catch it with my thumb.

“What do you want?” she whispers. “Right now. Not for the team or the paperwork. What do you want?”

I look at her, at all of it tangled up together in those blue-green eyes.

“To hold you. That’s the whole list. No pressure and no expectations, just the two of us being still for a while.”

She’s moving before I finish. She folds into me like the space was cut for her, and I get one hand behind her head and the other around her waist. She’s shaking, small tremors that go all the way through her.

“I’ve got you,” I say into her hair. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.”

We stay like that a long time. Tyler’s typing and Gray’s phone voice and Zane rattling around the kitchen all go to background noise, and none of it reaches us.

Eventually her breathing evens out and the shaking quits. She pulls back far enough to look at me. She isn’t fixed and she isn’t better, but she’s here with me in a way she wasn’t twenty minutes ago.

“Bo?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For seeing me.”

I press my mouth to her forehead. “Always.”

She leans back into me, and I sit there in the dark holding her and let myself believe we can still come out the other side of this.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Reese

Ialmost cancel three times.