Page 51 of Cold Comeback
"Gideon, I'm going to—"
"Yeah," he breathed, "me too."
The orgasm hit me like a hard shot to the chest—sudden and overwhelming and making me grateful for the shelving holding me upright. Gideon followed seconds later, his face buried in my neck, body shuddering against mine.
We stayed pressed together for a moment, breathing hard and trying to remember how to function. The storage room smelled like cleaning supplies, sex, and a lingering sweetness from the face paint.
Reality crashed back slowly. First, the awareness that we were still in public. Then, voices in the hallway outside—Wren calling someone's name, getting closer.
Gideon stepped back so quickly he nearly knocked over a mop bucket. His hair was wrecked, his shirt rumpled, and a flush was spreading up his neck.
"Shit." He was already trying to smooth his hair and straighten his clothes. "The team—what if someone heard us?"
I watched him frantically attempt to erase evidence of what had just happened, and something twisted in my gut.
"So we're back to this?" I asked, tucking my shirt back in. "Pretending it didn't happen?"
"That's not—" He stopped and ran both hands through his hair. "You don't understand. If someone heard us, if they figure it out—"
"Then we deal with it. I'm not asking for a press conference. I'm asking you to stop treating this like a crime."
"It's… not that simple."
"It is. You're scared it makes you weak. It doesn't."
The voices in the hallway were getting closer. We both froze, listening.
"...need to wrap this up soon. Traffic's going to be murder..." Wren's voice moved past the storage room without stopping.
When the sound faded, Gideon's shoulders sagged slightly. "I should get back out there." His gaze met mine.
I opened the door, stepping out into the bright fluorescent light of the hallway. My legs felt unsteady, and I was pretty sure I looked like I'd been thoroughly debauched in a closet, but I didn't care.
Behind me, I heard Gideon take a shaky breath before following.
The rest of the cleanup passed in silence. We worked efficiently, professionally, like two teammates who hadn't jerked each other off only twenty minutes earlier. The others didn't seem to notice anything unusual, though Linc gave me a strange look when he caught me adjusting my collar for the third time.
In the parking lot afterward, most of the team had already left. I unlocked my car and rolled down the window, then looked back to where Gideon stood by his truck, keys in hand, staring at the pavement.
"Figure out what you want, Gideon," I called, not caring who might overhear. "I'll be here when you do, but I won't be your dirty secret."
I drove away without looking back, leaving him alone in the lot.
On the drive home, my body still hummed with the aftereffects of what had happened in that closet—the taste of him on my lips, the feel of his hands on my skin, and how he'd looked at me with wonder in his eyes.
The panic afterward stuck with me, too. He'd immediately started erasing evidence, building walls, and retreating into captain mode.
Back at the team house, I found Pluto in the kitchen, constructing what appeared to be a sandwich of architectural significance.
"How'd the charity thing go?" he asked around a mouthful of every condiment we owned.
"Good. Kids had fun. Grimmy only terrorized half of them."
"Progress." He paused in his sandwich engineering. "You okay? You look like you wrestled a bear."
"Something like that."
I grabbed a beer from the fridge and headed upstairs, leaving Pluto to his culinary experiment. In my room, I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled out my phone, scrolling through the photos Grimmy had taken throughout the event.
