Chapter Two
Cade
?
There's a schedule to pain, if you do it long enough.
The first hour after practice it's loud and stupid—all adrenaline and heat—and it lies to you. Tells you you're fine. Tells you that thing in your shoulder is nothing.
The second hour it gets honest.
By the time you're sitting in a cold training room with your elbows on your knees and a bag of ice going soft against the back of your neck, it's stopped pretending. It just sits there with you. Says what it came to say.
I'd been hurt enough ways by then that I'd started ranking them. The shoulder was a four. The jaw, where Carter's helmet caught me on the way down—he'd gotten me back on that slant, glue hands and a hard head—was a two, and would be a colorful three by morning.
The thing in my lower back, that I hadn't told anyone about and wasn't going to, I didn't rank.
Ranking it would mean admitting it had a number.
The training room emptied out around me the way it always did.
Guys getting taped and iced and gone, off to dinner and girlfriends and the ordinary Tuesday lives waiting on the other side of the building.
I stayed. I was usually the last one in there.
Partly because I hurt more than I said. Partly because my off-campus house was quiet in a way that got loud if you sat in it too long, and the training room at least had the hum of the ice machine and somebody to not-talk to.
"You're quiet," Wes said.
Wes Tanner was the new sports-med guy. Navy polo, twenty-four, good hands, a conscience he hadn't learned to turn off yet. He'd figure it out or he'd leave. They always did one or the other.
"I'm always quiet."
"You're quieter." He pressed two fingers into the meat of my shoulder and I let nothing move in my face, which is a skill, and not the kind they recruit you for. "This is bothering you more than you're saying."
"Everything bothers me more than I'm saying. That's the whole personality."
He huffed a laugh. But he didn't let it go, and that was the thing about Wes that was going to get him in trouble.
He saw a problem and he wanted to fix it—like the body was a thing you were allowed to be honest about in this building.
Like there wasn't a depth chart riding on every word he wrote in a file.
"Brooks's leg," he said, low, not looking at me, wrapping my shoulder. "You see what happened out there."
I'd seen. I'd seen Theo limp off and I'd seen Voss put him back on, and I'd felt the whole thing happen in my chest the way I always did. The wrongness of it. The wanting to do something. The doing nothing.
"He's day-to-day," I said.
The program line. It came out of me automatic, the way it was supposed to.
Wes's hands went still on my shoulder. "Yeah," he said. "Day-to-day."
He didn't say anything else, because he wanted to keep his job. But he didn't agree either. And that little gap—between what a man knows and what he's allowed to write down—was the whole machine, right there. I could've drawn him a map.
I didn't. Drawing maps for people is how you end up holding them.
"Tape it," I told him. About the shoulder. About the conversation. About everything. "I'm good."
He taped it. He didn't say I was good, because he was honest. But he didn't say I wasn't, because he wanted to keep his job.
I knew exactly how honest you were allowed to be in that building.
Zero. The answer was zero.
?
Here's the part I didn't tell Wes. Didn't tell anybody. Was barely telling myself.
I'd gone down that tunnel for her.
I want to be precise about it, because I spent a long time afterward lying to myself about how it started.
I saw the girl on the riser during the live period.
Saw her before the hit—you learn to read a sideline the way you read a backfield, and there was one body up there that wasn't moving like press.
Press fidgets. Press checks phones, chases quotes, watches whichever player's name is trending.
This one was still. Watching the field like it was a sentence she was reading for the second time, looking for the part somebody changed.
Then Theo went down, and got sent back in, and I came up out of the wrongness of it and looked back at the riser—and she'd stopped watching the field entirely.
She was watching the bench.
She was watching the exact wrong thing, the thing none of them ever watched, and she had a recorder in her jacket pocket. I could see the seam of it pressing through the fabric. You don't grow up the way I grew up without learning to spot a thing somebody's hiding against their body.
And that was the moment the season I was trying to survive got a second way to end.
I knew how it was supposed to go. Corbin would've handled it the program way—a smile, a no-comment, a credential that quietly didn't get renewed. But Voss had a different tool for the things a smile wouldn't fix.
The tool was me.
Lawson, that reporter's poking around. Go let her know it's not worth it. He never had to say the second part. I was the second part. I was the thing you sent when the smile didn't work.
So I went down the tunnel to scare her off. That's true. That's the clean version.
The other version is that some part of me—some part I didn't have a name for and didn't want one—had already decided I needed to stand close to her once before I decided what she was.
Bad instinct. I had a lot of those. I'd built an entire scholarship on overriding them.
But she'd looked up at me with that smile.
And I knew that smile. I'd been in enough of those rooms to know armor when I saw it, because I wore my whole face that way. And instead of getting smaller, she'd gotten brighter. Stepped into it. Told me to unclench my jaw.
Nobody talked to me like that. People said things to me through other people. They sent words down the chain. To my face they got quiet and careful—because of the hits, because of what I am on Saturdays.
She wasn't quiet. She wasn't careful. She stood in the cold mouth of that tunnel, clocked that I'd watched her for two and a half hours, and said it back to me—you came all the way down a tunnel to tell me there's nothing here—and she'd been right.
And I'd stood there getting taken apart by a girl who came up to my collarbone, and felt, for one second, seen.
That's the thing nobody warns you about being seen.
How fast you start wanting it again.
It's a problem. It's exactly the problem I'd spent twenty-two years building a body to avoid.
?
The locker room was loud, which meant it was fine.
You learn to read the noise. Loud and stupid is fine—that's just men being eighteen to twenty-two in a room that smells like a foot and a candle store had a fight. Somebody's bad music. Carter doing an impression of a coach that was, infuriatingly, perfect. A freshman getting chirped.
It's the quiet you watch for. A locker room goes quiet when somebody's hurt that everybody's pretending isn't—or when the coaches have been in saying things. Most days at Baylor Ridge it was one of the two.
Today it was loud. So I let my shoulders down half an inch and went to my stall.
"There he is." Miles dropped onto the bench next to me, already dressed, smelling like the body spray he bought in bulk specifically because I'd told him once it gave me a headache.
Miles Carter, my roommate—the only receiver on the roster fast enough to make me look slow in practice, and the only human on earth who'd never once been scared of me, mostly because he had no survival instinct of any kind.
"I saw you take my soul on that slant. Felt that in my ancestors.
You good? You've got your serial-killer face. "
"This is my regular face."
"That's what I'm saying. Concerning at all times." He bumped my taped shoulder, on purpose, watching for the flinch. I didn't give him one. He grinned like I'd answered a question anyway, which I had. "You hear there was a reporter at practice? Real one. Stayed the whole time, Priya said—"
"Student paper."
"That's what I— wait." He turned and looked at me, slow. He was a clown, but he wasn't dumb; the two things live in different rooms. "How do you know it was the student paper."
"Lanyard."
"Cade. Why are you reading reporters' lanyards."
"Because somebody on this team should."
I said it light. I didn't say because she was watching Theo. Didn't say because she's the kind of person who notices the wrong thing. Didn't say because Voss sent me to handle her and I went, and now I can't stop thinking about a smile.
Saying things is how they get out. Getting out is how people get hurt. And I'd spent my whole life being the wall those things broke against, instead of the door they walked through.
Across the room, Jaxon Holt was holding court for two freshmen, golden and easy, telling some story with his hands—and even from there you could see the thing I'd never had a word for.
How the smile arrived a half-second ahead of him, like a man waving from a window he wasn't actually standing in.
Then his eyes flicked, once, to the hallway where the coaches' offices were.
Checking. The way we all checked. The smile stayed up, but the man behind it ducked for a second, and I thought: he's tired too.
I filed it away and forgot about it.
I shouldn't have.
Across the room, the other direction, Theo was getting dressed slow.
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I went over because that's what I do. Not because I'm good. Because Theo is mine to watch, and I watch what's mine.
We came in the same year. Roomed together freshman fall, before I moved off campus. He'd held my head over a toilet the night I got the call about my grandmother and never told a soul, and I'd carried more of his secrets than that, and the thing between us wasn't the kind you put words on.
You just stood next to it.
"How's the leg," I said. Low. For him.
"It's nothing." He didn't look up. He was lacing his shoe with the careful focus of a man building an alibi. "Tweaked it. Wes looked at it."
"Voss send you back in."