WE NEED TO TALK

Maeve's POVI closed the laptop and sat there for a moment. Then I stood up, put my things in my bag, and walked out of the library. I had been sitting with the decision for two weeks in the same way I sat with difficult legal arguments, turning it over, examining it from every angle, looking for the flaw that would make it untenable. Looking for the reason that outweighed all the other reasons. I had been thorough about it, the way I was thorough about everything that mattered, and the conclusion I kept arriving at was the same one every time. I was done waiting for a readiness that was never going to feel clean. There was no version of ready that came without the weight of September and the weight of my family and the weight of everything that sat between us. I had understood that on the river path last Tuesday when I had felt him watching from his usual point and had felt, alongside the familiar complicated pull of the bond, something that was simply tired. Tired of managin

OPPOSITE WORDS

Declan's POVShe asked first. I had been ready for that. "Why have you been watching me?" And I had asked back, because it was the only fair response, the only question that matched hers in weight. "Why did you call me on New Year's Eve?" Neither of us answered and the apartment settled around us in the silence, and we stood there on opposite sides of it and I watched her do what she did, which was hold herself exactly where she needed to be and look at me with those brown eyes that the bond had been giving me in impressions for months. She was so beautiful. I had thought it in September and I had been thinking it in some form every day since and standing in my own apartment with her in it for the first time, the apartment that smelled like me and not like her and was therefore the wrong scent as far as the bond was concerned. "You first," she said. "Ladies first," I said. Something crossed her face that might have been the beginning of a smile before she caught it. "I came he

TEETH AND FURY

Maeve's POVHe blocked the door without thinking about it, I could tell, because the thinking came after. He was just there, suddenly between me and the exit, and he looked almost as surprised by it as I was. "Move," I said. "No," he said. I looked at him. "Declan." "Stop running Maeve," he said. "Every time this gets close to something real you run. I'm done watching you do it." The nerve of that landed somewhere that immediately became anger, which was fine, anger I knew how to use. "I'm running?" I spoke. "Do you want to talk to me about running? You, who told me it was a mistake the morning after you bit me, who avoided me for three months with surgical precision, who lied to a scout in your coach's office—you want to stand at my exit and tell me I'm the one who runs?" Something moved through his face. "That's fair," he said. "All of that is fair." "I know it's fair," I said. "So move." "No," he said again. I took a step toward him. "You don't get to do this. You don't ge

THE BOND DOUBLES DOWN

Declan's POVWe made it to the couch. There was a lamp that shifted and a book that fell and neither of us paid any attention to either of those things because the last four months had built up a kind of pressure that left no room for graceful, and by the time we got to the couch we were both breathing like we had been running. She was furious. I could feel it in the way she moved, in the way her hands were in my hair and not gentle about it, in the way she kissed me like she had an argument to finish that words weren't adequate for. I was not far behind her. Four months of watching and managing and standing on paths below library windows had produced something that came out now with the kind of force that had nothing polished about it. Good. I was done with polished. "You're mine," I said against her neck, which was not a managed thing to say but I was past managing. "Don't," she said, but she tilted her head anyway, giving me access to the place on her neck where my mark was st

NOTHING CHANGES

Maeve's POVThe dawn came in through the window the way dawn crept up on you in February, slow and inevitable, and I woke up before he did and lay there for a moment thinking about what I had done. The bond was warm and close and louder than it had been since September, that doubling quality it had taken on that I was going to have to find a way to manage, and Declan was asleep behind me with his arm across my waist and his breath even against the back of my neck. I should not have stayed. I had known I should not stay last night when the knot released and I could have left, and now it was morning and I was lying in his apartment thinking about my mother's voice saying we have plans for you and they don't include teenage mistakes. I started moving carefully. "Don't," he said, which meant he had been awake for a while. I stopped. "I have to go." "Not yet," he said. "Declan." He sat up behind me, and I turned to look at him in the grey morning light, his hair badly behaved, his

RULES

Declan's POVShe came back two days later and we made rules. It was her idea. She arrived in the evening with her bag and her composure and sat down at my kitchen table. She put her phone face down on it like she was calling a meeting, and I made coffee because my hands needed something to do. I set it in front of her and sat across from her and waited. "No public acknowledgment," she said. "Nobody knows. Not your teammates, not my roommate, not anyone." "Marcus already suspects," I said. "Marcus can suspect all he wants," she said. "He doesn't get confirmation." "Alana?" I said, because Alana had been many things but subtle was not one of them. "Alana knows enough," she said. "She doesn't need more." She wrapped her hands around the coffee mug. "No social media, obviously. No being seen together publicly in any way that could be read as more than two students at the same university." I drank my coffee and said nothing. "When you get drafted," she said, "we deal with that then