Page 131 of Bitter When He Begs

Luca’s throat works, and the fight bleeds out of his shoulders. After a long moment, he nods… and I finally breathe.

We crawl into bed like ghosts. No lights, no words. Just silence so thick it feels like we’re breathing underwater. I lie still; stiff under the blankets, trying not to ask the hundred questions climbing my throat. Trying to be enough without asking for anything in return.

He hasn’t said a word since we got into bed, and I haven’t pushed, even though my mind is racing with all the things I want to say but know won’t help. Roman said Luca takes losses personally, that even when no one blames him, he still shoulders the weight of every single mistake, every missed opportunity like it’s solely on him.

I get that. I know what it’s like to want to be perfect and hate yourself for falling short. My father has produced more Oscar-nominated movies than I can count, and I know I will never measure up to him. I know how much it fucking sucks when you fall into that headspace.

But this silence? This heavy, suffocating weight pressing into the space between us?

It’s killing me.

I turn my head and watch him, trying to figure out if he wants me to say something or if he just needs me here. Before I can open my mouth to start talking about anything to fill the quiet, Luca moves, and to my complete and utter shock, he turns and curls into my chest.

My breath catches, my heart stops, and my entire body locks up at the unexpected warmth of him pressing against me.

Luca Devereaux—six-foot-three, broad-shouldered, cocky-as-fuck quarterback—is curling into me like he needs to hide from the world.

“I almost relapsed last night, baby.”

For a second, I forget how to breathe.

His voice is rough. Not the kind of rough that comes from yelling plays across the field or muttering a dirty joke in my ear. No, this is raw, frayed, torn down to the nerve endings. Like it hurts him just to say it out loud. Like he had to dig the words out of his ribs and hand them to me bleeding.

I close my eyes, bury my face in his hair, and breathe him in. Not because I want to romanticize this, but because this is real and scary, and it’s not about being strong for each other right now—it’s about being soft enough to survive the wreckage together.

“I called,” he says, voice low against my chest, each syllable cracking open something inside me. “I was gonna go. I was halfway to the fucking door when Eli and Juls showed up.”

My fingers thread into his hair, holding him tighter. “I thought I could handle it,” he mumbles. “Told myself I could take the loss. Just shake it off, you know? Like it’s just a game. Just a number on the board.”

I feel him curling tighter into me. “But then, like clockwork, my dad called and told me I embarrassed him. That I should’ve choked somewhere private instead of on the field in front of the whole fucking city.”

My entire body tenses, rage igniting in my chest, a slow, simmering burn crawling up my spine, because I don’t even fucking know Luca’s father, but I hate him. I want to grab that bastard by the throat and make him understand what he’s done to his son.

I hate him for making Luca feel like this. For making him doubt himself. For being the reason Luca sat alone in a hotel room, shaking and spiraling and thinking about calling a dealer instead of me.

“He said I’m a waste of his last name.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, pushing back my own emotions and focusing on him. “No,” I whisper immediately without hesitation. “He’s wrong. He’s so fucking wrong.”

“I wanted to believe that,” Luca says, his voice cracking again. “I did. But when I hung up, I just… I wasn’t thinking anymore. I just wanted it to stop. All of it. The noise, the ache, the pressure. I wanted the edge to go away. The edge he put there since I was old enough to throw a ball.”

My heart aches for the man I’ve fallen so fucking hard for. For the man who carries so much weight on his shoulders, who’s spent his whole life being told he’s not enough by the one person who was supposed to build him up, not break him down.

He goes quiet, and I know that silence too well. That moment where you hate yourself so much you can’t say the next part. So I say it for him.

“But you stayed.”

He nods, slow and tight against my chest. “Only because they stopped me. If they hadn’t been there, I don’t—I don’t know what would’ve happened.”

I rest my cheek against his temple and close my eyes. “That’s okay.”

“It’s not,” he whispers, his voice breaking open. “I was right there. I was gonna throw it all away.”

“No, Luca,” I murmur, holding him tighter as my voice steadies around the storm brewing in my chest, “it’s not okay—not in the‘that was fine, don’t worry about it’kind of way. It’s not okay that you were there, hurting like that, and I didn’t even know.” I pause, threading my fingers through his hair, grounding myself in the warmth of his body pressed into mine. “But what is okay… is saying it out loud.”

His breath hitches, like he’s not sure how to take that, not sure if it’s a lifeline or another weight.

“I’m not brushing this off,” I say softly. “I’m not pretending this didn’t scare the shit out of me. It did. It still does. I keep replaying how close it came. How I almost lost you without even knowing.”