Chapter Fourteen
Cade
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The Monday after the party, the locker room knew.
Nobody said anything. That's not how a locker room works.
A locker room is the most information-dense place on earth and almost none of it is spoken; it travels in glances and in who-sits-where and in the half-second a conversation pauses when you walk in.
I walked in Monday and felt the pause, the recalibration, forty guys updating their model of me in real time, Lawson, the wall, the guy who never says anything, picked a grown man up by his collar in Carter's kitchen over the reporter, and I stood at my stall and got dressed and let them look, because there was nothing to do about it but let them look.
Miles, naturally, said the thing nobody else would.
He flopped onto the bench next to me, pulling on his cleats, and said, low, conversational, "So on a scale of one to 'we need to have a team meeting,' how worried should I be that you're dating the human being currently trying to dismantle our entire program. "
"Don't," I said.
"I'm not judging! I'm pro-romance! I'm just, as your roommate and the guy who has to live with you, doing a little light risk assessment.
" He lowered his voice further, and the joking thinned out, the way it could when it mattered.
"Half these guys think it's the most insane thing they've ever heard and the other half think you've finally lost it in a way that's frankly overdue.
But Cade—" he glanced around, made sure of the distance, "—a couple of them came up to me.
Quiet. Asking if it's true she's really looking into the injury stuff.
The training room thing. Because they've got stuff, man.
Marcus. Deon. There's a freshman safety who hasn't been right since the Halloran game and won't say so.
They're scared, and they're watching you, because you're the one guy in here nobody can push around, and if you're with her—" He shrugged, but his eyes were serious.
"I don't know. I think you matter more than you think you do.
I think a lot of guys are waiting to see what the wall does. "
I didn't have an answer. I filed it next to the thing Theo had said at the water station, the thing about keeping the kid around, and I started to feel the shape of a responsibility I hadn't asked for and couldn't see the edges of.
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Voss called me in Tuesday.
The office, the chairs, the framed photos of teams going back thirty years, the wall of boys who'd given him everything and been used up and replaced.
He had the warm voice on, but there was something underneath it now, a degree cooler, a man who'd gotten a report he didn't like and was deciding how to play it.
"Heard there was some excitement at Carter's place," he said, easy, watching me.
"Heard you got between that little reporter and a friend of the program.
Real chivalrous." He let it sit. "You want to tell me what that's about, son?
Because the version I'm hearing is that my most reliable guy, the one I trust to keep his head, made a real public scene over a girl who's spent six weeks trying to burn this place down.
And that's not the Cade I know. So either somebody's lying to me, or you've got something to say. "
The hand wasn't on my neck. That was how I knew it was serious.
He kept the hand for when he was sure of you.
Right now he wasn't sure of me, and so he sat across the desk and waited, and I felt twenty-two years of training scream at me to fix it, to make him sure again, to say whatever put the warm hand back.
"Guy was bothering a student at a player party," I said. Flat. The wall. "I don't care who she's writing about. You don't corner a girl in a hallway. That's all it was. You'd have done the same."
It was a good lie. It had the shape of the truth and a principle he couldn't argue with. I watched him decide whether to buy it, watched the calculation behind the charm, and watched him choose—for now—to let it go, because it wasn't yet worth the cost of calling me a liar to my face.
"Course I would," he said, warm again, the hand finally coming up to clap my shoulder as I stood.
"Course. You're a good man, Cade. Just—be careful who you're chivalrous around.
People will get the wrong idea. They'll think you've gone soft on the wrong person.
And in this business, son, the wrong idea about a player can cost him a draft slot faster than a bad forty.
You hear me?" The smile didn't change. The threat under it was surgical.
"Protect your stock. That's all I'm saying. Protect your stock."
I heard him. He'd just told me, in the gentlest possible voice, that he knew, and that he could make it cost me, and that he was choosing not to yet.
It was the same move Mercer had pulled in the hallway, the same move the envelope would pull later, the whole program speaking one language: we can hurt you whenever we decide to. Be grateful we haven't.
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I told Sloane none of it.
That's the part I have to keep being honest about, because it's the seed of everything.
We met that night—her place, Brielle gone, the careful dance of two people who'd been seen in public and were now extra careful in private—and she asked how I was, actually asked, the way she did, and I had a locker room full of scared guys looking to me and a coach who'd just threatened my draft in a voice like honey, and I said fine.
Fine. The team motto. The lie I'd been raised on.
I told myself I was protecting her. She had enough weight on her; she didn't need mine.
I'd carry the Voss conversation, the threat, the scared guys, all of it, the way I carried everything, and she'd never have to feel it.
That was love, I told myself. That was the wall doing the one good thing it knew how to do, standing between her and the hit.
It wasn't love. I know that now. It was the wall protecting itself by staying useful, by being the strong silent one, by never once letting her carry any of mine—because if she carried mine, then I'd have needed her, and needing was the thing I'd been trained out of, and a man who needs can be hurt, and a man who can be hurt isn't safe.
So I held her instead of telling her. I let her think the quiet was peace.
I kissed her in the dark and ran my hand down the spine of the most dangerous girl in three counties and let her believe I'd come over light, when really I'd come over loaded, with a coach's honeyed threat in my chest and a whole locker room of scared guys on my shoulders, and not a word of any of it on my lips.
"You're somewhere else tonight," she murmured, against my collarbone, because she read everything, because she always knew.
"I'm right here," I said.
It was the truest lie I ever told her. I was right there. I was just there with the wall up, carrying everything alone, calling it love, building—one withheld thing at a time, one fine at a time—the exact wall between us that would, in the end, nearly cost me her.
She fell asleep with her hand fisted in my shirt. I lay awake doing the math of all the things I wasn't telling her, and the number kept getting bigger, and I told myself each one was a brick I was carrying for her.
Every one of them was a brick I was putting between us.
I just couldn't see it yet. That's the thing about a wall you build from the inside. It looks, from in there, exactly like shelter.
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