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I wake up tasting her on my lips and hard enough to hammer nails, which is exactly how every day should start and exactly why I’m fucked.

The thin wall between our rooms might as well be tissue paper.

I can hear Chelsea moving around, getting ready for day two of this professional torture disguised as team building.

Every footstep, every drawer closing, every sound that tells me she’s right there, close enough to touch if architecture wasn’t in the way.

Last night replays on loop. Her backed against that washer, hands in my hair, making those sounds I’ve been dreaming about for two years. The way she said my name. The way she admitted I terrify her, like I haven’t been terrified of how she makes me feel since Vegas.

Cold shower. Coffee strong enough to make me sweat. Game face on.

The morning activity is trust falls, because apparently we’re in middle school.

Chelsea stands at the front in hiking pants that should be illegal and an Outlaws fleece that makes her look soft and touchable.

She’s explaining the psychological benefits of vulnerability while I imagine peeling those clothes off with my teeth.

“Hendrix, you’re up,” Coach calls, because the universe hates me.

I take my position, back to the team. The irony isn’t lost on me—trusting my teammates to catch me when I can’t even trust myself around our therapist.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Chelsea says, professional as fuck like she wasn’t moaning into my mouth twelve hours ago.

“Question, Doc.” I turn to face her, noting the slight tension in her shoulders. “What if trust is the problem? What if you’ve already fallen and no one caught you?”

Her jaw tightens. “Then you learn to catch yourself.”

“Sounds lonely.”

“Sounds necessary.”

The team shifts uncomfortably. Everyone can feel the undercurrent, even if they don’t understand it.

“Just fall, Hendrix,” Weston calls. “Some of us want lunch.”

I fall. They catch me. Trust exercise complete. But my eyes stay on Chelsea, who’s biting that bottom lip in the way that means she’s fighting for control.

Lunch is outdoors, picnic-style team bonding bullshit. I grab my tray and make a beeline for where Chelsea’s sitting with the coaching staff. She sees me coming and subtly shifts closer to Patricia, but I squeeze into the space on her other side anyway.

“Cozy,” I comment, letting my thigh press against hers.

“Crowded,” she corrects, but doesn’t move away.

“So Doc,” Lawrence pipes up from across the table, apparently over our practice incident. “You got a boyfriend? Husband? Significant other who should know we’re alone with you in the mountains?”

The question hangs in the air. Chelsea’s hand stills on her water bottle.

“My personal life isn’t relevant to team dynamics,” she says carefully.

“That means no,” Emerald translates, grinning. “Doc’s single, boys.”

“And uninterested,” Chelsea adds firmly. “In case that wasn’t clear.”

“Harsh,” someone mutters.

“Professional,” she corrects, but her thigh presses harder against mine, and I have to bite back a groan.

I lean over, pretending to grab the salt, and whisper in her ear: “Liar.”

She kicks me under the table. I grin and settle back, enjoying the flush creeping up her neck.

The afternoon is supposedly about “communication exercises,” which translates to partner activities designed to make us share feelings. Chelsea, in her infinite wisdom and possible sadism, pairs me with her.

“This seems like a conflict of interest,” I point out as she leads me to a quiet corner.

“Everything about this is a conflict of interest,” she mutters, then louder: “The exercise is about active listening. One person shares for two minutes while the other listens without interrupting.”

“You want me to share my feelings? Here? Now?”

“I want you to participate in the exercise like everyone else.”

“Fine.” I lean back against the wall, studying her.

“I feel frustrated. Constantly. I feel like I’m trying to play hockey with one hand tied behind my back.

I feel like everyone wants me to be something I’m not—calmer, safer, less.

I feel like the only time I’ve ever been myself, really myself, was in a Vegas hotel room with someone who saw all my sharp edges and didn’t run. Until she did.”

Chelsea’s breathing changes. “Reed—”

“My turn to listen,” I remind her. “Two minutes. Go.”

She looks around, checking who might overhear, then steps closer.

“I feel like I’m drowning. Like everything I’ve worked for is balanced on a knife’s edge, and one wrong move will destroy it all.

I feel angry that I’m here, in your professional space, making me want things I can’t have.

I feel...” She pauses, eyes bright. “I feel alive when you look at me, and I hate myself for it.”

“Time,” someone calls from across the room.

We stare at each other, both breathing hard from honesty neither of us meant to share.

“Good communication,” she says weakly, then flees to check on other pairs.

I spend the rest of the afternoon pretending her confession didn’t just rewire my entire nervous system.

By evening, I’m vibrating out of my skin. Dinner is a blur. The optional movie night is torture—sitting in a dark room, knowing she’s three rows back, feeling her presence like a phantom limb.

I escape to the equipment shed behind the lodge, needing air and space and distance from her perfume. The shed is basically a glorified garage, full of hiking gear and maintenance supplies. I’m pretending to look for extra hand warmers when the door opens.

I know it’s her before I turn around. My body recognizes hers like gravity.

“We need to stop meeting like this,” I say without looking up.

“I was getting first aid supplies.” Her voice is steady but thin. “Patricia scraped her knee on the trail.”

“Bandages are on the left shelf.”

I hear her move past me, determined to keep distance. But then she makes this sound—frustrated, wanting—and when I turn, she’s staring at me with eyes that match the hunger in my chest.

“Don’t,” she whispers.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t look at me like that. Like you want—”

“Everything? Because I do.”

One moment she’s across the shed. The next, we’re colliding like atoms splitting. Her mouth finds mine with desperate accuracy, and any pretense of control evaporates. This isn’t the exploration of Vegas or the desperation of the laundry room. This is pure need, two years of want demanding payment.

I lift her onto the workbench, stepping between her thighs as she wraps her legs around me. We’re frantic, graceless, pulling at clothes with shaking hands. Her fleece hits the floor. My shirt follows. Every barrier between us feels like an insult.

“We can’t,” she gasps even as she’s unbuckling my belt. “Someone could—”

“Don’t care.” I capture her protest with my mouth, swallowing her words and doubts. My hands find skin, relearn curves I’ve dreamed about. She arches into my touch, nails digging into my shoulders.

It’s fast, messy, necessary. Her hiking pants shoved down just enough, my jeans following. When I push into her, we both freeze, overwhelmed by the feeling of us finally connected again. Then she shifts, takes me deeper, and thinking becomes impossible.

We move together in desperate silence, swallowing each other’s moans. The workbench creaks beneath us. Tools rattle. Her legs tighten around me as I drive into her with two years of pent-up need.

I work my hips hard and fast, needing to release my pent-up energy. It’s so hot that she can’t control herself around. The thought makes me wild.

“Reed,” she breathes against my neck, and I almost lose it right there.

“I know,” I manage. “Fuck, Chelsea, I know.”

She breaks first, biting my shoulder to muffle her cry. The feel of her coming around me, the pain of her teeth, the perfect wrongness of doing this here—it all crashes together, and I follow her over, pulsing inside of her.

We stay frozen for a moment, breathing hard, still joined. Reality creeps in with the cooling sweat and distant voices from the lodge.

She pushes at my chest. “Let me up.”

I step back, watching her rebuild her walls with her clothes. Pants yanked up. Fleece smoothed down. Hair finger-combed into submission. In under a minute, she’s transformed back into Dr. Clark, except for her swollen lips and the mark I definitely left on her neck.

“This doesn’t change anything,” she says, not meeting my eyes.

“It changes everything.”

“No.” She grabs the first aid kit with shaking hands. “It was just... adrenaline. Proximity. It won’t happen again.”

“You said that about the laundry room.”

She finally looks at me, and the mix of want and regret in her eyes nearly brings me to my knees. “I mean it this time.”

Then she’s gone, leaving me in a shed that smells like sex and sawdust, trying to figure out how something so right can be so wrong.

I fix my clothes, give her a five-minute head start, then make my way back to the lodge. In the common room, she’s tending to Patricia’s knee with steady hands, looking like she didn’t just come apart in my arms.

But I see the truth in the careful way she moves, the slight flush on her chest, the way she absolutely doesn’t look in my direction.

Weston appears at my elbow. “You good? You look... intense.”

“Just thinking,” I manage.

“About?”

About how Chelsea Clark has worked her way under my skin like ink, permanent and painful. About how every time she leaves, it feels like losing a piece of myself. About how I’m falling for someone I can’t have, and the landing is going to destroy us both.

“Hockey,” I lie. “Always thinking about hockey.”

He doesn’t believe me, but he lets it go. Across the room, Chelsea finishes with Patricia and escapes upstairs. I know she’s going to her room, the one next to mine, where we’ll lie in separate beds pretending we didn’t just fuck each other senseless in a shed.

This isn’t just lust. Lust would be simpler, cleaner, easier to walk away from.

This is something else. Something that makes me want to be better and worse simultaneously. Something that makes every other woman fade to background noise. Something that’s going to end badly, but I can’t seem to stop accelerating toward the crash.

I head to my room, already knowing I won’t sleep. Already knowing I’ll lie there listening to her breathe through the wall, replaying every sound she made, every way she came undone.

Tomorrow we go back to Chicago. Back to professional distance and scheduled sessions and pretending this thing between us doesn’t exist.

But tonight, I can still taste her on my tongue, feel her on my skin, and pretend that wanting her isn’t the worst kind of penalty—the kind you can’t kill.

The kind that kills you instead.