Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 11 - Chapitre 20

Chapter 11: Fallout Elias I woke up sore in a way I hadn’t been sore before, in a bed that wasn’t mine, with the memory of Asher’s voice still sitting somewhere under my ribs. *No one else gets this.* I lay there a while before I moved, cataloguing all of it — the deep ache low in my back, the particular pull every time I shifted my hips, the weight of his arm that wasn’t there anymore, the quiet of a house that had absorbed something the night before and hadn’t figured out how to be normal again yet. When I finally sat up, the pain flared sharp enough that I had to pause. Standing made it worse. Walking to the bathroom was careful, controlled, almost a limp. I caught my reflection in the mirror and looked away fast. Last night was written all over the way I moved. He was already in the kitchen when I came down, coffee in hand, not looking at his phone the way he usually did in the morning. I'm just standing there. His eyes tracked the careful way I was walking before he could st

Chapter 13: The Switch POV: Asher The hostel lobby smelled like industrial carpet cleaner and chlorine that had followed us in from three different pools already this season. Coach Reyes pinned the room list to the corkboard by the front desk, and the team crowded around it the way they always did, half looking for their own name and half looking for something to complain about. Someone had already dropped a duffel bag in the middle of the floor, and two of the sprinters were arguing over who called the room with the better view before anyone had even confirmed which rooms had views at all. "If I'm stuck with someone who talks in his sleep again, I'm switching hostels," one of the freshmen muttered, scanning the list with visible dread. "You talk in your sleep," Noah told him, deadpan, and got a shove for it. "Kann, you're with me," Noah announced, scanning the sheet. "Hale, you got stuck with Ethan. Rough deal, man, he snores like a truck." I read the list over his shoulder. El

Chapter 15: What He Sees POV: Asher I woke up before my alarm, still half-tangled in the memory of a door handle turning against a lock, still feeling the ghost of how still we'd both gone. Elias was already up, sitting on the edge of his bed, fully dressed, staring at the door like it might try the handle again on its own. "Morning," I said. "Morning." He didn't look at me. Neither of us mentioned it. We didn't need to — it was sitting in the room with us anyway, in the too-careful way he folded yesterday's clothes into his bag, in the way I kept glancing at the door myself every time footsteps passed in the hall. Someone laughed outside, ordinary morning noise, teammates heading down for breakfast, and both of us flinched at it in a way neither of us acknowledged out loud. We got ready in near silence. When I reached for my bag at the same time he reached for his, our hands brushed, and he pulled back fast enough that I felt it more than the contact itself. "We should head do

Chapter 17: Caught on Camera POV: Elias Mark's backyard was strung with cheap party lights and packed with half the swim team by the time we got there, a speaker blasting something with too much bass, a cooler already half emptied of everything but the drinks nobody wanted. Mark himself was holding court near the grill, twenty now and reminding everyone loudly, a paper crown someone had forced onto his head sitting crooked. "Kann! Hale! Get in here," he shouted, waving us over. "Drinks are in the cooler, don't touch the good stuff, that's for people who bought me actual presents." "You said gift cards were fine," Noah called from somewhere near the fence. "Gift cards are the bare minimum, Noah, show some effort next year." I laughed despite myself, took a drink I didn't really want, and let the party swallow me the way parties always did — noise, motion, teammates I'd known for years folding me into conversations I only half followed. Asher drifted near me most of the nigh

Chapter 19: Not Just Physical POV: Elias The house was empty when we got home, Marcus and Diane out for the evening, and neither of us said much on the drive back. I kept thinking about the corridor, about the sentence Asher hadn't finished, about the way I'd stood there wanting him to finish it more than I'd wanted almost anything in longer than I could admit. We ended up in the kitchen, same place we always seemed to end up when things got too heavy for the rest of the house. He leaned against the counter across from me, arms crossed, none of his usual ease in his posture. "You never let me finish," he said. "In the corridor." "I know." "Do you want me to?" I looked at him for a long moment, weighing every version of the answer I could give — the safe one, the deflecting one, the one that would let us both keep pretending this was still something we could file under benefits. None of them fit anymore. Hadn't fit for a while, if I was honest, and I was tired of the effo