Page 42 of The Longest Shot
You chose wrong, kid. Now you’re going to pay for it.
He walks away, his expensive loafers clicking against the marble in a rhythm that sounds like a countdown to my execution. Several people in the lobby are staring now, that rubbernecking instinct people get when they sense drama but don’t know the situation yet.
Morgan hasn’t moved. She’s looking at me like I’ve just violated some fundamental law of physics by doing something helpful without immediately undermining it with a fart joke. I don't know whether I should walk away, or say something, or wait until she goes and?—
"Follow me," she says, her voice low and controlled, giving away nothing.
Oh, shit. Round two.
seventeen
MORGAN
Everythingin my mind just detonated.
It’s not a controlled blast, but messy and chaotic, because every piece of data I’ve collected on James Fitzgerald over the past three years is suddenly useless. Because the man who just torched his golden-boy status for me doesn’t fit anywhere in my careful classification system.
My pulse hammers so hard I can feel it in my teeth. The red EXIT sign above a service stairwell catches my eye—perfect. I grab his arm without thinking, and the contact hits like pure voltage, the first voluntary touch in three years bringing back everything my mind tried to delete.
The solid heat of his forearm.
The way his muscles cord beneath my grip.
His hands in my hair on that beach.
His mouth against my throat.
The way he held me like I was precious, before he broke me.
I yank him through the door before my knees buckle, and the stairwell swallows us in dust and shadows. A single bulb overhead throws harsh light that turns his face into something carved from stone and secrets. The air tastes stale, but he smells like home.
I whirl on him. “What was that supposed to prove?”
The words come out serrated as I brace for the usual routine: the thousand-watt grin, the charming deflection, or some stupid joke that'll be delivered with that infuriating eternal-sunshine energy. I almost beg for him to give me the jester, because I understand that, and I can hate that.
But he doesn’t.
He just stands there, shoulders squared like he’s about to take a hit, and absorbs my anger without a single defensive joke. The manic energy that usually radiates from him has been replaced by something that looks dangerously like the man I glimpsed for two weeks three summers ago.
Something quieter and steadier.
“Galloway’s a predator," he says, simple and stark, with no performance and no punchline. “And I’m sorry.”
My heart stops.
“For spraying you on the ice… for the locker room… for the jokes after Kellerman dropped the bar… for all of it.” His voice drops. “For before.”
Before.
One word, and I’m drowning, twenty-one and eighteen simultaneously, standing in this stairwell and sitting on the hood of that truck. The word carries everything—late-night conversations where he actually listened, his laugh when I made a joke, the way he kissed me—and the moment it shattered.
“I should’ve done something different three years ago," he says, quiet and earnest. "Instead of being a coward.”
The apology demolishes me.
Every carefully constructed barrier I’ve built crumbles to dust. Because this is him actually acknowledging that he hurt me, that he sees it, and that he cares about it. And, best of all—worst of all?—he means it, because the boy whoalwaysruns from sincerity is standing here bleeding it.
I refuse to cry. But my eyes betray me anyway. And, suddenly, all the hardness and loneliness and goddamn fuckingstrengthI've had to maintain to protect myself and support others fractures into a million pieces. In its place is something that probably looks a lot like hope.
