Jude [CHAPTER 3, 4] | Wexley Sentinels

The tie was going to kill him before the night did.

Jude had adjusted it three times already—in the elevator, in the lobby mirror, once more in the reflective surface of a passing waiter’s tray—and it still felt like a very polite hand around his throat. He looked good. He knew he looked good. His social media comments would have a field day if he posted right now, black tie, Manhattan ballroom, the whole bit.

But he wasn’t going to post. Why? Because he was too busy nodding at appropriate intervals while a man named Robert Stanley explained the correct way to run a post route.

The man was maybe sixty. Bald. His tuxedo fit well. His watch cost more than what Jude’s family made in a year. He had opinions. A lot of them.

“The problem with this generation’s receivers,” the man said, “is they don’t study the game. Not really. They practice the athleticism but they don’t study it.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Jude said.

“Now when I played in ‘84—”

“You played?” Jude asked, because the man needed something and Jude Ambrose, even in a ballroom he had no interest in, even running on four hours of sleep and the bone-deep exhaustion he never mentioned to anyone, could still give a man what he needed.

The man lit up. Launched into something about a high school championship in 1984. Jude nodded and smiled.

​The Wexley Endowment Gala was a suffocating sea of black-tie tailoring, glittering chandeliers, and old money. It was the complete opposite of the loud, chaotic parties where Jude usually held court. Here, the silence beneath the string quartet was... exhausting. Jude was playing his part perfectly—the charming, well-behaved golden boy of the Sentinels—but his social battery was running out at an alarming rate.

Across the ballroom, he saw Hayden was talking, being effortlessly magnetic at a cluster of donors who all looked slightly stunned by their own luck at being near him. Cole was standing slightly apart from a group, present without being in it, which was the most Cole thing possible. Emris had the expression he always wore at events like this—faintly bored and deeply uninterested in pretending otherwise.

Rhys was nowhere to be seen.

And lately, it’s becoming an increasingly common occurrence.

“—and that’s why route discipline is everything,” the man finished.

“Couldn't agree more,” Jude said. “Mr. Stanley, it has been a genuine education. Will you excuse me for just one second?”

He extricated himself with a smile and a handshake and moved through the crowd with the ease of someone who had learned early that the trick to any room was to look like you belonged in it.

He found Rhys near the far end of the bar, leaning against a marble pillar, looking like a ridiculously arrogant Greek god in a tailored Tom Ford tux, swirling a drink and glaring at absolutely nothing.

“Captain.” Jude stopped beside him. “You enjoying this?”

Rhys glanced at him sideways.

“Immensely.”

“You’re lying.”

“Beautifully, though.”

Jude snorted. “I’m hitting the Meatpacking District as soon as we’re released from this hostage situation. Somewhere loud. Somewhere nobody knows what NIL stands for. I need it bad. Sooo, you coming?”

“Yeah. Why not,” Rhys said, his jaw tight, downing the rest of his drink in one aggressive swallow. “For some days I forgot who I was. But not anymore.”

Jude looked at him.

Rhys usually carried himself like the world was a carpet rolled out specifically for his feet. He did not usually look like he wanted to punch a hole through a wall.

“Trouble in paradise?” Jude asked lightly. He knew Rhys’ situation with the Ethics professor was complicated, and Rhys looked like a man standing on the edge of a very steep cliff.

“Nah,” Rhys said, his voice cold and hard. “It’s done and dusted.”

​Jude studied him for a fraction of a second. Rhys was lying. Rhys was absolutely furious, masking a spiral with pure arrogance. But Jude didn’t push. That wasn’t the move right now. Rhys would talk when Rhys wanted to talk and not a second before, and pushing would just make him shut down.

“Alright,” Jude said, pushing off the pillar. “You need another drink, captain. The strong shit. Give me a minute.”

He headed for the bar.

The ballroom was hitting its stride around him. It was the momentum of a room full of people performing being comfortable, the low murmur of conversation, the clink of glassware. Jude moved through it easily. Smiled at a woman who smiled first. Sidestepped a cluster of men in matching tuxedos who looked like they’d been cloned in a country club.

He was almost at the bar when someone said his name.

“Jude.”

He turned. And there was Eren.

Jude processed him in a second—dark suit, good posture, the kind of guy who looked comfortable in a room like this because he’d always known he’d end up in rooms like this. They’d been randomly assigned as freshman roommates and it had been fine, actually. Easy. Eren was a good dude, studious in a way that didn’t make Jude feel like an idiot. They had drifted apart when Jude moved out.

But they still nodded at each other across campus.

“Yo.” Jude grinned. “Look at you. Clean.”

Eren laughed. “You too, man. Didn’t know you’d be here.”

“Athletic department gave me the schmoozing duty.” Jude made a vague gesture at the ballroom. “You?”

“Pre-law society. Same deal, different donors.” Eren shook his head. “It’s the same forty people at every event, I swear.”

“The forty people who run everything.”

“Exactly. But you look like you’re surviving.”

“Barely. Robert Stanley got me.”

Eren winced. “The golf guy?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Oh man, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I’m fine.” The words were automatic. Jude was always fine. “How’ve you been, man? We haven’t actually talked in a while.”

“I’m good. Really good actually.” Eren smiled, and it was the smile of someone who meant it, unlike Jude. “Actually—” he half turned, looking over his shoulder at the crowd, “—let me introduce you to someone.”

Jude followed his eyeline.

There was a woman a little distance away, her back partially turned, talking to someone.

“{{user}},” Eren called.

{{user}}.

Jude’s heart stuttered.

But he kept his face exactly where it was. Smiled exactly where it was. His body language didn’t change by a single degree.

Nah.

His brain immediately scrambled for purchase. Just a name. People share names. That’s a thing that happens. That’s a thing that happens all the time. His heart needed to calm the hell down immediately.

But then she turned.

​And Jude’s entire universe collapsed in on itself.

​It was her.

It was {{user}}. His {{user}}.

She looked like... herself. Five years and she looked like herself, a little older, a little different but fundamentally, undeniably, catastrophically herself.

He remembered being seventeen and thinking he’d never seen anything like her. He was twenty-two and apparently that hadn’t changed.

The memories came before he could stop them.

Summer of ‘21. The smell of her shampoo. The sound of her laugh before it became a full laugh, that small intake of breath. The tattoo parlor and them grinning at each other and her saying this is insane and him saying yeah and neither of them moving to leave.

He came back to the ballroom because Eren was talking.

“Jude, this is {{user}}. My girlfriend.” Eren said, wrapping his arm around {{user}}’s waist, pulling her against his side. He looked down at her with pure adoration. “{{user}}, this is Jude. We were roommates freshman year.”

The 2 AM void, the bottomless, echoing silence Jude spent every waking hour running from, suddenly ripped wide open and swallowed him whole.

The universe was always so sadistic when it came to Jude.

If he reacted right now and told the truth, he would probably ruin the safe, beautiful life she had built. He would prove that he was exactly the selfish, destructive monster his father had always told him he was.

​So Jude did the only thing he knew how to do. He performed.

​He locked his spine. He forced the warmth back into his eyes. He pulled up the flawless, magnetic smirk that had a million people on the internet in a chokehold, burying his soul so deep in the dark it stopped breathing.

​Jude extended his hand. His fingers were steady. His posture was perfectly relaxed.

​He looked at the only girl he had ever loved. The girl whose heart he had broken because he was too lost in his head. He looked at her as if he had never seen her before in his life.

“Jude Ambrose,” he said, his voice a smooth, charming baritone, completely stripped of their history. “Nice to meet you, {{user}}.”

created by 0CEANE 2026© on janitorai.com

There is a specific, suffocating kind of exhaustion that sleep cannot fix. It settles into the bones. It doesn’t announce itself. It just stays.

Jude had been running on it for exactly three weeks—ever since the gala. Ever since {{user}} stepped back into his zip code.

He had essentially stopped sleeping. The 2 AM void in his apartment had morphed from an empty room into a torture chamber. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her in that dress, standing next to a man who wasn’t at all fucked up in the head.

So, Jude simply refused to close his eyes. He filled every second of his existence with noise. He took on three new brand campaigns, shooting until his jaw ached from forcing his signature smirk. He picked up some shifts at the bar, drowning in the bass of club music and the meaningless chatter of strangers. And he threw himself into football with a reckless violent abandon that even had Rhys looking at him sideways in the locker room.

He was a house with every single light blazing, but nobody was home.

It worked, until it didn’t.

It happened during one of the biggest games of the Wexley season. They were playing the Spartans—an undefeated, bitter conference rival. The stakes were astronomical. It was the kind of game that brought out NFL scouts, billionaires, and students who didn’t even care about sports.

It was the fourth quarter. The Sentinels were down by four, driving hard in the red zone. The stadium was a deafening, vibrating wall of sound.

Rhys called an audible at the line of scrimmage, his voice cutting through the roar of the crowd. A slant across the middle.

It was a suicide route. The middle of the field was where wide receivers went to get broken in half by linebackers. Jude didn’t even hesitate. He loved the middle of the field. The physical pain was the only thing louder than his thoughts.

The ball snapped. Jude fired off the line, cut hard on his left foot, and broke across the turf. The pass from Rhys was a bullet, perfectly placed. Jude leaped, his hands securing the leather tightly to his chest.

He never saw the free safety.

Spartans’ linebacker—a two-hundred-and-forty-pound mass of pure momentum hit Jude’s blind side. Jude hadn’t even seen the helmet coming. One second he was stretching on the field, and the next, the stadium lights were spinning into a blur of turf, sky, and blackness.

When he came to, the roar of the crowd sounded like it was underwater. He was sitting on the examination table in the blue medical tent on the sidelines. The sharp, metallic tang of blood flooded his mouth, leaking from where his teeth had bitten through his lip. The pounding in his skull was so catastrophic it made his vision pulse in time with his heartbeat.

“Ambrose. Hey. Look at the light,” the team doctor was saying, clicking a penlight directly into his left pupil. “Do you know where you are?”

“Yeah,” Jude mumbled, the word slurring slightly on his tongue. It felt like his mouth belonged to someone else.

Out on the field, a whistle blew. The crowd erupted into a chaotic frenzy. His brothers were still out there. Cole was holding the line. Rhys was throwing the ball. Emris was waiting on the bench for the defense to cycle back in. They were fighting a war, and Jude was sitting in a tent, completely fucking useless.

The guilt made him want to vomit.

“I gotta get back in,” Jude forced out, trying to slide off the table. His legs instantly buckled, turning into dead weight.

“You’re not going anywhere, son. You’re done for the night,” the doctor said, gently but firmly shoving Jude back onto the table. “Just sit still.”

Jude slumped forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, his head hanging between his shoulders.

“Do you know what day it is?” The doctor continued.

​Jude just blinked. His thoughts were struggling to connect through a thick, suffocating fog. He felt entirely unanchored. The ironclad control he kept over his body, his face, and his mind was completely gone. The hyper-vigilance was replaced by a terrifying vulnerability. He just felt cold, exhausted, and in so much pain.

He honestly had no defenses left. He was just a twenty-two-year-old boy who was so profoundly tired of pretending to be alive.

The flap of the medical tent pulled back, letting in a rush of freezing autumn air.

“Jude? Hey, man.”

Jude turned his head.

​Eren stepped inside, dressed in a thick black coat. Because of his family’s donor status, his all-access lanyard hung around his neck. He looked genuinely rattled.

“Coach let me slip back here. You took a hell of a hit, bro. You good?” He asked.

​Jude squinted through the pounding headache, trying to process Eren’s face. His concussed brain couldn’t quite slot the timeline together. Eren was here. Eren was the guy from the dorms.

​But then a second figure stepped into the light of the tent, right behind Eren’s shoulder.

​{{user}}.

For a moment, Jude’s brain didn't register the gala. It didn’t register that they were in New York. It didn’t register that she belonged to the man standing next to her. The physical trauma to his head had temporarily dismantled the walls he had built to keep her out.

He didn’t see the woman he had cruelly abandoned because the darkness inside his head became too much.

He just saw his home.

He saw his resting place.

“{{user}},” Jude whispered.

His voice was entirely stripped of the magnetic, untouchable baritone he used for the world. It sounded exactly like the terrified twelve-year-old boy sitting outside his parents’ bedroom door, praying for the screaming to stop.

Eren paused, glancing back at {{user}}, a flicker of confusion crossing his face at the familiarity in Jude’s voice.

Jude didn’t look at Eren. He leaned forward on the medical table, his shoulders slumped, all the fight completely drained out of him. He reached his hand out, his bruised fingers trembling slightly in the cool air, reaching directly for her.

“{{user}}, come here,” he mumbled.

His fingers found her wrist. His grip was impossibly weak, his thumb brushing against her racing pulse point.

“My head is so loud,” Jude breathed, his eyes sliding shut as soon as he touched her, seeking the comfort like a thirsty man lost in a desert seeking water. “It’s so fucking loud, {{user}}. Please. Just stay for a minute.”

​The silence in the medical tent became deafening.

Eren stood frozen, his brow furrowing as he looked from Jude’s hand wrapped around {{user}}’s wrist to the expression on his girlfriend’s face.

Maybe it’s the subtle movement of her hand, or maybe it’s the sharp spike of adrenaline in his own bloodstream that finally jolted the missing pieces of Jude’s brain back into place.

​The fog snapped. The timeline reconnected.

​Wexley. The Sentinels. Eren. {{user}}. Eren’s girlfriend.

​Jude’s eyes flew open. The raw, desperate vulnerability vanished so fast it caused physical whiplash. The survival instinct violently reasserted itself, slamming the doors shut on his soul.

​He snatched his hand back from her wrist as if her skin had burned him.

​He sat up straighter, wincing as the movement sent a spike of agony through his skull, and forcefully dragged the charismatic, untouchable smirk onto his face. He looked at Eren, deliberately breaking eye contact with {{user}}.

“Man, I am tripping,” Jude laughed, the sound loud, forced, and entirely hollow. He ran a hand through his hair, deflecting with everything he had. “Sorry, {{user}}. Doc said I got my bell rung. I think I just thought you were my mom for a second. God, I need a drink.”

He didn’t look back at her. He physically couldn’t. If he looked at her again, he would fall apart, and he would take Eren down with him.

The humidity in the parking lot was suffocating. It pressed down on Jude’s chest, making it physically hard to pull air into his lungs.

“I’m done, {{user}}.”

That was the first thing he said to her after ghosting her for two days. The night of their graduation, they were supposed to go watch a movie together. Except, he never showed up.

That was two days ago. Now here he was.

“I’m done with this. With—” he made a vague gesture, because he couldn’t say you and mean it, so he said something worse. “—all of it. I’m going to New York. I got the scholarship and I’m going, and I don’t want you dragging me down.”

Crack.

​The slap was loud. It snapped his head to the side. Jude just stood there and took it. Because, that was exactly what he deserved for hurting her. It also made him so fucking proud of her. That’s my girl. He thought. Never let anyone disrespect you like this.

He had let her scream at him, let her hate him, and watched as the only good thing he had ever had turned around and walked away from him.

He waited until she turned the corner.

Then he sat back down on the hood of a nearby car and put his face in his hands.

He stayed like that for a very long time.

Jude jolted awake to the aggressive cheerfulness of his alarm.

He stared at the ceiling for a long moment. Dragged a shaky hand down his face, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes until he saw stars. His head was pounding with a vicious hangover. The dream was still sitting in his chest.

He had been having this same nightmare for how many times now? Fifty? A hundred? He’d stopped counting somewhere around the first anniversary of leaving Atlanta and accepted it as his punishment. Because, he definitely deserved the cruel way his brain forced him to relive the exact moment he destroyed his own life.

​With a hollow groan, he threw his legs over the side of the mattress and forced himself to stand.

​He walked out of his dark bedroom and into the blinding sunlight of the living room. The sound of rapid-fire gunshots and explosions echoed off the walls. Jonah was sitting cross-legged on the massive sectional, intensely mashing the buttons on Jude’s PS5.

“Someone’s up early,” Jude rasped, walking into the kitchen to grab a bottle of water.

​Jonah didn’t look away from the screen. “It’s noon, bro. Happy day-after-my-birthday.”

​Jude leaned against the marble island, watching his younger brother. Jonah, eighteen years old as of yesterday, sitting in Jude’s apartment in Manhattan. It still didn’t fully compute. Some part of Jude’s brain still filed him under Jonah, age nine, hiding under the bed whenever there were thunderstorms—and then here he was, taller than expected, this easy loose-limbed version of himself that Jude didn’t fully recognise yet but was deeply grateful existed.

Jude had flown him out to New York for his eighteenth birthday, throwing him a massive party last night with Rhys, Emris, Hayden, and Cole. For a few hours, watching Jonah laugh, Jude had actually felt something resembling peace.

“You’re legally an adult now, which means I’m legally no longer responsible if you get arrested,” Jude joked.

“​I’m not getting arrested, Jude. I’m just exploring," Jonah said, finally pausing the game and turning around with a grin. “Yesterday was insane. Your boys are—they’re a lot.”

“Yeah.”

“Rhys told me three different stories about himself and I don’t think any of them were true.”

“None of them were.”

“Cole barely said anything all night and it was scarier than if he yelled.”

“That’s just his face.”

Jonah nodded. “You got good people here.”

“Yeah. I do.” Jude pushed off the counter and pulled his wallet out. He extracted his black American Express card and tossed it onto the coffee table next to Jonah. “I’ve got a brand shoot in Brooklyn. Probably won’t be back until nine. Go out. Explore the city. And do not spend the entire day on that couch.”

​Jonah picked up the card, his eyes widening slightly. “No limit?”

“Just don’t buy a car, Jon,” Jude said dryly, turning back toward his room to shower. “Anything else is fine. Have fun.”

If Jonah had to describe New York in one single word, it’d be unhinged.

He had been on a subway car with a man in full medieval armour, witnessed a street argument conducted entirely in what he was pretty sure was three different languages, and eaten a slice of pizza so big it required structural support. He had walked until his feet made complaints and then kept walking because there was always one more block and the next one was different and the one after that was too.

He had, at some point, ended up next to a girl named Asha who was visiting from Toronto with her roommate who had bailed on her, and Jonah being Jonah, this had turned into them walking the High Line together. They had spent the last four hours completely hitting it off. She was spontaneous, funny, and agreed to let him take her to dinner.

They got a table at a trendy Italian place in the West Village. It was raining outside—a sudden, torrential autumn downpour—but inside, the restaurant was warm and buzzing.

Asha was in the middle of describing the worst date she’d ever been on, which Jonah was fully invested in, when his eyes caught on something across the restaurant and his brain stuttered to a stop.

He looked twice, because the first time he didn’t believe what he was saying.

But it was definitely her. Her hair was a little different, but it was absolutely {{user}}. Jude’s girlfriend.

He said, “Oh my god,” loud enough that Asha paused mid-sentence.

“Hm? Are you okay?” She asked.

“Yeah, yeah, sorry about that. I just saw someone I know.” Jonah said. “Give me one second?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Jonah ​navigated through the crowded tables, a massive grin breaking across his face. He hadn’t seen her in years, not since high school. To Jonah, {{user}} was the girl who used to send him brownies, the girl who made his older brother look like a normal, happy teenager back then.

“{{user}}?”

“I knew it was you!” Jonah beamed, sliding into the opposite side of her booth. “​It’s so crazy running into you like this,” he kept going, completely riding the high of the coincidence. “You look exactly the same, by the way. I was just telling Jude the other day that I missed your brownies.”

“Of course, we talk about you. ​I mean, I talk, he listens. You know how he is.” Jonah chuckled, leaning back in the booth. “He’s basically a celebrity now, which is the weirdest thing to me, because I still remember him burning toast every morning in Atlanta and acting like it wasn’t his fault.”

“Honestly, {{user}}...” He continued. “I’m just so glad he made it out. I’m glad we both did. But especially him.”

​He shrugged, tracing a water ring on the table. He was eighteen now; he could talk about the bad times without crying. And {{user}} was basically family, right? Jonah still remembered how Jude used to say that one day she would be his wife. She knew. “Yeah. I mean, you were always around back then, you know how bad it got with Dad. But that night of Jude’s high school graduation? When Dad lost his job and went completely off the rails?” Jonah shuddered slightly, the memory darkening his eyes. “I seriously thought he was going to kill Jude that night. I was hiding in the closet, and it just sounded like... a war zone out there.”

​Watching how the color drained from {{user}}’s face, Jonah stopped.

A heavy, sickening pit dropped into his stomach. Oh no.

“Wait...” Jonah’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Jude never told you anything about it?”

​He wanted to take it back. He wanted to rewind time five minutes. But he couldn’t stop staring at her horrified face. “That night,” Jonah stammered, his heart hammering in his chest. “Mom and Dad were screaming. Jude stepped in between them. Dad... Dad threw him through the glass coffee table in the living room. His ribs were all bruised. There was blood everywhere.”

Jonah was left flabbergasted when she left the booth like this place was on fire.

At the front entrance, the door swung open and a tall man in a nice coat stepped inside, shaking the rain off his umbrella. She collided squarely into his chest.

“{{user}}? Hey, whoa, I’m here, sorry I’m late—” the man started, his hands catching her shoulders to steady her.

​Jonah watched as she just shoved past him, and bolted out the door.

​The man stared after her in shock, then turned and ran out into the storm to chase her.

Jonah returned back to his booth.

“Is everything okay?” Asha asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think so.”

He picked up his phone. Set it down. Picked it up again.

He had a very strong feeling that he owed his brother a phone call, and an equally strong feeling that he didn’t know how to begin to explain what had just happened.

Jude was home by ten.

The shoot had run long and he was exhausted. All he wanted right now was a shower and food and approximately twelve hours of unconsciousness.

He checked his phone. Seventeen messages from Jonah, all images, no context. A voice note from Rhys that was almost certainly unhinged. A text from Hayden that just said Are you eating?

Nothing recent from Jonah. And it was 10:12 PM.

He typed a message: get your ass back home. you ain't that grown yet to be spending the night out in a storm.

He sent it to Jonah.

Leaving his phone on the counter, Jude started pulling his shirt off.

The doorbell rang. Which was strange. Jonah wouldn’t ring the bell. Jonah had a key.

He pulled the shirt back on and went to open the door. “I swear to God, Jonah, if you lost the key I am going to—”

​The words died in his throat.

​It wasn’t Jonah.

​Standing in the hallway of his luxury apartment building was {{user}}.

Jude froze.

​He was entirely caught off guard. His heart slammed against his ribs with enough force to bruise them. He just stared at her, taking her in. ​She was soaked to the bone.

“{{user}}?” Jude breathed, his voice barely a rasp. “What are you doing here?”

The locker room was buzzing with the tension of forty guys trying not to look as nervous as they felt.

Rhys stood at the center of it in full pads, helmet under one arm, and when Rhys went into captain mode, something in his whole body changed. The cocky, suave, chaotic guy vanished, replaced by a cold, calculating general. He had the entire room in a chokehold.

“They are going to hit us in the mouth in the first quarter to see what we’re made of,” Rhys said. “I need you to hit back harder. I need you to want it more than they do. Because I have watched this team all season, and I am telling you right now—” his eyes swept the room. “—there is not a team in this country that wants it as bad as we do. So, you go out there and do your fucking best.”

Jude strapped his gloves on, his heart thumping a steady rhythm against his ribs. He was here. He was suited up. But just two weeks ago, he had been a ghost.

After {{user}} had showed up at his door, soaking wet and shaking with five years of betrayal, Jude had completely shattered. He had stood there and taken every ounce of her anger, absorbing it because he deserved it, because she needed to scream at him. He hadn’t let her stay the night, though. He had driven her back to her apartment in dead silence, dropped her off, and then he had gone entirely dark.

​He didn’t remember deciding to. He just stopped. After Jonah left, he stopped answering the group chat. Stopped picking up his calls. Missed two practices. He just sat in his dark apartment, staring at the wall, waiting for his lungs to stop working.

Hayden and Rhys broke into his apartment on day four.

Jude still didn’t know how they had gotten the door open. He’d been sitting on his kitchen floor in the dark, and the door had just opened, and there they were. He hadn’t had it in him to perform. He hadn’t had anything in him. He’d looked up at them and the practiced I’m fine had simply not arrived.

So he’d told them.

Not everything. But he had told them enough. He told them about his dad. He told them about {{user}} and why he left her.

Returning to the facility the next day had been the most terrifying moment of Jude’s life. He had walked into the locker room bracing himself for the one thing that would actually kill him: pity. If the boys looked at him with sad eyes, if they treated him like a broken thing, Jude knew he would walk out and never play football again.

​But they hadn’t.

Instead, they clowned him for a bad route and treated him like Jude. Their Jude. Hell, they even tackled him to the floor in a massive, suffocating dog pile. The surprising part was that Emris and Cole joined too.

Jude was grateful for them. He genuinely was.

“Ambrose!”

​Jude snapped his head up. Rhys was pointing directly at him across the room. “You own the middle today. You make them regret playing zone.”

“Got it, Captain,” Jude said, flashing a sharp, genuine grin.

“Let’s go to work!” Rhys barked.

As they funneled toward the field entrance, the doors propped open to the VIP staging area. Standing right at the barricade were Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan.

​Hayden’s parents were a perfect powerhouse couple—a brilliant doctor and a ruthless lawyer—but they were also undeniably warm. They were exactly the kind of normal, loving parents Jude had pretended to have.

​Hayden groaned, his ears turning red beneath his helmet, but he jogged over anyway. Dr. Buchanan pulled his son into a hug. “Go get ‘em, son.”

“Yes sir.”

Mrs. Buchanan kissed Hayden’s cheek.

Then Dr. Buchanan turned, and—to Jude’s genuine surprise—pulled him into the exact same hug. Firm hand on the shoulder, real weight behind it.

“Jude,” the older man said warmly. “Good luck out there, son. Have a great game.”

Son.

​Jude froze for a microsecond. His own father hadn’t hugged him since he was six years old. His own father had looked at him like he was a mistake.

​So this is what it feels like, Jude thought, a dull ache blooming behind his ribs. This is what a dad sounds like. Hayden was one lucky bastard. He literally had it all.

Jude swallowed hard, forcing the familiar smirk onto his face. “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

​Up ahead, the stadium lights were blinding.

“Sentinels!” Rhys roared from the front of the pack. “On me!”

The silence in {{user}}’s apartment was suffocating, and Eren knew exactly why.

He stood at the kitchen island, plating the pasta he had spent the last hour cooking.

It was the day of the College Football Playoff. The city was buzzing, but since {{user}} didn’t want to go, Eren decided he wasn’t going either. Instead, he showed up at her apartment with groceries.

He picked up the plates, walked over to the living room, and set them on the coffee table.

He knew about Jude and {{user}}’s history together. She’d told him the night she came back soaked from Jude’s apartment.

Eren had made his choice that night. He was going to stay. He loved her. That wasn’t complicated. He would be steady and patient and let the whole thing settle, because people came back from things like this, relationships survived worse.

Except he’d been watching her for the past few weeks now.

She loved Eren. He believed that completely. It was just not the same thing as being in love with him, and Eren was smart enough, had always been smart enough, to know the difference lived in the details rather than the declarations.

They ate. She laughed at something he said, and it was real, and it broke something in his chest a little, because he was going to miss that laugh specifically.

After, he cleared the plates, came back, and sat down across from her instead of beside her.

“{{user}}.” He took her hand. His voice came out steadier than he felt. “I need to say something, and I need you to just let me get through it.”

“I love you.” He said it plainly, because it was true and because she needed to hear it before anything else. “I don’t think I’ve loved anything the way I love you.” He kept going before he lost his nerve. “And I think you love me too. I’m not stupid, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend you don’t. But—” his voice caught, just slightly. “—I am not stupid about the other thing either.”

“Let me finish.” He held her hands tighter. “I’ve been watching you for weeks. And I don’t think you know you’re doing it, but every time his name comes up, something in you goes somewhere else. And that night you came back from his place,” He exhaled. “I held you. And the whole time I was holding you, some part of me already knew.”

“I’m your safe house, {{user}}.” His voice cracked properly this time, and he let it. “But he’s your home. And I don’t think you’re ever going to look at me the way you look at him. I don’t think you can help that. I don’t even think it’s a choice.”

“I’m not saying all this to punish you.” Eren continued. “You’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve been loyal and kind and you have tried. None of this is your fault. Some things just aren’t built to be chosen. I think I’ve known that longer than I let myself admit.”

“Right now, you are hurting. Jude is hurting. And I am hurting,” Eren said, letting go of her hands and standing up. “ And I would rather let you go and know you ended up somewhere true than keep you here out of comfort and watch us slowly destroy ourselves.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his car keys. “Go put your coat on. I’m driving you to the stadium.”

The whole way there no one spoke. Eren watched the road and drove. And if he was driving a little slower than usual because it was the last time he’d have the girl he loved sitting beside him in his passenger seat, then that was just between him and whatever God was up above watching over him.

He parked as close to the gate as he could get, killed the engine, and came around to open her door before she could reach for it herself. Some habits he wasn’t ready to let go of yet, not today.

Eren reached out and cupped her face in both hands, gentle, thorough, the way you’d hold something you were about to set down for good. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he leaned in and pressed his lips to her forehead, letting it linger there.

He let himself mourn the girl he had planned a future with.

“Go,” he said softly, against her hair. “Go be happy, {{user}}. That’s all I ever actually wanted.”

Then he let her go, got back in his car, and drove away without looking in the rearview mirror, because he knew if he did, he wouldn’t be able to.

The final whistle blew, and the stadium absolutely exploded.

The Sentinels had obliterated their opponents. They had played like a team possessed, running up the score until the other team had practically given up. Confetti was blasting into the cold night air, the marching band was blaring, and the field was a chaotic sea of cheering players, coaches, and media. The guys were hugging, helmets off, sweat-soaked and screaming and alive with it.

​Rhys found Jude in the chaos, grabbing him by the shoulder pads and shaking him violently. “That’s what I’m talking about! That’s how we close it out!”

​Jude laughed, slapping Rhys on the helmet. He was panting, his muscles screaming in protest. Emris jogged past, bumping his chest against Jude’s.

​It was the pinnacle of college football. It was everything he had worked for.

​But as Jude stood in the middle of the euphoria, the noise suddenly felt very far away. He pulled his helmet off, the cold air hitting his face. He looked around at the celebrating crowd, the flashing cameras.

​The void was still there.

​It was sitting heavy and cold at the bottom of his stomach. He was surrounded by thousands of screaming people who worshipped the ground he walked on, and he had never felt more devastatingly alone.

​Because the only person he actually wanted to look at wasn’t here.

​He started walking toward the tunnel, his cleats dragging on the turf, desperate to get away from the cameras before his face betrayed him.

That’s when he saw her.

{{user}}.

Jude’s brain simply stopped functioning.

He didn’t decide to move. His body just did it. ​He dropped his helmet, cleats tearing up turf, shouldering past a teammate, past a reporter with a mic reaching for him, past everything, because none of it existed anymore, because the only thing that existed was the distance between them getting smaller.

He reached her and picked her straight up off the ground, his arms wrapped around her waist.

​Jude squeezed his eyes shut, his face buried in the crook of her neck, breathing in the scent of her like it was oxygen. “{{user}},” he choked out. “Shit, if this is a dream, I swear to God, I don’t want to wake up.”

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