Charm lifted her head from Ryan’s chest, her eyes red and glossy. “Ay.”
I shook my head once, softer this time. “Tomorrow, Cee.”
She nodded and pressed her lips together while Ryan’s hand moved slowly over her back.
Hannah came over with a plastic bag full of ice wrapped in towels and shoved it against Easton’s chest with more force than necessary. “Put this on your face and ribs before you scare customers who enjoy symmetry.”
Easton took it. “Thanks.”
“I’m not thanking you for the parking-lot redecorating.”
“Understood.”
“And you,” she said, pointing toward me. “Text me when you’re home. Don’t make me call Bliss for translation.”
I nodded because arguing with Hannah after she had threatened half the basketball team felt disrespectful to her range.
The walk to my car happened inside a strange pocket of quiet. Rain had softened into mist, clinging to my hair and cooling the heat still trapped beneath my skin. Easton walked beside me, too close and not close enough, the ice bag pressed against his cheek and his other hand flexing at his side like he was only now realizing how much it hurt.
Neither of us spoke until I unlocked the car.
He opened the passenger door, then paused with one hand against the frame.
“I don’t live at Hockey House anymore,” he said.
I looked at him over the roof of my car.
The parking-lot lights caught the bruise near his cheekbone, the blood at his mouth, and the exhaustion carved into his face beneath all that stubborn, brutal control.
For some reason, that hurt almost as much as everything else.
“What?”
His eyes remained on mine. “I moved out.”
The mist fell between us, cold and soft and impossible to hold.
“Where?” I asked.
Easton looked away first, toward the wet street, the darkness beyond the Sin Bin, and everything we had left burning behind us.
“My apartment,” he said.
Then he got into my car and shut the door.
15
Aura
I made it three blocks toward Hockey House before Easton spoke.
“Clarke, I wasn’t joking. I don’t live there anymore.”
My hands tightened around the steering wheel, knuckles bleaching white. The Sin Bin was already a dark smear in the rearview, and Cade’s headlights faded behind us with Bliss probably crying in his passenger seat because she was emotionally inconvenient and loved people like a full-contact sport.
I had expected a fight before Easton got into my car. I had expected him to tell me to fuck off, call someone else, bleed on a curb out of spite—anything except slide into the passenger seat and stare through the windshield with every ounce of violence gone quiet behind his eyes, banked to embers but still burning.
Then I turned toward Hockey House, and he finally decided to use his mouth.
