The Inevitable

CHASE

I lasted forty-five minutes in my room.

Shower. Change. Fifteen minutes lying on my back staring at the ceiling fan. Ten minutes pretending to scroll through my phone. Five minutes arguing with myself.

Then I got up.

The house was quiet in the way it got after nine—Mom and Richard probably asleep.

Her light was on. The thin gold line under her door was the only brightness in the dark hallway.

I knocked once. Quiet. Deliberate.

A beat of silence.

“Yeah?”

I pushed the door open.

She was at her desk, laptop open, a half-empty mug of something that had probably been hot an hour ago sitting beside the keyboard. Her hair was down—loose, dark, spilling over one shoulder. She’d changed from whatever she’d been wearing when I came home into an oversized tee and those sleep shorts that had been ruining my life for three weeks.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” Her voice was careful. Controlled. The same register she used when she was deciding how much to give.

I stepped inside. Left the door open—deliberate, conscious, necessary—and stopped in the middle of the room. Arms at my sides. Not crossing them. Trying not to perform.

“We need to talk about what happened,” I said.

The words came out even. I’d rehearsed them in the car, actually. Three hours of highway and those seven words were the ones I’d landed on. Direct. No preamble. No pretending the last week hadn’t been an exercise in mutual, excruciating avoidance.

Sloane looked at me for a moment. Then she closed her laptop—slow, deliberate—and turned in her chair to face me fully. Feet coming down from under her and planting on the floor. Hands folded in her lap.

Composed. Ready.

“Okay,” she said.

“It was a mistake,” I said. “What happened in the kitchen. I—” I stopped. Exhaled once through my nose. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

Something moved through her face. Fast. Gone before I could read it.

“You didn’t do it alone,” she said. Flat. Factual.

“I know. But I pushed it there. The fight, the—” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I was angry and I took it somewhere it had no business going. That’s on me.”

“I kissed you back, Chase.”

“I know.”

“So stop doing the chivalrous thing where you take all the blame. It’s annoying.”

I almost laughed. Almost. “Fine. We both did it. It was still a mistake.”

She looked at her hands. “Yeah.”

“It can’t happen again.”

“No,” she agreed. “It can’t.”

The words sat between us—the right words, the rational words, the words that made complete and obvious sense given every variable in the equation. Our parents were getting married. We were going to be family, legally and permanently, in a matter of weeks. We were going to be at the same table at Christmas for the rest of our lives. We were going to have the same last name attached to the same address in the same sentence on legal documents.

We were going to be siblings.

And I was standing in her bedroom at nine-fifteen at night and my hands wouldn’t stop remembering what her waist felt like.

“The camp was good,” I said, because I needed to say something that wasn’t any of that. “Scouts were there. I played well the last day.”

“I know,” she said. “I read the recap.”

I stopped. “There was a recap?”

“The camp posts a daily summary. I have a G****e Alert for your name.” She said it with the absolute, terrible composure of someone confessing to something minor. Like mentioning she’d used my shampoo once by accident.

“You have a G****e Alert for my name,” I repeated.

“It’s journalism.”

“It’s a G****e Alert.”

“For journalistic purposes.”

“You set it up while I was at camp.”

“I set it up when I started covering the summer games. It’s professional practice.”

“Is it professional practice to check it every day?”

Her chin came up. “I check all my alerts every day. That’s how alerts work.”

“Sloane—”

“The piece is running Tuesday,” she said, pivoting with the speed of someone who’d been practicing the redirect. “Derek confirmed this morning. I wanted to tell you before it went live.”

I looked at her. Really looked.

She was doing the thing she did when she was scared—going clinical, going professional, building walls out of vocabulary and logistics because the alternative was standing in the open.

I recognized it because I did the exact same thing.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the heads up.”

“It’s honest,” she said. “The piece. I want you to know that going in. It’s not a puff piece and it’s not a hit. It’s just—what I saw. What you said. I didn’t editorialize.”

“I’m not worried about the piece.”

“You should at least be prepared for—”

“Sloane.” My voice came out lower than I intended. “I’m not worried about the piece.”

She stopped.

The room went quiet.

“I thought about you,” I said. “At camp.”

Her hands tightened in her lap. Just slightly.

“Every night,” I said. “Which was—I know. I know how that sounds. I know what we just said thirty seconds ago. I’m not telling you to do anything with it. I just—” I stopped. Tried to find the version of this that was honest without being a catastrophe. “I thought I’d get there and the space would fix it. Get the distance and it would stop.”

“Did it?” she asked. Quiet.

“No.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“Me neither,” she said. So quietly I almost missed it.

The admission landed like a blade between my ribs—clean, precise, the kind of wound you don’t feel immediately. Just a sudden warmth spreading somewhere it had no business being.

Neither of us moved.

“This is a disaster,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Like, a genuinely complicated, legitimately catastrophic disaster.”

“I’m aware.”

“Our parents are getting married.”

“In seven weeks.”

“We’re going to be family.”

“Legally.”

“Chase.” Her voice cracked on my name—barely, just the faintest splinter—and it undid me completely. “What are we doing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And for once in my life I wasn’t performing the answer. Wasn’t giving the version that sounded confident and in control. Just the truth, plain and useless. “I genuinely don’t know.”

She stood up.

One step toward me.

Then stopped herself—hand lifting and falling back to her side like she’d thought better of it.

“We said it was a mistake,” she said. Working it out loud. Thinking through it the way she thought through every problem—methodically, rigorously, like if she examined all the angles long enough the answer would declare itself. “We said it can’t happen again.”

“We did.”

“And those are both true statements.”

“They are.”

“So.”

“So.”

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

And the problem—the actual, structural, load-bearing problem with the entire argument we’d just constructed—was that true statements and inevitable ones weren’t the same thing. Something could be a mistake and still be coming. You could know exactly where the ice was thin and still feel the pull of it under your feet.

“You should go,” she said. Her voice had gone unsteady at the edges. “If we’re doing the responsible thing, you should just—go back to your room and we should both sleep and tomorrow we’ll—”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re right.”

I didn’t move.

She didn’t either.

“Chase.” My name in her mouth—not sharp now, not a weapon—just my name, just the two syllables, stripped of everything except how much it cost her to say it.

“I know,” I said.

“We agreed—”

“I know.”

“Then why are you still—”

“Because you’re still standing there,” I said. “And I’m still standing here. And we’ve been having the responsible conversation for five minutes and neither of us has actually moved.”

She exhaled. Shaky. Real.

“I hate you,” she whispered. The way she’d said it in the kitchen—not a weapon, just the only word big enough to hold what she actually meant.

“I know,” I said again. Softer.

I crossed the room.

She watched me come—not stepping back, not stepping forward, just watching with those wide, dark-green eyes and that expression I’d been trying to decode for weeks. Not fear. Not anger.

Want.

Terrified, reluctant, furious want.

I stopped in front of her. Close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off her skin. Close enough to see the rapid flutter of her pulse at her throat.

I lifted my hand—slow, giving her every second to stop me—and tucked the loose strand of hair behind her ear.

Fingers resting against her jaw.

Thumb at her cheekbone.

“Tell me to go,” I said. Low. Rough. Meant it completely.

She looked up at me. Her hands came up—pressing flat against my chest—and I thought for one second she was going to push.

She didn’t push.

She grabbed my shirt.

I kissed her.

Different this time.

No rage behind it—none of the violence and fury that had driven the kitchen collision. This was something else entirely. Slower. Deeper. Intentional in a way that the first kiss hadn’t been, the first kiss having been an accident of combustion.

This wasn’t an accident.

This was a choice we were making with full knowledge of what it cost.

She kissed me back with the same awful, aching deliberateness—hands fisting in my shirt, pulling me closer while every rational part of both of us catalogued the distance we were burning through and couldn’t seem to stop. Her mouth opened under mine and I made a sound low in my chest—involuntary, helpless—against her lips.

I walked her backward until her knees hit the desk and she gasped—startled—and I caught her, one arm around her waist, and used the grip to pull her flush against me instead. She came willingly, completely, her arms winding around my neck, her body arching into mine like she’d been waiting for this exact alignment.

I kissed her jaw.

Her temple.

The corner of her mouth.

Back to her lips—slower—tasting every part of her mouth with a patience I hadn’t known I possessed.

Her fingers slid into my hair—not yanking, not punishing, just holding. Like she needed something to anchor her.

I knew the feeling.

I kissed her until we were both breathing too hard and my back was to the wall and her forehead was pressed to my chest and neither of us could remember which of us had moved last.

We stood there—shaking—breathing each other’s air.

“This,” she said, into the front of my shirt, “is a catastrophically bad idea.”

“The worst,” I agreed.

“We’re going to regret this.”

“Probably.”

She tipped her head back and looked at me—flushed, wrecked, more honest than I’d ever seen her.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Okay?” I stared at her.

“I don’t know what we’re doing,” she said. “And I know it’s a disaster. And I know we literally just—not three minutes ago—” She stopped. Let out a short, bewildered breath that was almost a laugh. “But okay.”

I looked at her face. The freckles across her nose. The slightly swollen curve of her bottom lip. The look in her eyes that was terrified and certain in equal measure.

“Okay,” I said.

And I kissed her again.

Because neither of us had moved toward the door.

And both of us already knew we weren’t going to.