Unsteady

by Peyton Corinne

“For the record,” I say, looking out along the lake, across all the life around us. “I am offering.” She’s silent. Smiling and shaking her head, she avoids every ounce of the eye contact I’m directing toward her. But I can’t bring myself to regret it.

“Just relax and let me take care of you.”

I am gone for this girl.

“We should do this more.” His smile is like spun gold. “Yeah?”

Because I crave Sadie like an addiction.

Her touch soothes me as much as it ignites me. I was floating before, feeling nothing but numbness. Sadie makes me feel alive for the first time since that game. Like I’m a whole man again.

“I think I’m in love with her.” I hear Rhys tell Bennett, but his voice doesn’t lower even a notch. “And she won’t let me in.”

“Sade doesn’t think I’m a golden boy, Ben.” Rhys smiles, but it’s all wrong. “I don’t have to pretend now that she’s here. She knows I’m broken.”

I gesture to her, making her face turn ashen as I call louder, “And tell your little friend up there to watch her fucking back. I don’t need unbruised knuckles to skate.”

“You should sleep it off, hotshot.” His lips tilt at the nickname. He keeps his eyes closed and his hand folded in mine. “You’ll still be here when I wake up?” “Yeah,” I murmur, stealing a moment to caress his overheated forehead and run my fingers through his hair. “I’ve got you.”

“If you’d picked up a basketball all those years ago, I’d be courtside for the rest of my life with one of those big foam fingers. If you take up a paintbrush, I’ll buy every piece that we have wall space for. If you use that big brain of yours for engineering or law, I’ll do whatever I can to show I support you until my last breath.”

“I think I wish Anna was my mom. I think she’d love me a lot.”

“Sadie?” She spins back to me, the divot forming between her brows. “Yes?” “I don’t want you to keep me away, okay? I want to be part of your life.”

“Sadie, if you told me you were joining the Witness Protection Program, I’d ask, ‘Where are we going?’ and ‘Can I pull off a beard?’ ”

“Gray?” “Yes?” “I want to kiss you.”

If she rejects me again, I think I can take it. In fact, I worry more that, if she lets me, the dark thing that lives in me will just want to take and take and take from her. I worry I will be too much, and yet still not enough.

“The entire hockey team is in my kitchen,” I whisper. My hand trails along her side to tuck against the soft fabric of her thong and tug it down over her hips. “So maybe I should let you scream as loud as you want, Gray. Then there’ll be no mistaking who exactly you belong to.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, kotyonok. You can take it.”

“Come,” I demand, my hand gentle against the top of her sex between our bodies. “That’s my girl. So good, baby.”

The way I feel about her is real, so deep it feels like a cord looped from inside me to her, tethering me to her.

I’ll take any bit of her she’ll give to me—a dog begging for scraps, until she lets me in. I’m patient. I can wait.

But a green mug of coffee with some sort of slightly misshapen design in the foam slides in front of me. “What’s this?” “It’s… ah, latte foam art. It’s supposed to be a flower.” He says it sheepishly, quiet. “I love it.”

Her praise feels like standing in the sun, warming me everywhere.

she could easily kill me if she wanted and I’d say thank you as I bled out beneath her.