Chapter 2
ELIJAH
For nearly two hours, the room has moved without me. Voices eddy around the coffee table, around the tablet, around my name, while I stand where I first stopped and haven’t quite remembered how to start again.
I keep my phone in my hand because it anchors me to a single point—Jayden’s message, my reply—and because, when I close my eyes, I see the moment after he read it.
The slump of his shoulders. Hurt and disappointment weighing down on him.
The same hurt and disappointment that I’ve caused Finley for months.
His frown, her tears. It’s all I see, and then it loops—the slump, the gloss of her eyes, the guilt threading both—until balance goes watery and the carpet seems to drift under my shoes.
The air in here thins, not all at once, but with a quiet persistence that makes my lungs second-guess the next breath.
“Okay,” Coach calls with a loud clap like he’s addressing a boisterous locker room. “How are we handling this?”
Connie doesn’t try to cut through the noise; she just perches on the table next to him and turns her attention gently my way. “What do you want to do, Eli?”
Do I really have any choice right now? Because it feels like I’m back in a shitty hotel room in Colorado with my power taken away from me. And again, I can’t fight back.
When I shrug, Shayne holds up his iPad with one of the photos of Ryker and me glaring my way.
Vomit burns up my throat at the sight of the boy in the photo. Me.
At first glance, it doesn’t fit my nightmare. It looks like two kids in the heat of the moment. It’s nothing like the truth I recall.
Suddenly, I’m questioning myself like I did all those years ago.
Did I do this? Maybe it is my fault. What if I’ve been in denial about everything that happened, and at the root of it, Ryker is right?
What if I did want it? But I’ve been holding on to some twisted sense of righteousness. Trying to be someone I’m not.
“What happens if I do nothing?” The question comes out flat.
Shayne lets out a breath that sounds practiced.
“More stories will run wild. Speculation will become a frenzy around you and the franchise. It could impact your sponsorships, our sponsorships… There are so many angles and variables at play here. Not to mention that you have a girlfriend.” He keeps flicking, pinching, enlarging pixels into conclusions.
After going back and forth for a while, he pauses on one of the least blurry pictures and zooms into a darkened corner where my bicep is partly cut off at an odd angle.
My arm burns as soon as I set my eyes on the detail he circles in red. I can feel the panic rolling through me like an avalanche ready to take me out. And my heart is still beating. Still fighting frantically against the sharp pain pulverizing my chest. Beating somewhere without me.
“Who else was there?” Shayne asks, moving to the dining table where Coach and Connie have sat down. When I shake my head in reply, he levels me with an unmoving stare. “Now isn’t the time to protect others, Sylkes. Save yourself.”
It’s too late for that. The past can’t be changed.
“Eli…” Connie drawls my name, inviting me to sit beside her. When I don’t budge from where I’m standing, she gets up and rounds to my side. “That article doesn’t change who you are.”
“With all due respect, Dr. Armstrong, there are times when a person’s public image is his character, and this is one of those times.
This article suggests that Elijah has been having a secret affair with another man.
” He swipes to the last image attached to the email, and my entire body goes cold. “That boy… this man.”
I study the leading angle of the photograph and the story it shows. A lie. I don’t remember being this close to Ryker when he followed me out to the parking lot at the rink. I know he came close, but… not this close.
With the door of my SUV open, it shields our faces in a way that, with our closeness, looks like we’re caught in an intimate moment. Like we’re kissing.
Bile rises up my throat. The immediate urge to run bites at my heels. That’s the only way I can protect myself right now.
“We’re not even friends anymore,” I say as I head for the door.
“Sylkes,” Coach calls after me. “Elijah… Son…”
“Wait, please,” Cecilia lunges in front of me. She looks flustered as she sucks in a deep breath and says, “That’s Coach Hallman.”
“What do you know, Four?” Shayne asks at the same time as she tells me, “I overheard your argument when he came to the training facility.”
“What argument?” Coach comes to stand at my side.
Cecilia pulls back with an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, but I think you have options. There are ways we can spin this if we look at the facts. When he came to the facility, he was obviously harassing you.”
Shayne stalks towards us with an all-business scowl on his face as he swipes at his iPad. “What happened? What did you see… hear? Tell me everything, Four.”
“Her name is Cecilia,” I grumble at him before she manages to give him what he wants. “Cece wasn’t there for the whole thing.”
She gives me a sheepish look. “I was about to open the door of the administration stairwell when I heard you asking him why he was there. I’m sorry,” she adds quickly with an apologetic grimace. “You sounded angry, and it caught me off guard. It felt rude to interrupt.”
“So you eavesdropped instead,” I scoff, trying to rub the achy throb from my eyes.
“Not really. Not everything. I had a VM from merch about the shirts for the kids, so I listened to that.” Cecilia pauses as though she’s trying to refresh her memory.
“Then you started walking away, but Coach Hallman grabbed you, and when you told him to get off of you, he didn’t.
You had to pull away from him, and even then, he continued stalking you—”
“Harassment, stalking… we can work with that,” Shayne says with a tinge of relief and excitement to his words that irks me so badly I explode.
“You can’t spin a lie with more lies,” I bark into the air as I pace back and forth.
“I haven’t seen Ryker Hallman in seven years.
Since that night.” Pointing at Shayne’s iPad, I suck in a deep breath, allowing it to set heavily in my lungs as I allow the words to spew like acrid vomit.
“Since those photos. We weren’t making out and we weren’t exploring,” I tell Connie when she approaches me.
“We were at the wrong place at the wrong time, and I had never had liquor before, so I was… I couldn’t…
I… I couldn’t stop Ryker or Presley or any of it.
My body couldn’t keep up with my head, and… ”
I can’t do this.
The unforgiving sting behind my eyes blurs my surroundings as I push past Coach, Shayne, and Cecilia and run out of the room.
I run and keep running through the long corridor and down the stairs. I continue charging through the hotel, chasing the merciless pounding of my heart until there’s nowhere left to go. Just the fire exit in front of me.
“Eli,” a soft voice calls behind me while an equally tender hand rests on my shoulder. “You can’t keep running.”
“I’m-I’m…” not. I want to say, but I can’t bring myself to lie to Connie when she moves to stand in front of me. Instead, I tell her, “Those photos, the article… it’s not true. It’s not, Connie. I never. I didn’t—”
“Breathe, Eli,” she instructs in that cool, no-nonsense tone that makes it impossible not to comply. “That’s it, deep breath. Illegitimi non carborundum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Remember?”
I nod, and she smiles.
It’s a while before I can get my heart to slow and my lungs to open up. The deeper I breathe, the wider it feels like I’m opening myself, so when she asks, “You said you couldn’t stop any of it. Any of what, Eli? What couldn’t you stop?”
I can’t stop myself from answering, “It was just supposed to be a party, but… but it was a trap.”
“What was the party for? What were you celebrating?” Connie heads for the stairs and sits on the third step up, waiting for me to join her.
“Back in junior league. We’d beat the favorites to win the tournament, and… yeah, the guys always had a party. They never invited me, though. Or Ryker.”
“Why not? You were part of the team, weren’t you?”
Nodding, I pause in front of her. There’s too much nervous energy running through me for me to sit.
“Presley was the cool guy, and he didn’t like me, and because Ryker is gay, he had a problem with him, too.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I thought he was a good person. That he was my friend.”
Connie’s brows pull together. “And he wasn’t?”
“No,” I snap. “He set me up.”
“At the party.”
“Yes. He made me feel bad for not going to the party, and… and…” I shrug, pacing from one side of the stairs to the other while she watches me. “We were meant to be friends. No one else wanted to be my friend because of who I am. My father being a pastor… a preacher.”
“That’s where your nickname comes from…?”
“Yeah. I… ugh… I used to take a moment before each game, you know, to pray. It was what I was taught. To ask God for guidance, for victory… success. I was stupid and naive, and the other guys…”
When I shrug again, Connie asks, “You told me that Presley is from the same town, same church. Didn’t he pray, too?”
“He’s always been better at fitting in. Showing people what they want to see.”
“So, tell me about the party.” Connie silences her phone, sending the call that interrupts us to voicemail. “Why was it a trap?”
“Before we left for the tournament, Presley and I had a fight. He hurt Finley—the only good thing I had. He tried to take her away from me, and… and no one hurts my girl.” Connie tips her face up with a soft grin.
I wait for her to say something, but when she doesn’t, I go on.
“He hurt her, and I hurt him in front of his buddies. At the party, he got his own back.”
“What does that mean? He got his own back? What did he do?” Like she does in her office, Connie kicks off her heels and settles in to listen to me.