Done.
I set my phone down on my stomach and stare at the ceiling again.
In twelve weeks, I’ll have somewhere else to go.
Which means if Grayson keeps looking at me like he wants two entirely different things, I won’t be trapped here when one of us finally screws this up.
The thought should make me feel calmer, but instead, I lie there in the huge quiet room with my heart thudding too hard, already wondering what the hell I’ve just agreed to and if I’ve just fucked up a good thing.
Chapter 14
Grayson
I missthe clean simplicity of football sometimes.Read the defense, trust your instincts, plant your feet, throw.
No gray areas. No live-in nanny with a mouth made for bad decisions and a smile that makes my four-year-old light up like Christmas morning. No fake relationship I volunteered us into because I couldn’t stand watching her shrink in front of a man who never deserved her in the first place.
No Cole Pearson looking at me like I’m a puzzle he solved three throws ago.
The axe leaves my hand with a satisfying thunk and lands just outside the bullseye.
“Cute,” Cole says beside me, arms folded over his chest. “Real intimidating, Gray.”
I glance over. “You sober guys get smug as hell.”
“Nah, we just focus our frustrations on a target.”
“Is the board the target or am I?”
He grins at me. “Both.”
The range is loud — wood splitting, low music from a speaker somewhere overhead, groups of people laughing too hard because there’s beer involved and because hurling sharp objects at a wall unlocks something primitive in the male brain. The whole place smells like cedar shavings, spilled IPA, and testosterone.
Cole loves it here. He says it gives his hands something to do when they want to hold a bottle, says early sobriety taught him that idle hands are dangerous when your old habits are waiting like wolves just past the tree line.
I get it. Maybe that’s why I agreed to come. My own hands could use a job that isn’t trying not to fidget every time Carly walks into a room.
Cole picks up an axe, tests the weight, and gives me a look over one shoulder. “So, let me make sure I’ve got this straight. You agreed to be her fake boyfriend to piss her ex off?”
“Yes.”
He throws.Bullseye.
Asshole.
He doesn’t even react to it. “Why?”
I drag a hand over my jaw and stare at the target like it personally offended me. “I don’t know. I didn’t like seeing her like that.”
“Like what?”
I exhale hard through my nose. “Deflated.”
The word doesn’t feel big enough, but it’s the closest I’ve got. ButCole waits.
That’s the thing about him. He learned, somewhere between nearly wrecking his life and clawing his way back into it, how to shut the hell up and let silence do the work.
“It was like she was trying to make herself smaller,” I say finally. “Like she said the wrong thing and got cornered and just wanted to disappear. She didn’t even know I was listening.”
