12. Maya
Maya
I'm on Cole's couch in Cole's sweatshirt, with my laptop open on my lap and the senior class feature staring back at me.
Five hockey players, four years, a program rebuilt. Four hundred words in an hour, and three hundred of them are about Dante's positioning on the half-wall.
My apartment's heating died at nine. The landlord won't send anyone until morning, and it's seven degrees outside. Cole texted an hour ago from the recruiter dinner with Addison and the boosters.
Probably won't be back until late. Fridge has food.
So I used the key Cole gave me, and now I'm here for the fifth time, sitting inside a house that smells like coffee, laundry detergent, and, beneath both, Dante's soap. Clean. Sharp. Expensive without trying too hard.
The scent is in the walls by now.
The second 413 call came three days ago. I answered that time. Seven seconds of open line. No breathing. No voice. The specific silence of someone confirming I'd pick up.
I wrote it down. I deleted the log. I didn't tell Cole. I didn't tell Richard.
The house is different without Cole in it. The geometry is wrong. Without him here, there are only two points left in the room: Dante and me.
I'm writing about the senior class defensive identity when the front door opens.
My spine locks. My hands stay on the keyboard, but every word on the screen drops out of focus.
Dante walks in.
He sees me and stops hard enough that his bag swings forward on his shoulder.
His weight shifts back, and I can almost feel him recalculating the room with me inside it.
Damp hair. Dark eyes. Jacket still on. His gaze moves from me to the couch, to Cole's sweatshirt on my body, to the hallway where the office sits.
Two weeks since his hand stopped an inch from my face. Two weeks since he pulled it back. Except for goodnight. He said goodnight, and he used my name.
"Maddox." His voice is sharp.
"Voss."
"Cole?"
"Booster dinner."
"And you're here because?"
"My heat's out. Cole said I could use the house until the landlord sends someone in the morning."
He sets his bag down harder than necessary. His jacket stays on. His keys stay in his hand.
He walks past me to the kitchen. The keys hit the counter. I hear the coffeemaker running. One mug. He comes back, sits in the armchair across the room, and drinks.
I go back to my laptop, write a sentence, and delete it.
"Your piece on the defensive scheme," he says.
I look up. He's watching me over the rim of his mug.
"The one that ran last week."
"I know which piece."
"It's wrong."
"Explain."
"You argued the weak-side gap is systemic.
It's not. It's Addison compensating for the hole Rylan left in the lineup.
He reshuffled the D-pairs mid-season to cover the loss.
The weak-side exposure you're seeing is roster management rather than scheme failure.
Pull the deployment numbers before and after Rylan's removal. The pattern changes."
I open my mouth, then close it.
He's right. Fuck him, he's right. The trend is real, but the Rylan variable is something I missed because I was working from press box data, not internal deployment decisions.
"The internal deployment changes aren't public," I say.
"No."
"So you're telling me my analysis has a gap you can see because you have access I don't. That's a leash, Dante."
His jaw tightens. "That's not what I said."
"It's what you meant. You meant I'm writing from the outside. That my analysis is still sixty feet from where it needs to be. That I'm still sixty feet above the ice looking down. Still a tourist."
"That's not—"
"That's exactly what it is. Dressed up in tactical language. Same argument. Smarter delivery."
His knuckles go pale on the mug. We stare at each other across eight feet, and the air between us has the same heat as his office. This time, neither of us moves closer.
"The Rylan variable is real," he says, quieter now.
"So is the word tourist. And it's still in my chest a month later, so maybe your critique landed better than you think."
My phone buzzes.
My pulse jumps so hard my fingers freeze over the keyboard. I pick up and press the phone to my ear before I can talk myself out of answering.
The line is open.
Faint static hums against my ear. No breathing. No voice. That same specific silence, the one that feels less like absence and more like someone standing very still on the other end.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Dead.
The phone stays pressed to my ear until my hand starts shaking. I lower it, set it face-down on the cushion beside my laptop, and press my hands together in my lap hard enough that my knuckles ache.
Four in. Four hold. Four out.
"Maya."
My first name. Without me saying his first. The last time he used it, I'd said Goodnight, Dante, and he gave it back. This time, he reaches for it on his own.
I don't look up.
"Who was that?" he asks.
"Nobody."
"Your hand is shaking."
"It's not."
"You answered. You stayed silent. You listened to nothing for six seconds and hung up. That's someone."
"Spam."
The house goes quiet.
He sets his coffee on the side table, stands, and goes to the kitchen. A cabinet opens too hard. The kettle hits the stove.
He comes back with a mug, tea bag still steeping, and sets it on the coffee table in front of me hard enough that it sloshes over the rim. Then he steps back toward the armchair.
Barry's. The same brand as two weeks ago, still on the shelf.
I pick up the mug. The warmth seeps through my palms, into my fingers, into the tremor I want to hide from him. The shaking slows anyway.
"Thank you," I say.
He sits back down in the armchair. His coffee is on the side table, forgotten and cold. He looks at his phone, screen angled away. His thumb does not move.
Minutes pass.
"You know what I can't figure out," he says.
I wait.
"You walk in here with Cole's key. You sit on Cole's couch in Cole's sweatshirt.
Your charger's been plugged in by the couch for two weeks.
Your jacket was on the hook last Thursday.
You've got a toothbrush in the upstairs bathroom.
You've been rotating through his sweatshirts since October, and I can tell which one you took by which one's missing from the closet. "
Every artifact I've left in this house has been seen.
"And the name." His voice drops. "Maddox. His family's name. On your badge. On your byline. On the press credential that gets you into every room in this building."
Cold moves through my chest, sharp enough to make my fingers tighten around the mug.
He doesn't know. To him, the name on my badge is Cole's name pinned to me, and he's looking at me like it proves something about what I am.
He has no idea what that name cost me, what I left behind to carry it, or what it replaced.
"Say what you're trying to say, Dante."
"I'm saying you're everywhere. You're in the press box. You're in my kitchen. You're in my house when I come home. You're in Cole's clothes. You're in—"
He stops. The sentence dies in his mouth.
"I'm in what, Dante."
His jaw works. "You're in my head," he says. "And I didn't invite you there."
The refrigerator hums too loud into the space between us.
"So this is my fault," I say. "I'm in your head and that's an invasion. A strategy. Something I engineered."
"I didn't say—"
"You bought my tea. You fixed the printer. You stood in that office two weeks ago and stopped an inch from my face. You gave me editorial feedback on my own piece. You said goodnight using my first name."
I set the mug down on the table before I throw it at him.
"You built half of this and now you're standing in the wreckage calling me the architect."
His chest rises once. Falls. His jaw shifts. The muscle along the hinge tightens and releases and tightens again. He doesn't speak.
"It's still true that you're everywhere," he says.
"I know that too."
I stop. I swallow once before the word comes out, and when it does, the argument falls away from my voice.
"And you're scared of the word for what that makes me."
"What word?"
"Equal."
It comes out quiet, almost hoarse, and the refrigerator hums into the silence after it.
"You should stop leaving things here," he says, quieter now. "Your charger. Your jacket. The toothbrush."
He pauses.
"Every time you leave something behind, it's still here when you're gone. The house holds it. I walk past your jacket on the hook and I know you were here."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It's a fact."
"Facts don't come with that tone."
His eyes are on me, and the anger is still there, but it has thinned. Then his gaze drops once to my mouth and back, fast enough to pretend it didn't happen.
My phone buzzes again on the cushion.
My shoulders jump before I can stop them. My hands fly to my lap.
Chronicle notification. I exhale.
His eyes track the flinch, the recovery, the way my hands press together.
"The calls," he says.
"I said it was spam."
"And I said that's not nobody. You flinch every time that phone moves. You answered a silent call at eleven at night and your hand shook."
He leans forward in the armchair.
"Who is calling you, Maya?"
"That's not your business."
"Someone is scaring you and you're sitting in my house. That makes it my business."
"I'm sitting in Cole's house."
"You're sitting in mine."
The sentence hits low, behind my ribs, and my pulse shifts before my mind catches up. I feel it in my wrists, in my throat, in the soft, stupid place between my thighs before I can shut the reaction down.
Mine.
One word and my body turns traitor. Heat climbs under my sweatshirt. My fingers dig into my palms. I hate him for saying it like ownership, and I hate myself more for the way the word fits somewhere it has no right fitting.
I don't answer because there are too many answers, and every one of them would put my throat in his hand.
"You should go," he says.
My stomach drops.