LOGINSLOANENeither of us said anything for a long time.Then he laughed. Quietly. Into my hair."What?" I said."You traced it." His fingers moved slowly along my spine. "The tattoo. You traced the whole thing. Twice.""It's well done. Tank has a gift.""You traced her hair three times.""I was checking the texture.""You were checking the texture," he repeated, and the way he said it, warm and wrecked and so fond, made something in my chest crack open all over again."Chase.""Mm.""What did your mother lie to you about?"His hand stopped on my back."I texted you," he said finally. "Last Saturday. After the steakhouse. Nothing came up under it.""I blocked you.""I know you blocked me. I sent it anyway." He took a breath. "I have a brother. Owen. He's seventeen. And a sister. You've met her. And a stepmother who's been sending me Christmas cards since I was five that I never got."I lifted my head."Kira Walsh," he said.The blue light rippled over his face."Kira," I said. "Kira from t
SLOANEHe stood up and took me with him. Just scooped me off the sectional like I weighed nothing, my legs around his waist, my arms around his neck. His cock pressed hard against my bare ass."Where are we going?""Bar.""*The bar?* Chase, that's where your mother keeps the good gin.""Then the gin's going to see some things." He carried me across the room. "She put a bar in the pool house, Sloane. She put a wine fridge in the laundry room. She's a woman of priorities."He set me down on it. A long counter in honey-colored teak, the edge of it hitting right at his hips. Cold under me.I yelped. “It’s freezing.”“It’s teak.”“I don’t care what species of tree it is, Chase, it’s *February*.”He grabbed a folded pool towel off the shelf behind the counter and slid it under me with one hand, lifting me with the other, the way he’d lift a stick off the rack. Efficient. Easy. Like he’d planned it.“Better?”“You *planned* this.”“I’ve had weeks of nothing to do but skate and think.” He eas
SLOANEHe kissed me like he was trying to memorize the shape of it.No rush. No teeth. Just his mouth on mine, slow and open, like we had a hundred years and he’d decided to spend the first one right here. I got two buttons undone. Then three. My fingers kept slipping because he kept doing this thing with his tongue that made my brain stop sending signals to my hands—deep, deliberate strokes that made heat pool low in my belly.“You’re terrible at this,” he murmured against my lips.“You’re distracting me.”“I’m kissing you.”“That’s the distracting part.”He smiled against my mouth. Then he sat back on his heels, right there between my knees, and undid the rest of the buttons himself. One at a time. Not fast. Watching me watch him. The hard line of his cock pressed against the front of his pants, already thick and obvious.The shirt came off his shoulders.And I saw it.I'd felt it under my palm on Brittany's bed an hour ago. I'd traced the edges of it through cotton. But I had never
SLOANEDownstairs, someone had turned the music up.Motown. Somebody laughing too loudly. Glasses clinking. The party was trying very hard to forget that the captain of the Vancouver Titans had just publicly ended things with a model in the middle of his mother's toast and walked out. Forty people pretending they hadn't seen anything. Victoria would be managing it. I could picture her smile from here.Up here, it was just us.Chase had stopped crying a while ago. He was still leaning into me, his face in the curve of my neck, breathing slow and wet against my skin. My collar was soaked through. His hand was still fisted in the back of my dress like he thought I might evaporate if he let go.I hadn't moved my hand from between his shoulder blades. I could feel the tattoo through his shirt. Not the lines, just the warmth of the skin there, and his heartbeat underneath it, finally slowing down."This is Brittany's room," I said.He laughed. Hoarse and wrecked, right into my neck. "Yeah."
SLOANEHis old room didn't look like his anymore.Victoria had done exactly what she'd done the morning after he left for Dalton in August. Fresh white duvet, pressed flat. Seven decorative pillows in descending sizes, sage and cream, arranged like a showroom. A lavender candle on the nightstand that had never been lit. A framed print of a sailboat where his Flyers poster used to be, the four pinholes still faintly visible in the paint around it if you knew to look. I knew to look. I'd stared at that poster over his shoulder in July, at two in the morning, trying not to make a sound.Brittany's suitcase lay open on the floor by the closet. Silk and cashmere, folded perfectly. A garment bag hanging from the door.Downstairs, the party was trying to recover. Somebody had put on Fleetwood Mac. I could hear Dad laughing at something, too loudly, the way he laughed when he'd had three glasses of wine and was trying very hard to make a room forget what it had just seen. I couldn't hear Brit
CHASEI asked her on Wednesday.I called from the parking lot after practice, engine running, heat on high, Owen's highlight reel open on my phone on the passenger seat, paused at minute four, where he'd set my shorthanded goal against Minnesota to some song with a lot of violins.She picked up on the second ring. "Sweetheart. Are you calling to tell me you're coming Friday? Because you are coming Friday.""I'm coming Friday.""Good. I had the navy suit pressed. It's hanging in the basement closet. Not the black. The black makes you look like you're attending your own trial.""Mom. What year did you and Dad get married?"Silence.Not long. Maybe a second and a half. But my mother never paused. My mother had an answer loaded for every question before you finished asking it."Why on earth are you asking that?""Owen asked me. At dinner. He's making a family tree for some school thing."That was a lie. I'd gotten good at those. Better than I'd been in September."Two thousand and five,"
SLOANEThe Hartley place screamed money the second we pulled up—sleek modern lines, two-and-a-half stories of glass and stone, the kind of house that cost more than most people’s entire lives. It smelled like fresh rosemary and old wealth when we stepped inside.Dad and I hauled our suitcases from
CHASEThe locker room reeked of sweat-soaked gear, fresh tape, and the cold bite of sharpened blades. Most of the Vancouver Titans had already peeled out after morning skate—laughing, slapping asses, scattering to hotels for whatever flavor of chaos they’d lined up: threesomes, one-night stands, or
SLOANEI was halfway through a very important scroll when my bedroom door swung open without so much as a courtesy knock.“Oh my god, Dad—what the hell?” I yanked the sheet up to my chin, though my silk camisole and tiny sleep shorts had already betrayed me by riding up in all the wrong places. Dad
SLOANERevenge tasted like shirtless pettiness and the faint scent of cedar body wash.I was starving for anything that wasn’t Victoria’s artfully plated grilled salmon, so I’d claimed the kitchen while the happy couple was out “finalizing wedding details.” The massive marble island gleamed under r







