Page 4 of The Lies We Play

We chose it.

After three years, we signed what we could—promised what mattered.

Still, now and then, some old bruise inside one of us reaches for the promise just to see if it holds.

I feel Creed go still behind me.

Halston looks at him.

Creed tries to smile, but it barely gets past his mouth. That’s his tell. The almost-smile. The expensive little lie he uses when wanting something makes him feel exposed.

“You say that like you think I forgot,” Halston says.

Creed’s fingers flex once over my stomach.

“Did you?”

Oh, Creed.

My beautiful, impossible Creed, who can take a hit into the boards hard enough to make an arena go silent, then skate back to the bench with blood on his mouth and murder in his eyes. Who can sit beneath the fluorescent locker-room lights with ice taped to half his body and still make losing look like a personal insult to his ancestors. Who has made an art form out of control—on the ice, in front of cameras, in every clean answer he gives when reporters ask questions designed to make him bleed where no one can bandage him.

Yet love still makes him ask permission to exist.

Halston sets the papers aside.

Carefully.

As if one wrong move might send Creed out of reach.

Then Halston rises.

Creed’s hand slips from my waist.

I feel the loss instantly.

Halston steps close.

Creed looks up at him.

For a second, neither man speaks.

That is the part that ruins me. Not the kiss that I know is coming. Not even the wanting, though there is so much of it in the room I can barely breathe around it.

It is the looking.

Halston looks at Creed as if he sees every locked door inside him and knows which ones were built from fear.

Creed looks at Halston as if he would hand him anything if Halston would just promise not to leave him outside the circle.

Then Halston reaches for him.

His hand curls around the back of Creed’s neck, fingers sliding into his hair. Creed’s lashes lower, and his expression shifts so fast it hurts to witness. The arrogance falls away. The control. The gleaming, public version of him.

What remains is the man who crawled into bed between us last week at three in the morning after a road trip from hell, without a word. Just Creed pushing his face into my hair while Halston lay one hand between his shoulders, as if touch was the only language Creed could accept without flinching.

Halston bends.

“Never,” he says.