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When I undressed him, he shivered under my hands. And when we went to bed, he held me with such shameless neediness that it filled a hole in my chest where happiness should have been all my life.

We kissed and wrestled, doing a kind of passionate dance girls had never been thrilled about. The worship Shane had mentioned had never been so delicious.

And when I pressed my thumb against the button that sent a continuous current of tingles and vibration through Shane’s body, speeding up and strengthening to an incredible climax, I made sure my lips were tight around his cock because I wanted to have every last drop of him.

Our days were busy, but our nights went on forever. I lived for them.

It caught me unaware that all I did on any given day was just a way to pass the time. What I really ate for, what I played for, what I worked out for, were the hours I got to spend with Shane in the privacy of our rooms.

By the end of November, Elio had all but moved in with Jaxon.

And I hadn’t quite moved in with Shane, but it was getting there.

It crept up on me in the little ways. A toothbrush on his sink, a clean T-shirt in his drawer, his hoodie clinging to my chair like it belonged there. I wasn’t staying the night every night, but it was enough that the space between us never lasted long.

Late November brought a cold wind through the city, the kind that made you grateful for warm beds and warmer bodies. After practice, after studying, after the team dinners and the casual beers and the chaos of the locker room, it was Shane I found myself drifting toward.

There was a night, maybe a week ago, when we’d gone for a walk through Lincoln Park.

Shane had insisted the lights on the paths were atmospheric.

It was freezing, but I didn’t complain. He had this ridiculous wool hat pulled down over his ears, and I could see the outline of his glasses fogging with every exhale.

We passed a guy playing guitar under a bridge.

Shane stopped to listen. Just stood there, watching him with this thoughtful tilt of his head.

I stood beside him, closer than necessary, our shoulders brushing.

He didn’t move away. That night, he kissed me outside my dorm before I could invite him in, and it knocked the air out of me for a full five seconds.

Another night, he came over to help me with a paper. We sat on my bed with our laptops open, but somewhere along the way, I lost my place in the textbook and started tracing patterns on the back of his hand. He let me, not even looking up. He just smiled and leaned into my side.

We didn’t ask ourselves what we were or where this was going.

We didn’t have to.

And it wasn’t always deep talks and hand-holding, either.

Sometimes, it was him giggling in the middle of a kiss because I was tickling his ribs by accident.

Sometimes, it was the way he rolled his eyes at my texts but still answered every one.

Sometimes, it was him stealing my hoodie and pretending it was for research purposes.

He was still shadowing me. Still scribbling in those notebooks sometimes, but not always. He asked questions and measured things. And when he left in the morning, I watched him go with a strange ache in my chest that hadn’t been there before.

I didn’t want to name it. I didn’t want to jinx it.

But I was starting to know what it felt like to want someone in your life for longer than just right now.

That weekend, he stayed over. We didn’t have sex—not that night.

We just lay there, tangled together, sharing old stories and dumb theories about why professors always used blue pens.

He asked me if I remembered my first goal in high school hockey.

I told him, then asked what music he listened to when he was sad.

We drifted to sleep in the middle of a debate about the best bagel place in Chicago.

And when I woke up to find him still there, still wrapped around me, I smiled like a fucking idiot.

This wasn’t a game anymore. Not to me.

Not when he made me want to stay in bed all day.

Not when he made the world feel like it had slowed down just enough for me to breathe.

The windows began to frost during the night around the same time Shane began writing his thesis.

My anxiety skyrocketed for no apparent reason.

He’d promised to remove all actual references to my identity and protect me from detection, except that I knew it was me.

I knew he was digging through everything I had ever said, through all my wandering glances, my flourishes on the ice, and my behaviors, good or bad.

Even so, I wondered what the final result would be. Had I opened a wound with this project that wouldn’t close? Had I carved my heart out by accident? Had I given more of myself than I had thought?

The answer, of course, came in the worst way possible.

It came in a little blue notebook that Shane hadn’t let me look at. He hadn’t, except that he had left it in my room, sneaking out after sleeping in. And I knew it was wrong, but dammit, it was my life he was writing about. Didn’t I have the right to know?

Later, I wished to gods that lightning had struck me before I opened the blue cover of Shane’s notebook. I wished I hadn’t looked.