But I can’t stop. I can’t fucking stop. Because I don’t know if I’m chasing pleasure, or pain, or just the illusion of being wanted again. And it all sounds the same in his voice.
I don’t even realize my hand is moving until it’s already there—dragging down my stomach, slipping under the waistband of my sweats, fingers curling around myself like I’m trying to anchor my own body in place before it shakes apart again.
The video keeps playing. My breath keeps stuttering. And I’m watching myself come undone under a man who isn’t here, who isn’t mine, who never fucking was—and it breaks something in me that was already cracked straight through.
I stroke myself hard, desperate, chasing the sound of his voice. The way he groans against my throat. The way he says my name in the video like he owns every breath I take. My hips jerk up into my own hand, fast and messy, head tipped back against the metal wall as the ghost of his mouth drags me closer and closer to the fucking edge.
“Rafe—” It slips out. A broken moan wrapped around a name that shouldn’t be there.
My whole body seizes with it. I don’t mean it. I don’t fucking mean it. But the words are already out, and I hate myself for them the second they leave my mouth. I grit my teeth like I can bite them back, like I can scrape the name off my tongue with my own guilt.
But it doesn’t matter. I came moaning the name of the man who taped me to a fucking goalpost.
Not Nathan.
Rafe.
It happens fast—too fast after weeks of withdrawal, days of starving, hours of needing anything, anyone, any piece of the world that felt like it used to. My back arches and my breath breaks as the pleasure hits sharp and violent, humiliating in the way it rips through me before I can stop it.
I come quietly and frantically into my own palm, shaking hard enough that my forehead drops against the cold steel wall, pressing there as everything inside me finally snaps. The high lasts a second—maybe two—just long enough to trick my body into believing it found something it was starving for.
Then it crashes.
My vision blurs, my throat tightens, and my chest hollows out like a sinkhole opening beneath my ribs. The tears come fast and hard, angry and hot and completely unstoppable. I curl forward, away from the wall, away from the phone still glowing on the floor, and wrap both arms around myself like I can somehow hold the pieces together.
But I can’t.
Not this time. Not after watching that, after coming to him, to a ghost, to a memory that should’ve been buried the night he sold me out.
I sob—quiet at first, then louder, broken, shattered, choking on the sounds I swore I’d never make for him again. My whole body trembles like the orgasm wrung something vital out of me instead of giving it back.
I feel filthy. And all I can think is: I want him back. I hate him. I want him back. I hate him. I want him back—The thoughts loop until they blur, until the only thing left is the hollow ache and the wreckage of what he turned me into.
I curl tighter on the floor, tears dripping onto the back of my hand, breath hitching around sobs I can’t swallow. And for the first time since the compound, I don’t try to stop it, I just break.
8
RAFE
Practice is supposed to be clean today. Before a game like this, everyone should be razor-sharp, locked in, focused on drills, because Leonardo doesn’t tolerate sloppy ice and the bets on tonight are higher than usual. The compound feels it — the tension, the hunger, the pressure. Even the fucking air is tight. Everyone is dialed into the rhythm of it: Misha hitting like a freight train, Kai skating with that detached surgeon’s precision, Finn spinning circles around the forwards just to piss them off, Luca chirping anything that breathes. It should feel like a machine humming.
But it doesn’t.
Because Julian is skating like he left half his brain in bed. He’s not high — I know that look. He’s not withdrawing — I know that one too. He’s not manic, not jittery, not wired.
He’s… empty.
His stride is perfect. His edges clean. His stick-handling sharp. But there is nothing behind his eyes. No fire, no fury, no sarcasm, no reckless spark. He’s moving on autopilot, like his body remembers what to do but his mind is three steps out of sync. He goes through every motion like someone wound him up and pushed him onto the ice without checking if the soul was still inside the shell.
And that pisses me off more than anything he’s done so far.
Julian Reaver is a lot of things — mouthy, high, suicidal, a goddamn problem — but he’s never blank. I’ve seen him half-dead from withdrawal and he still managed to spit at me. I’ve seen him high enough to fight Finn, Luca, and the boards at the same time,and he still lit the entire rink on fire with his presence. But this? This quiet, disconnected skating? This nothingness?
It feels wrong. Wrong in a way I can’t ignore.
I watch him cut across center ice, flawless form and no soul, and it grates under my skin until my fingers tighten on the stick so hard the tape bites into my glove. He doesn’t react to Finn chirping loud enough to shake the rafters. He doesn’t snap back at Luca’s digs. He doesn’t flinch when Bishop throws a puck into the boards next to him just to get a rise.
Julian just keeps skating. Head down, expression flat, breathing steady. Like he’s not here.
