Page 219 of The Pucking Coach's Daughter
Between the ice bath bestowed upon me by Bear and his brother, the freezing room they kept me in, the blood loss, and then the blood-transfusion-driven fever and chills, I’m just… done. And ready to jump into a bonfire if it would mean getting warm.
When I drag myself out of the shower, later the same day I got home from the hospital, Carter waits for me. He’s fully dressed, standing in my bathroom leaning against the back of the door like he’s trying to keep himself from jumping on me.
It would make me feel normal, though…
“Hi,” he whispers.
I haven’t seen much of him in the past week. I think he came to the hospital, but I don’t have solid memory of it. I just remember him holding my hand, drifting into consciousness to find to his head resting on the side of my bed as he, too, slept.
“Hey.” I reach for a towel. “Long time no see.”
He cracks a small smile. “Yeah.”
“And intruding on my shower time…”
“Best place to catch you naked,” he replies.
I nod carefully. “I got the all-clear. With the stitches…”
He stands straighter, a pained look crossing his face. “I, uh, heard about Penn’s proclamation of love.”
Ah.
“Yeah.”
I keep the towel wrapped around me and use another one to dry my limbs. He watches me brush out my hair slowly, then blot out the excess moisture with the second towel. Penn saying he loved me—even with all the extra feelings about L. tied up in it—was overwhelming. In the best way possible, maybe?
But also, like something was missing.
Something that’s now standing in front of me.
How can I tell Penn that I love him—I do—and yet still feel incomplete? One puzzle piece slotted into place. But there are more pieces. In the end, I didn’t have to tell him. He knew. He preemptively accepted it.
“And you feel the same,” Carter says.
I focus on him. “I… yeah.”
I focus on the way his expression breaks, and how it breaks a little bit of me, too.
“But, Carter—I can’t say I don’t also feel the same for you, too. Because I do. We let each other go when it got scary. But I think I like scary from you. I’ve started to crave it.” I inch toward him. There’s nowhere for him to go—the door at his back, me at his front. “I can’t pinpoint when I fell in love with you. I think I’ve been falling since you didn’t let me disappear into FSU. You followed me. You saw me. And I see you.”
He swallows.
“I love you,” I repeat. “I’m in love with you.”
I wait for him to leave. For him to brush me aside and hit the road because he won’t be my only.
But he doesn’t. His gaze seems to deepen and darken, and suddenly he’s got my towel in his fingers, and he pulls it off my body in a quick jerk.
It drops to the floor, leaving me exposed. Bruises across my ribs, the stitches on the inside of my thigh, the ring of deep bruises around my neck—although, to be fair, those were visible even with the towel. There are burn marks where they touched me with the jumper cables, but those feel like nothing compared to the havoc they wreaked inside my body.
“Don’t touch me like I’m broken,” I beg him.
He exhales. Grasps my hips. Shifts me so my back is to the door. He braces his forearm against the wood next to my head and leans in real slow. I meet his storm-blue eyes, but my gaze flicks to his lips.
I close my eyes in anticipation.
The touch is sweeter than I remember. Soft, like a brush of sugar across my lips. Then away.