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“I missed this,” I tell him. “Not just — I missed this, but I missed everything. Being able to just look at you without checking who’s watching.”

“Nobody’s watching.” He presses his forehead to mine, still moving, still slow. “Nobody has to know anything tonight except us.”

I feel that settle through me as much as anything physical does — the specific luxury of it, no cover story, no time limit, no one downstairs who might walk in. Just this room, this bed, this boy who drove here to say the two words that changed everything.

He picks up the pace gradually, testing, reading my body the way he reads everything, and I meet him with every roll of my hips, my hands finding his shoulders, his back, the ink I’ve traced so many times I could draw it blind. He works me toward the edge slow and deliberate, in no rush to get either of us there, savoring every gasp he pulls out of me like he’s been waiting six days specifically to hear them again.

“I love you,” I breathe, somewhere in the middle of it, and he groans against my throat like the words themselves undo him a little.

“I love you too. God, I love you.”

He builds the pace slower still before he lets it climb, drawing it out, both of us trembling with how much we’re holding back, until neither of us can hold back any longer. His cock drags deep with every stroke, filling me completely, and the slow drag of him against every sensitive inch of me has my whole body coiling tighter with each pass. I meet him thrust for thrust, my nails dragging down his back, both of us chasing the same thing after six days of aching for it — not urgent anymore, just inevitable, the specific gathering pressure of two people who know exactly where this ends and aren’t afraid of getting there.

His hand slides between us, finding my clit, and the added pressure right where I need it has my hips bucking up against him, desperate, my whole body chasing the release building low in my belly. He reads it — reads me, the way he always does — and drives harder, deeper, his own control finally fraying at the edges, his breathing gone ragged against my throat.

“Theo — I’m close, I’m so close —”

“I’ve got you.” His voice is wrecked, barely holding together. “Let go. I’m right there with you.”

I do. The orgasm crashes through me harder than the first, my whole body clenching around his cock, back arching off the bed, a cry tearing out of me that I don’t even try to muffle. He follows almost instantly, his hips stuttering, a broken groan of my name against my skin as he empties into me, his whole body shaking with the force of it.

When I come again it takes him with me. Both of us falling apart together, his name and mine tangled in the same breath, and he doesn’t pull away after — he stays right there, buried deep, forehead pressed to mine, both of us shaking through the aftershocks together instead of separately, his cock still twitching inside me as the last waves roll through both of us at once.

We stay tangled like that for a long while, neither of us moving, neither of us wanting to. Eventually he shifts onto his side, pulling me with him so I’m tucked against his chest, his arms around me, my head fitting into the specific space under his chin like it was built for exactly that.

“Six days,” he says, quiet, into my hair. “I’m never doing that again.”

“Good.”

“I mean it.” His arms tighten around me. “Whatever happens. Whatever’s hard. We’re in the same room for it from now on.”

I lie there listening to his heartbeat slow back to normal, both of us breathing hard and completely unwilling to move, and I let myself feel, fully and without any bracing at all, exactly how much has changed since he knocked on that door two hours ago.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he says, after a long while, his fingers tracing slow patterns against my back.

“Okay.”

“I called your dad. Before I came here tonight.” He says it carefully, watching for my reaction. “I got his number from Sloane, who apparently got it from you months ago for some emergency-contact thing. I told him I needed to talk to him.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I’m not going anywhere. That I know what this looks like — a scholarship kid with a spreadsheet full of debt showing up to promise your father I can take care of you — but I told him I meant it anyway. I told him I love you in a way I didn’t know I was capable of loving anyone, and that I already love the babies, even though I haven’t met them, even though they’re barely bigger than strawberries right now. I told him he doesn’t have to worry about whether I’m going to show up. I already decided that a long time ago. I just needed six days to catch up to my own decision.”

I press my face into his chest, overwhelmed all over again.

“What did he say?”

“He said thank you.” Theo’s voice goes soft. “And then he told me to take care of you. Like I needed the reminder. Like I wasn’t already planning to spend the rest of my life doing exactly that.” He pauses, something almost amused moving across his face. “He also asked about the draft. Very directly. Litigator-style questions — timeline, what happens if things fall through, whether I have a backup plan if hockey doesn’t work out the way we’re hoping.”

“That sounds like him.”

“I appreciated it, honestly. He wasn’t trying to scare me off. He was making sure I’d actually thought it through.” Theo’s hand finds mine, laces our fingers together. “I told him the truth. That the Bruins are building a plan around me finishing here, that the development timeline gives us room, that even if none of it works out the way we want, I’ve got a degree coming and I’m not afraid of building something from nothing. I’ve done it before.”

“He probably liked that answer.”

“He said I sounded like someone he’d want representing him in court.” Theo almost smiles. “Which I’m choosing to take as high praise, coming from him.”

I lift my head to look at him, and he looks back at me steady, certain, all in exactly the way he promised on my front porch twenty minutes and an entire lifetime ago.