All Chapters of BOUND TO THE BILLIONAIRE CAPTAIN: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

Clara's POV I wrote down his mother's lullaby on the back of a napkin from Mr. Tran's at 4am and spent the next eighteen hours trying to figure out if I was a thoughtful person or crazy. My brain had gotten stuck on the lullaby. Three up, four down, long pause. No way I'd be getting to sleep. I sat cross-legged on the green sofa in the dark, the radiator whining loudly behind me. I drew five wobbly lines across the napkin with my purple pen, and carefully played through each note of the lullaby as my first singing teacher had taught me. I hummed so I wouldn't wake up Allie, who wasn't home. Most nights this week she wasn't home, and I had decided, being the generous person I am with plenty of secrets of my own, that it must be Shawn. I was happy for her. It was in D minor, 3/4 time. It went up a sixth, which makes it feel like it's grasping for something on a high shelf. Then it paused on a suspension, dragging out that note for an extra beat. After humming it around forty times

Allie POV Shawn asked me again at eleven on Saturday morning, in the same booth at Little Wren with the same oat milk latte, and I had my answer ready in my teeth like a nut I'd been cracking all week. I had brought the frog mug in my tote bag, wrapped in a dish towel, and I set it on the table between us before he could finish his sentence and slid it across the wood with one finger. "It's yours," I said. "I know it's mine, technically, but it's been yours since you borrowed it with the face of a man who meant to bring it back. I'd like you to keep it. No." He looked at the mug and then at me. "No to the mug, or no to the other thing?" "All of the above." "Okay," Shawn said, and let out a breath that was almost a laugh. He drummed two fingers on the table, the pattern I knew, and then stopped, as though he had remembered he was no longer allowed to. "Can I ask why?" "Because you want closure." "Is that bad?" "Closure is what people ask for when they want to be forgiven witho

Clara's POV By the time I rounded the corner of the east concourse, mopping, these two radio nerds were arguing about a man's shoulders and I couldn't really do anything. It was Tuesday night and just after 11 o'clock. It was very quiet and dark in the building except for the long strip of yellow light spilling across the press table. Two sophomores were putting up microphones for this Saturday's radio show. They both had the same Briar Radio hoodie on so I knew who they were. They both were very familiar to me like most people who work late in this building. I could tell who they were by the trash they left from their sneakers. The tall one had a habit of drinking oat milk and left empty cardboard cups in the cup holder. The other one, who wore glasses, had a habit of eating sunflower seeds and left an impeccable pile of shells. They were practicing their introduction for before the game and they were both acting like they were famous. "That's fine, but we have to do the Redwoo

Allie POV Clara had slept on the couch with her boots on and the lamp burning, which is how you sleep when you have decided to leave quickly, and at nine on Saturday morning I stood in the kitchen doorway with a coffee in each hand and the growing, unpleasant suspicion that I had been a terrible friend for about a week. I had noticed the pieces without putting them together, the way you notice a pot boiling over in another room. She had said fine eleven times on Thursday, which is ten more than a person who is fine. She had stopped humming. She flinched when the radiator knocked, a small whole-body shudder like a horse that has heard a branch break, and when I asked about Carter she answered in tidy, evenly spaced sentences, like someone reading from a card. She had not asked me one thing about Shawn, which, considering that I had spent three days working out how to tell her I'd said no and meant it, was either a miracle or a very bad sign. I had been busy, is what I'm saying. I ha

Carter POV There is a kind of quiet that settles in a hockey player's body just before a hit, a stillness that starts at the base of the skull and spreads out through the shoulders, and I had felt it a thousand times and never once like this. "That's him," Clara said again, so softly that I read it off her lips. For weeks I had been carrying a shape. I had built it in the dark out of almost nothing, a shadow with a stick, a faceless boy in a basement in Arizona, and I had kept it at a careful distance in the part of my mind where I stored the things I could do nothing about. I had imagined it a hundred ways. It had never occurred to me that it would be wearing rust and cream, laughing, with a bag of sunflower seeds in the pocket of its warm-up jacket. I looked at him for exactly as long as I could stand. He was tall, well-built, and entirely unremarkable, which was the worst part, because I had always assumed there would be something to see. He had the face of every boy who has b