He steps back and holds the door open anyway.
I come in. I don’t know why I come in. Maybe because I’m incapable of forming a single thought right now.
The door swings shut behind me and I’m standing in his living room — high ceilings, real furniture, the kind of place that quietly announces that someone comes from money. Actual art on the walls, not the cheap printed posters that live in every dorm room on campus. Bookshelves that have actual books on them, chemistry textbooks mixed in with novels mixed in with what appears to be an entire shelf dedicated to hockeybiographies. Hardwood floors.
Rhys is leaning against the kitchen counter watching me take it all in with this expression on his face that is making my blood pressure fucking boil. He’s amused.
He is so deeply, privately amused, and he’s trying to dial it back and failing completely, and every second I stand here not saying anything gives him something more to laugh at. I’m fuming.
I turn on him.
“This doesn’t leave this room,” I say. “Not to your roommate, not to anyone on the team, not to Fitch. This didn’t happen and you don’t say a word.”
“Okay.” He says it too easily. A smile pulling at the corner of his mouth that he’s not quite suppressing.
“I mean it, Rhys.”
“I heard you.”
“Stop smiling—”
“I’m not smiling.”
“You are literally—” I drag a hand through my hair. “Wipe that look off your face.”
“What look?”
“That look.” I step toward him. “The one you’re doing right now. You think this is so funny.”
“I think,” he says carefully, the smile finally breaking through all the way, slow and wide and completely infuriating, “that you drove almost an hour. To my house. Not by accident.”
“It wasn’t—”
“Grindr.”
“Don’t.”
“Jamie.” He says my name like it’s the punchline to the best joke he’s ever heard. “You’re on Grindr.”
“Shut up.”
“You drove probably fifty minutes—”
“I swear to god if you say that one more time—”
“To my house. To fuck me.” He tilts his head, and something shifts behind his eyes then — the amusement is still there but something else is moving underneath it, something clicking into place, piece by piece, while I stand here watching it happen and being powerless to stop it. “Huh.”
That single syllable does something sour to my stomach.
“Don’t,” I say, on the verge of a panic attack. “Whatever you’re thinking right now — don’t.”
He looks at me. Really looks. The smile fading into something more focused, more deliberate. Like he’s doing math in his head and the answer keeps coming out the same way no matter how many times he runs it.
“You backed up every time I got close to you,” he says slowly.
“That’s not—”
“You punched me in a coffee shop.”
