5. Cole
Cole
My phone buzzes in my lap, the vibration cutting straight through my teeth.
Dad: Mock trial results posted. Zimmerman got the Hartley fellowship. You would have too if you'd applied. Still time for fall cycle at Georgetown.
I lock the phone, my thumb pressing too hard against the button.
Unlock it. Read the words once more until they blur.
Lock it again, and the click sounds too loud in my head while Whitfield drones on about the equal protection clause.
Three texts this week. Monday the fellowship, Wednesday Georgetown, now Friday both of them again. He never just says hi.
Whitfield points toward the front row. "Ms. Patel.
Bolling v. Sharpe?" She starts answering, stops halfway through the second sentence, and flips through her notes.
I know the case—I read it at six this morning between protein shakes, highlighter moving down the margins while the blender was still humming.
Whitfield will call on me next week with something harder.
He likes to space me out. Three good answers a month and he remembers the answers, not how often.
Patel picks her answer back up, and Whitfield nods and turns back to the board.
Near the front, one seat to the left, Maya's laptop screen glows open like a fucking beacon.
Her Media Ethics seminar uses the room after ConLaw, and the journalism kids usually drift in during the last few minutes, but Maya was already here when I walked in at seven-fifty.
She sits perfectly still, her eyes tracking across the screen while her fingers rest on the keys without typing, and I know that stillness means she's absorbing every word.
The pen behind her ear is the one she carries everywhere, chewed at the end.
And she's wearing that gray Briarcliff sweatshirt with the cuff split along the seam—the one I lent her freshman year when she came over to study and got cold.
The one she returned to the Elm House couch on Tuesday night.
Seeing it on her now tightens my chest until I have to force my next breath.
She must have grabbed it back off the arm before she left, because three days later it's on her again.
She usually keeps my stuff for a week before it migrates back.
Three days is fast, and the speed of it fucking gets to me.
Whitfield closes his notes. "Read Romer for Monday." Students start packing bags. "And Mr. Maddox." He waits until I look up, his eyes holding mine. "Your brief on qualified immunity was the strongest in the section. Consider the law review submission deadline. March fifteenth."
"Thank you, Professor."
You've got the mind for this. It's what my father says when he's praising me, said the same way Addison does after a shift—short, certain, like the decision's already been made.
The lecture breaks with chairs scraping and backpacks zipping while the ConLaw crowd funnels toward the aisle and the Ethics students drift in through the opposite door. Maya looks up from her screen as the room reshuffles, and her eyes land on me with a focus that makes my pulse kick.
"Stalking me?" she says, her voice dry.
"Whitfield's ConLaw. Every Monday-Wednesday-Friday." I sling my bag over my shoulder, edge out of my row to the center aisle, and step up beside her row. "You know this. You've been sitting in this room with me for three semesters."
"I've been sitting in this room before you for three semesters. You just happen to be here when I arrive."
"Semantics."
"Precision," she says, and the word lands like a challenge.
I lean against the desk at the end of her row, turned toward her seat, while she looks up at me, chin tipped slightly back, the gray sweatshirt hanging loose on her, and my throat goes tight.
"How's the mid-season piece?" I ask.
"Filed it this week. After—" She stops, her mouth stilling for half a second before the sentence finishes. "After the interview," she says, neutral, but I hear the edge underneath.
The press room comes back at me sideways: Dante across the table with his voice low and flat saying You showed up in this world with a borrowed name, Maya sitting still while he said it, that tight line along her jaw, and me beside him with my knee pressed against his under the table, a line of heat I couldn't ignore.
Her recorder is probably still on Dante's desk.
I've been in his room twice since Tuesday and both times it was sitting beside his laptop in the same spot, neither Dante nor I touching it, a silent fucking standoff.
Borrowed name. She filed the piece anyway.
"It'll be good," I say. "Your pieces are always good."
"Don't patronize me, Cole."
"It's not patronizing if it's true."
She holds my eyes, steady, and the look goes straight through me.
"Go to class," she says.
"This was class."
"Go to your next class."
I give her the half-grin, the one that usually makes her roll her eyes. "Love you, sis."
"Stepsister. Go."
I push off the desk, the bag still on my shoulder, and head up the back aisle that runs along the rear wall behind her row.
As I pass behind her chair I set my hand on her shoulder for one second with the same pressure, the same casual weight I've been putting there since we were thirteen.
She leans into it a fraction, just enough to register in my palm, and then I'm through the door into the hall, the ghost of her warmth lingering on my skin.
The sweatshirt. Three days, not a week.
Friday night. Game day. The arena is packed: students pressed shoulder to shoulder in the student section, donors behind the glass at center ice, a handful of scouts scattered along the press level above.
It's Cornell, the game Addison's been drilling us for all week, and my blood is already humming with the kind of adrenaline that sharpens every sound, every movement.
Dante and I run the same line. The first goal comes off the boards behind the net—Dante pulls two defenders, then slides the puck blind into the slot.
My stick is already waiting, because I know where it's coming.
I know where he is, the way I've known for six years, the way I know where he is in a dark room with the door closed, and the connection runs like a live wire under my skin.
The arena sees chemistry. The analysts see a system. Nobody up there is seeing what it actually is, what it looks like at midnight with the door closed and his hands in my hair, and the truth of it makes my chest tighten.
The second goal comes on the rush when I cross the blue line, drag the defender wide, and leave it behind me for Dante to pick up and send top shelf. Then the buzzer sounds. Ten in a row.
The locker room detonates. Sticks slamming the floor, helmets banging off metal, somebody cranks the speaker until the bass rattles through the tile, and I'm up on the bench with my jersey half-off before I know it, the roar filling my lungs.
"TEN IN A ROW, BABY! SOMEBODY GET ME A CROWN AND A SANDWICH!"
A roll of tape comes flying across the room and I snag it out of the air. "THE KING ACCEPTS YOUR TRIBUTE!" I launch it back into the freshmen, and the laugh that tears out of me feels raw and real.
"Get down before you break your neck," Gio calls from his stall. He smiles, but it's hollow, his attention already sliding back to his phone before the expression fully forms, and the sight of it cuts through my high.
I hop down through the gear scattered across the floor, land on someone's shin pad, and nearly eat the floor before catching myself on the open frame of Declan's stall.
Declan looks up, just one look, and my hand—already moving toward his stick for balance—jerks back before it touches.
Nobody touches another man's stick on game night, especially not his.
I step away, the stumble still buzzing in my knees.
Across the room Adrian sits on the bench, still fully dressed, elbows on his knees. He catches my eye after the near miss with Declan's stick and gives one short nod, and I nod back, the silence between us heavier than any celebration.
I cross to my stall and sink down, my stick across my lap, and start peeling gear off, the tape coming away in a long strip until Dante's borrowed name comes back at me and the strip snaps loose in my hands, the sound sharp in the noisy room.
By eleven Elm House is loud, the post-game party in full swing. The place is packed, music rattling the windowpanes, bass humming through the hardwood under every step, and I move through it like I own the place because right now, I fucking do.
I texted Maya before the game:
Me: Elm House after the game. Everyone's asking about you.
She said yes. Tuesday night she said pass, tonight she said yes. Dante called her a tourist with a borrowed name, and Maya doesn't stay away from a place where someone told her she doesn't belong—she walks right back in and makes them watch her.
I come down the stairs after locking my room and Dante's for the party, the house keys back in my pocket.
I shoulder past two freshmen blocking the entry hall, cut around a knot of girls in front of the speaker, and move to the fridge, grab a beer, press it into Calder's hand on my way past, tell him his second-period shift was clean until his spine straightens a little.
Dante's deeper in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with a glass in his hand and watching the room the way he watches the ice, and I clock him and keep moving, my skin prickling with the weight of his attention.
Gio stands near the kitchen doorway with Zoe beside him, her hand on his arm and his on her hip, both of them posed for the room more than each other, and I drift into the open space at his right.
"You good?" I ask Gio.
"Great," he says, the answer too fast, too bright.
"You've checked your phone all night."
"You noticed?"
"I always notice." It comes out easy the way it's supposed to, but the truth underneath is sharper.
Zoe's fingers tighten on his arm, and Gio's jaw works.