The hate should have stayed simple.
I told myself that every morning while the thin winter light pushed against the curtains and the silence Damian had given me filled the room like cold water. Hate was supposed to be a clean blade—something I could hold, something I could use to keep the memory of his body from crawling back under my skin. Instead it had grown teeth. It lived in the same place as the ache that still flared low between my hips whenever I remembered the exact stretch of him. It sat beside the unwanted heat that rose whenever his voice cut across the ice. It had stopped being armor and started being another kind of wound.
Five days after the competition I woke with my hands already fisted in the sheets and the ghost of his breath against the back of my neck. I sat up too f
