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SEVENTEEN

EASTON

“You are like nicotine,” Jace said before he clicked his lighter on and lit the tip of the cigarette. The ashtray lay on the middle of his bare chest, the cigarette glowing and smoke rising, his left arm resting under me. A thin sheet covered us from our waists down. The dusk glow set everything in the bedroom alight.

“How so?” I asked.

Jace exhaled a lungful of smoke. “People think, ‘Oh, it’s just a cigarette.’ But they don’t realize how powerful this thing is. How addictive.”

I squinted. “I’m not sure if you’re giving me a compliment.”

Jace turned his head to me and grinned. “You’re the best goddamn thing I’ve ever been addicted to, Easton.”

My eyelashes batted rapidly, and I struggled to contain a smile. “Wow. That was smooth.”

Jace inhaled another puff of smoke, his chest rising and lifting the ashtray, then falling as he exhaled. The open window tempted the cloud of smoke out of the room. The heat was beginning to yield. The first two weeks of September seemed like God had flicked a switch. Chicago was turning golden and brown, and rain washed the streets at night.

Today, the weather was so nice that it felt like the universe was giving us one more nice day before the storms and the deep slumber of fall and winter. There would be more, I knew, but the passing of summer was something I always felt deep in my heart. Sure, October would bring the morning frost and the afternoon sunshine, but it would be a long wait before the days were bright and warm again.

I kissed Jace on the cheek.

“Is that the time already?” he asked, as if my kiss was an alarm clock. Perhaps it was, in all but its intention.

“Yeah,” I said, sitting up. I had practice in an hour.

Today had been an oddly tranquil day. The morning lectures were ponderous and slow. I didn’t run into anyone I knew. My breakfast was a croissant that had just been taken out of the oven and a cup of coffee with cinnamon. And when I returned here, Jace had put things in their place, scents of delicious food coming from the kitchen. We’d eaten together and lounged for a while before he’d taken my hand and led me to the bedroom for a small dessert. “You’ll get more after practice,” he’d promise, and I knew he wasn’t lying.

There were no limits to how much I could want him. Jace taught me the definition of insatiable. So I came back for more and more.

“I met the witch living across the hall,” Jace said.

“Mrs. Johnson?” I asked, still sitting in bed, reluctant to leave this gorgeous view.

“I doubt she got any johnson since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Jace muttered. “She tried to shut the front door on me. She went, ‘Who are you? Who are you visiting?’ And when I said I lived here, she didn’t believe me. She made me pull my keys out and unlock the door myself. Then she picked the middle of the stairs and took about an hour to climb all the way up here. I couldn’t go around the hag.”

I knew better than to scold Jace for using that language. He would only double down. “What happened then?”

Jace shrugged. “Pushed her down the stairs.”

I gasped, eyes wide with terror.

He just chuckled. “Chill, Easton. I didn’t push her down the stairs. But the fact you believed me is worrying.” He shot me a mischievous smile and shook his head. “I told her that if she planned to walk in front of someone for so long, she better take the mothballs out of her clothes because they stank up the hallway. I wish you saw her face.”

“Christ, Jace,” I said, horrified and tempted to laugh in equal measures.

“She complained about the noise, by the way,” Jace said. “Muttered all the way up here.”

“What noise?” I asked, cheeks going red.

Jace’s silence confirmed it. It seemed to make him happy. Had I been that loud? It was hard to remember such insignificant things when the things he made me feel were so overpowering.

“You know what? I don’t care,” I said firmly.

As if by the sheer force of his will, Jace inserted order into my life. It was a strange thing to find order thanks to someone as chaotic as him, but it worked. My perspective shifted slightly every day, and my problems seemed smaller in comparison.

I got out of bed and dragged my underwear on, then dressed for going outside. Jace had no strict schedule. He wandered through his days, pursuing whatever he liked at any given moment. Most of the time, I didn’t know what he was up to. Sometimes, he would wait for me near the rink and walk home together. Sometimes, he would text me to meet him in an underground bar where nobody knew us. “I want to flaunt you a little,” he would say. “Make all those boys and girls jealous.” I hadn’t known this about myself, but being someone’s trophy for an evening almost always resulted in incredible sex later on. One night, a note from Jace lay on my bed, instructing me to undress and wait for him. I’d rolled my eyes and ignored it, trying to do anything else, but curiosity tempted me strongly enough that I found myself doing as I was told. Upon his return, without speaking a word, Jace undressed and walked into my bedroom, keeping the lights off and lying on top of me. I’d been close to dozing off, except that his footsteps awakened me. He could tell by my breathing, but we pretended as if he couldn’t. It had been the most exciting thing he had done to me, until the next day, of course.

I didn’t think one person could come up with so many ideas at such a quick pace. He seemed to be an inexhaustible well of kinks and fantasies, waving his hand and bringing them to life. And there was nothing I wouldn’t do. His steady, guiding hand opened a world of possibilities I had never thought existed beyond fantasy.

Outside our bubble of reality, where the rules and laws and social order didn’t apply, things didn’t change. They may have gotten worse if I were being completely honest. What changed was me.

I watched a fraction of Steel Saints rally behind Kyle. I watched Elio’s reluctant embrace of the responsibilities that were slowly stripped away from me. In performance reviews, although I was still present, Elio’s opinions were sharp and precise. On the ice, Kyle led a growing sub-squad with an increasing openness. The leadership slipped away through my fingers until I was the captain in name only.

There was little I could do to fix the damage now. What I had to do was take a breath and not fight it without a plan. The battle itself was impossible to win when there were two favorites and I was the third wheel.

Perhaps I wasn’t ready to accept the new reality, but I knew I had been fighting it the wrong way. Jace’s steadiness lent itself to me. He had done the very thing he had promised to do. My worries no longer weighed so heavily.

And with a refreshed vigor, I went to practice. It didn’t scare me to have to face increasingly doubtful looks from my teammates because I would return to Jace at the end of it all. I would return, and he would accept me precisely the way I was. And perhaps we would make some more noise to bother Mrs. Johnson.