Get It 7

He finds me in the kitchen again, and this time I don’t bolt—progress, apparently, looks like standing still while your nervous system screams at you to run. Max drops into the chair across from me, folds his arms on the table like he’s about to suggest we order pizza.

“You’re part of this household now, which means your performance at the next trial reflects on me.” He leans back, studying me in that unhurried way that makes me want to climb out the window. “I can’t have my stepsister placing thirty-first.”

“For you or for me?” I stir my coffee with dedication the task doesn’t deserve. “I’ve made peace with my mediocrity—it’s a whole lifestyle.”

His mouth twitches at one corner—not pity, not condescension, something closer to a dare. “I’ll train you. Mornings before the academy, basic combat technique.”

The fact that he’s framing this as his problem rather than my rescue operation makes something behind my chest unclench a fraction. He’s not saving me—he’s protecting his reputation, and the difference matters more than I can afford to examine right now.

“Fine.” I take a sip that burns my tongue because I need to be doing something with my mouth that isn’t smiling at him. “But if you make me run laps, I’m filing for emancipation.”

“Six a.m. tomorrow, training yard.” He stands, and the kitchen gets bigger and smaller simultaneously—bigger because he’s leaving, smaller because the warmth he displaced lingers against my skin.

The training yard is empty at six, mist hanging low across the grass, the kind of morning cold that bites first and apologizes never. Max is already stretching, and the grey light does unreasonable things to the lines of his shoulders and the way his shirt pulls across his back.

He straightens when he sees me, rolling his neck, already looking like he’s been awake for hours. “You’re late—three minutes.”

“I’m mourning the loss of sleep, it’s a process.” I drop my bag by the fence and shake out my arms, trying to look like someone who warms up voluntarily and not someone whose pulse picked up the second she saw him across the yard.

“Stance.” He circles me once, assessing, and every inch of skin he passes prickles awake. “Your base is too narrow—one solid hit and you’re down.”

I adjust. He steps behind me and his hands find my hips, repositioning them, and every synapse in my body misfires at once. His palms are warm, large through the thin fabric, thumbs pressing into the hollows above my hip bones.

“Lower—bend your knees, you’re stiff.” His voice is close to my ear, clinical, instructive—he’s teaching, this is teaching, and the fact that my skin is catching fire where his fingers rest is entirely my own catastrophe.

I am extraordinarily stiff because every muscle I own has gone rigid trying not to lean back into him. My mouth opens on a breath I can’t quite finish, and I force my knees to bend before the hesitation becomes a question he’ll ask out loud.

He moves to my side and guides my forearms into guard position, fingers wrapping around my wrists to adjust the angle. The contact travels up my arms and detonates somewhere behind my collarbone—heat, pressure, a drumming in my blood that has zero connection to the exercise.

“Keep your elbows tight.” He taps my forearm. “You flare them when you’re tired and it leaves your ribs wide open.”

“My ribs are very committed to staying closed, trust me.” My voice comes out thinner than I planned, and I turn the wobble into a cough that convinces nobody.

We move through drills—blocks, pivots, counterstrikes—all standard, all mechanical, all requiring him to adjust my body every ninety seconds. His hand on my shoulder blade, rotating me. His palm against my stomach, correcting my core while my diaphragm forgets how to function.

Then his chest against my back while he demonstrates a throw, and my respiratory system folds in on itself. The heat from the bathroom is back—not creeping this time but flooding, rushing up through my torso and settling behind my eyes until the edges of the yard go soft.

“Breathe.” He says it like a reminder, not a command. “You keep tensing up—relax your shoulders.”

My shoulders are not going to relax because relaxing means softening, and softening means leaning into the warmth pouring off him, and that is a chain of events that ends with me exposed in ways no glamour can cover. I force an exhale through my teeth and pray it passes for effort.

We spar light rounds and he pulls every strike, moving at maybe forty percent. I match him with the careful throttle I’ve spent my life perfecting, but my timing keeps slipping—his hand grazes my shoulder on a block and my counter comes a full beat late, my mind whiting out in the gap.

“You flinched—three times in the last round.” He drops his hands, studying me with his head tilted. “Am I hurting you?”

“No.” Yes—but not the kind he means, and the real answer would require a confession that dismantles everything my mother built. “I’m just—my head, I think I’m getting a headache.”

“You’re breathing wrong—shallow, fast.” He steps closer and my pulse hammers against every surface it can find—wrists, throat, the backs of my knees. “You’ve been doing it the whole session.”

I press my palm against my forehead and it comes away damp. My skin is burning, the same creeping heat from the bathroom but deeper now, settled into my bones, radiating outward from every place his hands have been.

“I think I should stop.” I step back, and the six inches of air between us does nothing to cool any of it.

“Kylie.” He catches my arm before I turn, just above the elbow, and the contact sends a shock so sharp through my chest that my knees almost buckle. His brow creases, eyes moving across my face—”You’re shaking.”

“Low blood sugar—skipped breakfast, bad planning, totally my fault.” I pull free gently, carefully, like extracting myself from a trap without triggering it. “We can pick this up tomorrow.”

He lets me go. But his gaze follows me across the yard and I feel it between my shoulder blades the whole walk back—heavy, questioning, unwilling to accept the easy answer I handed him. I keep my spine straight and my pace even and I don’t turn around, because turning around is a door I cannot open.

My bedroom door clicks shut and I slide to the floor with my back against the wood. My hands won’t stop trembling, and the warmth hasn’t faded—it’s spreading, pooling low in my abdomen, climbing my throat, turning my skin into something that doesn’t belong to me anymore.

I curl my fingers against the cold floorboards and count my breaths, waiting for the ceiling to stop spinning and my body to remember who it answers to. It takes forty minutes—last time it took fifteen, and the math on that progression is a problem I am not remotely equipped to solve.