Page 130 of Stuck with my Mountain Daddies

Then Beckett crouched down, scooping snow with quiet menace. “You’re dead.”

And just like that, chaos again.

Garrett dove behind a tree as if he was in an action movie. I tackled Riley into a snowbank to keep her from getting nailed, but she was laughing too hard to care either way.

Beckett had gone full military precision. Garrett was basically a snowball sniper. And Riley?

She was radiant. Laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe, cheeks flushed, eyes sparking like she ran on joy alone.

I lay there on my back in the snow, chest heaving as if I’d just sprinted ten blocks. And I couldn’t stop watching her.

Not because she looked good, which she did, but because she lookedhappy. Not the surface-level, everything’s-fine kind of happy. The real kind.

At last, nothing was weighing her down.

Damn, I’d missed that. Missed her like this.

Eventually, the chaos slowed. Garrett had snow down the back of his coat, Beckett was muttering something about “juvenile nonsense,” and Riley was beside me in the snow, catching her breath.

Everything felt quieter. Not silent. Just suspended. The world had hit pause and forgotten to press play again.

Snow kept falling. Slow, lazy flakes that caught in her hair. One curl had stuck to her cheek, damp from the snowball fight.

I reached out without thinking and brushed it back behind her ear.

She didn’t pull away. Didn’t flinch.

She looked at me. Reallylookedat me, like maybe she was seeing something she hadn’t let herself look at before.

Her smile faded a little, but not in that sad way.

“I needed that,” she said softly. “More than I realized.”

I sat up next to her, arms resting on my knees. “You know you don’t have to pretend your old life didn’t exist, right?”

She looked over, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Ava. What she did was awful. But pretending it didn’t happen doesn’t erase it.”

“And if I fight back, I just give it teeth.”

I turned to her, serious now. “Or you take the pen back. You stop letting other people write the story.”

She went still. Studied me as if she wasn’t sure whether to be mad or moved. Then she gave a soft, nervous laugh.

“That sounds terrifying.”

“Good.” I bumped her shoulder. “The best stuff usually is.”

She bit her lip. “What if I screw it up?”

“Youwill,” I said. “You’ll mess up, change your mind, probably cry more than once. But it’ll be yours. It doesn’t have to be loud or public. Just honest.”

Something shifted in her face. Only a flicker. Maybe she believed me.

And then I leaned in.

I didn’t mean to. It just happened. The space between us got smaller, and suddenly I could feel the heat coming off her skin, smell that faint vanilla in her hair, the cocoa on her breath.

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