Falling for my boyfriend's Navy brother novel Chapter 50

Chapter 50: Asher

I scrub a towel over the back of my neck like it oves me money.

Water beads down my spine, steam still logging the minut, but I can’t remember whether I actually washed my hair or just stood some kind of malfunctioning robot.

I tried

I really tried not to think about her.

Tried to let the heat scald her out of my head

that

ballet tank top clinging to her like it was designed with evil intent,

her back flexing under my hand as she bent forward like it was nothing,

like I didn’t have a thousand violently inappropiate thoughts at that exact moment,

like she wasn’t pressing every single one of my buttons just by existing.

And then she looked up at me and said,

“Please,” in that voice like honey and defiance and God help me, I felt it

ht down my spine.

Right

She asked me the other day if I was scared of the dark.

She was half–joking, eyes dancing, like she didn’t know the dark bad names and smells and faces for me. Like she didn’t know I’ve seen things that rewired the way my brain responds to silence.

She asks things like that.

Random. Stupid. Pure

She asked me if Navy guys eat real food or just chew protein bars like emotionless drones.

She asked me if I could kill someone with one hand.

She asked me if I’d ever eaten sand.

it face, like she’s lived her whole life in her head and just happened to stumble into the real world and now she’s trying to make

the said it with a straight

Lease of it.

And now I can’t stop thinking about the shape of her mouth when she talks.

When she bends.

When she smiles and doesn’t mean it. Or worse, when she smiles and means it with her whole heart

I finish dressing – dark jeans, gray long sleeve that clings to my chest more than I’d like and step out of the bathroom before I get any worse ideas. My law is already clenched so hard it aches.

Downstairs, Tyler’s flopped on the couch like he’s rehearsing for a mattress compute

Jeans, his football shirt, hair still damp

He’s scrolling something mindless and laughing at

own phone like it told a good joke.

Chapter 50: Asher

“Dude,” he says without looking up, how long does ir

grunt and the chair across from him. My beste is still tigh

like all that water did was weak, beto my skin and weigh nur down

He tosses a chip at me. It bounces off my chest.

“Both true,” he says brightly.

We sit like that for a few minutes.

He starts playing a football highlight teel en mute and rates over it like he’s sports announcer with a Red Bull addiction. I let the noise with mer o

Tyler being Tyler, loose and boud and oblicims.

He’s everything I’m not.

Always has been

After a while, he stops the video and tosses his phone on the table.

“Hey,” he says, tone shifting. “Can I ask you something?”

I raise an eyebrow.

He doesn’t wait.

“That scar on your neck… where’d you get it?”

The room tilts a little.

My spine straighte

It’s not the first time someone’s asked

but coming from him, it lands different.

I meet his eyes.

“Not the kind of story you should hear.”

He holds my BAZE.

for a beat longer than expected.

Then he nods once and trans back.

“Cool. Just… Jooked like it hurt.”

i did

still does sometimes.

I don’t say that.

Instead, I look past him, out the windus. The storm left water streaks on the glass like claw marke

Chapter 50 Asher

Be shifts in.

“What about the one on your eyebrow?”

I lift a hand and brush wet 11. The skin there is roughrt, a permanent iidge..

“A breach gone wrong,” I say simply “Toni was rigged. We didn’t check fast enough. Shrapnel from the frame clipped me ”

“I didn’t feel it at first. Just the heat. Then someone said I was bleeding Whole left side of my face was red

deliver it flat. No drama, Just facts,

The way I’ve trained myself to.

“Were you scared?”

I flance at him.

His expression is weirdly serious.

“No,” I say. “But I was pissed. We should’ve caught it. We got lucky”

He looks away, chewing on that.

Then, quietly: “You always talk like everything’s a checklist.”

I stare at him.

He shrugs, not apologizing

“It’s just–every time I ask something real, you give me the skeleton of an answer. Like the bare minimum a person needs to understand without feeling. anything about it.”

I open my mouth, close it again.

Because he’s not wrong-

It’s how I stay functional.

You don’t make it through warrone,

firestorms by giving feelings a seat at the table

You lock them up. You focus. You get out alive

He changes the subject before I can say anything else

“You think Penny’s coming soon?”

Her name lands in my chest like a punch

My fingers twitch.

“She said she’d meet us here,” I

He grims and leans back again, relaxed and happy, like we haven’t just talked about blood and shrapnel and emotional detachment.

“You know, I think the likes you,” he says suddenly,

Verify captcha to read the contentVerify