We don't make it home.
The corridor behind the stadium is concrete and fluorescent — the unglamorous skeleton of a building that performs for millions. Empty beer kegs stacked against one wall. Electrical panels humming. The muffled roar of seventy thousand people still celebrating above us, vibrating through the ceiling like a second heartbeat. His hand is on the small of my back, steering me toward the parking structure, and every step builds the pressure that's been compressing between us since the kiss at the railing, since the blood on his face and his palms on my cheeks.
We reach the corridor junction. He stops. I stop. We're standing three feet apart in ugly fluorescent light and his nose is taped and his jersey is torn and there's dried blood on his chin and he's looking at me the way he looked at me from the turf — like I'm the only fixed point in a spinning stadium.
I don't know who moves first. Maybe I pull him in. Maybe he pushes me back. Maybe it's simultaneous — two bodies acting on the same collapse, the same surrender to a gravity that's been bending us toward each other since the couch. My back hits the concrete wall and his mouth finds mine and his hands grip my waist and the space between us becomes nothing.
It's not gentle. It's not fairy-tale romantic or soft-focus cinematic. It's raw and desperate — two people who've been pretending so hard the pretending shattered and now there's just the wreckage and the heat underneath it. His mouth is on my neck, teeth grazing the tendon, tongue tracing the line from my jaw to my collarbone, and I make a sound against the concrete that echoes down the corridor and I don't care.
My fingers find the hem of his jersey and pull it up. His skin is hot underneath — sweat-damp, the muscles of his stomach clenching under my palms as I run my hands up his ribs. He hisses through his teeth when my fingers cross a bruise from the game but doesn't pull away, just presses closer, pinning me harder against the wall with his hips. I can feel him through the fabric — hard, urgent, his body saying everything his mouth has been holding back for weeks.
He lifts me. One arm under my thigh, the other bracing against the wall behind my head, and my legs wrap around his waist and the new angle presses us together in a way that makes my vision blur. My skirt rides up. His hand slides along my bare thigh — rough, calloused, the hand of a man who grips footballs for a living — and his fingers find the edge of my underwear and pause there, his forehead dropping against mine.
"Mia." Ragged. A question wrapped in my name.
"Yes." No hesitation. No calculation. Just the word, plain and sure, the truest thing I've said in weeks.
His fingers push the fabric aside and touch me and my head falls back against the concrete, my mouth opening on a sound that's half his name and half something older than language. He's watching my face — I can feel his eyes on me even with mine closed, reading every reaction the way he reads a defense, adjusting, learning, finding the rhythm that makes my breathing fracture. His thumb circles in slow, deliberate strokes while his fingers work inside me and the combination is methodical and devastating and nothing like a man who does anything by accident.
My hands are on his belt. Fumbling, urgent, my fingers clumsy with need. He helps with one hand — buckle, button, zipper — his mouth still on my neck, his other hand still between my thighs, and when I wrap my hand around him his breath catches against my skin and his whole body shudders, the involuntary response of a man who's been holding himself together for too long.
He pushes into me and we both stop breathing. The fullness of it, the heat, the way my body opens around him and then tightens, pulling him deeper — it erases everything. Every contract clause, every camera angle, every PR schedule, every lie. There is nothing in the world except the wall behind my back and his body inside mine and the sound of his breathing coming apart against my shoulder.
He moves. Slow at first — a withdrawal that makes me whimper, a return that makes me gasp — his hips rolling with a control that's clearly costing him something enormous, his hands gripping my thighs, his forehead pressed against mine. I can see his eyes this close, green and blown wide and stripped of every mask he's ever worn. No smirk. No performance. No charm deployed as weaponry. Just a man looking at a woman while he's inside her and showing her everything he has.
"Harder." The word leaves my mouth before permission is granted, raw and direct, and something breaks behind his eyes. The control dissolves. His hips snap forward and the new rhythm is faster, deeper, his body slamming me into the wall with a force that would hurt if every nerve in my body weren't busy short-circuiting. My nails dig into his shoulders through the jersey. My legs tighten around his waist. Each thrust drives a sound out of me that bounces off the concrete walls and comes back distorted, louder, the echo turning us into a chorus.
His mouth finds mine and the kiss is messy and graceless and perfect — teeth catching lips, his tongue against mine, both of us breathing into each other because there isn't enough air in this corridor for what we're doing. His hand slides between us, finds me, and his thumb picks up the same deliberate rhythm from before, now synchronized with his hips, and the dual sensation builds a pressure at the base of my spine that's bigger than anything my body knows how to contain.
"Jared—" His name is a warning, a plea, a white flag.
"I know." Two words, strained, barely audible. "I know. Let go."
The orgasm breaks through me like something structural collapsing — a wave that starts where his body meets mine and radiates outward through my hips, my stomach, my chest. I come apart around him, my body clenching, my voice filling the corridor with sounds I'll never unhear, my hands gripping his shoulders hard enough to bruise.
He follows seconds later — his rhythm breaking, his hips stuttering, a groan torn from his chest that vibrates through my entire body as he buries himself deep and holds there, shaking, his face pressed into my neck.
We stay like that. Pinned together against the concrete, his forehead on my shoulder, my fingers in his hair, both of us breathing hard. The stadium hums above us. Somewhere down the corridor a door slams and footsteps echo and fade.
He lifts his head. Presses his forehead against mine. His eyes are open and close and they're the greenest thing I've ever seen and they're terrified. Not of me. Of what just happened. Of the fact that the pretending is over and whatever this is has a pulse and neither of us knows what to do with it.
Neither of us speaks. No cameras. No script. No Claire with a tablet and a schedule. Just the concrete and the fluorescent light and the terrifying knowledge that whatever this was — whatever just happened against this wall in the ugly guts of a stadium while seventy thousand people celebrated above us — it wasn't in the contract.
He sets me down gently. My legs are unsteady and his arm stays around my waist until he's sure I'm standing. We fix ourselves in silence — his belt, my skirt, small practical adjustments that feel absurdly mundane after what just happened.
We walk to the car. My hand finds his somewhere in the dark of the parking structure. His fingers close around mine — tight, certain, the grip of a man who's made a decision he can't take back. Neither of us lets go.