Page 40 of Gap Control

It was the most honest thing I'd ever heard.

Snow continued to fall around us, melting where it touched my face, leaving cool trails down my cheeks. The world had narrowed to the soft sound TJ made low in his throat, and how he tilted his head slightly so we fit together better.

I didn't think. That was the glory of it. For once in my carefully controlled life, I acted without a strategy. I gave in to my impulse and didn't want to stop.

Not ever.

Then—

Reality flooded over me like ice water.

Panic exploded in my brain. It was sharp, immediate, and utterly merciless. Everything about the moment was suddenly too much.

My fingers curled into the soft fabric of TJ's hoodie, and then I let go. It was like I'd touched a flame and had to recoil.

I stepped back with the jerky, uncoordinated movement of someone waking from a dream they couldn't quite remember. Cold air rushed in to fill the space where TJ's warmth had been, shocking my system back to awareness of time, place, and consequence.

He opened his eyes, and the startled confusion there hit me hard. My stomach dropped.

"I—" I tugged the words out of my mouth. "I shouldn't have done that."

TJ's brow creased, his lips still flushed from kissing.

I stepped back, my boots slipping slightly on the pavement slick with melted snow. It was a full retreat.

He didn't follow. He didn't reach for me or ask the questions forming in his gaze.

I wanted to say more. My gut wanted me to apologize for wanting and then running. All that emerged was, "I'll—see you later."

They were the most inadequate words ever. He didn't move, and he didn't ask me to stay.

I turned away before I could witness his full response to my cowardice. The walk to my car was like crossing a frozen lake in a thunderstorm—each step dangerous with the surface beneath me threatening to crack at any moment.

My hand shook. I dropped my keys once before I could fit them into the lock. When I finally slid behind the wheel and pulled the door shut, the silence was absolute. It was the quiet that pressed against your eardrums and made you hyperaware of your own heartbeat.

I didn't turn the key.

I sat there gripping the steering wheel like it was the only thing keeping me tethered to earth, my knuckles white against theblack leather. My breath fogged the windshield in tiny bursts, creating a partially opaque barrier between me and the world outside.

The kiss hadn't gone wrong. I kept circling that thought, like water spiraling down a drain.

TJ didn't pull back, laugh, or look at me like I'd lost my mind. He hadn't done any of the things my neurotic imagination had rehearsed in countless scenarios. He'd looked like he didn't want it to end.

That should have been a relief. Instead, it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and realizing I'd forgotten how to fly.

I let my head fall back against the seat. A memory rushed in. I tried to stop it and not think about Nate, about history's tendency to repeat itself.

It didn't work.

Two years ago. January in Traverse City, when the cold had teeth and the snow fell in buckets. I was still with the Harriers then.

Nate Bradley was a defenseman—twenty-six to my twenty-two. He had dark hair that curled at the edges when he sweated and a brand of intelligence that made everyone else feel slightly less clever by comparison.

He'd offered me a ride home after a brutal practice stretched past ten o'clock. It was no big deal—my usual transportation got caught in the grip of a snowstorm that had turned the city into a slow-motion disaster film.

We'd stopped at his apartment first so he could grab something he'd forgotten. "Two minutes," he'd promised, but somehow two minutes became twenty.

I ended up inside with him, snow melting off my jacket onto his hardwood floors. We stood in his kitchen and talked about nothing important, subjects like hockey, winter, and Coach's increasingly creative profanity.

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