Chapter 21
Minnesota is cold as fuck.
It bites through the seams of your clothes, through the thin places you didn’t know existed, and it stays there long after you’ve stepped back inside.
It doesn’t matter that the training facility is warm or that the locker room smells like eucalyptus and detergent and the familiar tang of sweat.
The cold follows you in anyway. It clings to the backs of your hands, to your lungs, to the memory of stepping out of the car and feeling your body flinch like it’s bracing for impact.
Practice today is brutal in the way winter practices always are now that this is my life. It’s pretty relentless and effectively strips away ego until all that’s left is discipline and whether you can keep your legs under you when they start to shake.
We run defensive rotations until my calves burn.
We run them again. We run them again after that because Coach doesn’t care that it’s February and our bodies are already carrying a season’s worth of bruises.
He cares that our closeouts are half a step late on the weak side and that half a step is the difference between a stop and a highlight reel.
By the time he finally blows the whistle, my shirt is plastered to my spine and my lungs feel like they’ve been scraped raw.
I bend at the waist for a second, hands braced on my knees, sweat dripping off my nose onto the hardwood.
Somebody groans behind me. Somebody else swears.
The sound bounces off the high ceilings like an echo of suffering.
“Jesus,” a voice says near my shoulder. “Did we piss him off somehow?”
I straighten slowly, rolling my shoulders, and glance to my left. It’s DeShawn—a young guard with endless energy even when he’s dying. He’s the kind of guy who talks through drills like his mouth is powered by a separate battery. He’s toweling his face off, eyes wide with exaggerated misery.
“You’re looking at me like I’m supposed to know,” I say, forcing my breath to settle into something more controlled.
DeShawn points at me with the towel. “You’ve been pro, what, three years? You’ve seen some things. You gotta know.”
“Yeah,” another voice cuts in, dry and amused. “Tell us what the West Coast does when it gets hard. Do you all just… manifest a win?”
That’s Jonah, a wing who plays like he’s been carved out of focus. He’s not loud. He doesn’t waste words. When he does speak, it’s usually something that lands clean and makes people laugh in spite of themselves.
I huff a tired laugh as we start walking toward the locker room. “In LA, we complain a lot and then someone makes a smoothie.”
DeShawn gasps, hand to his chest. “A smoothie? That’s how you survive war?”
Jonah’s mouth tips up. “I knew it. Soft.”
“I’m from Southern California,” I remind them, pushing open the locker room door. Heat and noise hit me immediately. “I’m allowed to be soft.”
“Not here,” DeShawn declares, like he’s offended on behalf of the entire state of Minnesota. “Here we eat… I don’t know. Frozen meat out of the snow or whatever.”
From somewhere deeper in the room, a low voice calls out, “If you keep talking, I’m going to make you run suicides again.”
That’s Andre, our veteran big man, and he says it without looking up from his locker.
He’s built like a wall and carries himself like one too.
He’s steady, grounded, and has the kind of presence that quiets a room without needing to raise his voice.
He’s been oddly good to me since I arrived, in that calm, watchful way older players sometimes have when they decide you’re worth keeping.
DeShawn raises both hands in surrender. “My bad. I respect my elders.”
Andre snorts. “You don’t respect anything.”
“Not true,” DeShawn says, dropping onto the bench and yanking off his shoes. “I respect the fact that Oliver Marshall drinks iced coffee when it’s twelve degrees outside.”
“It’s not twelve,” Jonah says, stripping off his shirt. “It’s nine.”
DeShawn turns to me again, eyes accusing. “Nine degrees, man. Nine. That’s not weather. That’s a threat.”
I peel my own practice jersey over my head and wipe my face with it, feeling the chill of sweat on my skin as the locker room air hits. “It wakes me up.”
“It wakes your ancestors up,” DeShawn mutters. “Somewhere in the spirit realm they’re screaming.”
I laugh, but it comes out tired. My body is heavy with the kind of exhaustion that’s almost comforting because it makes thinking harder.
For a few hours, there’s only muscle memory and breath and the simple math of effort.
It’s not that I don’t think during practice.
It’s that the thinking has a shape. It has boundaries. It doesn’t spill into everything else.
That’s part of why I’ve been good lately. Better than good. Focused to the point of obsession.
Coach likes it. He’s been in a better mood for a full week, which feels like a sign of the apocalypse.
I’ve been closing more quarters. I’ve been getting consistent minutes.
I’ve even started a couple of games when rotations shift because of injuries or matchups.
The work is paying off in the one way work ever pays off in the League—opportunity. Trust.
My body can handle pain. I’ve always known that. I can play through bruises and sore joints and the ache that sits deep in your bones after a long road trip. I can handle being tired.
What I struggle with is the quiet. The quiet is where my thoughts find me again, and lately, the quiet has been getting bigger.
“Yo,” Jonah says as he opens his locker. “You coming tonight?”
I pause, towel in hand, and glance up. “Tonight?”
DeShawn leans forward immediately, excited. “Oh, don’t act like you don’t know. Andre’s wife is cooking. She makes this—what’s it called—pot roast? Beef roast? Some Midwest magic? It’s like a warm blanket but edible.”
Andre finally looks up, unimpressed. “It’s just food.”
“It’s not just food,” DeShawn argues. “It’s a spiritual experience. You know the new guy needs carbs. He’s been living on sadness and protein shakes.”
Jonah’s eyes flick to mine, quick and sharp, like he’s checking what lands. It’s subtle, but I catch it.
I’ve made an effort since the trade. Not because I’m naturally social, because I’m not. In LA, it was easier to retreat into the bubble of what I knew. My routines. My space. My controlled, quiet life that only ever really softened when Rafe was there.
In Minnesota, if I don’t say yes sometimes, the silence will swallow me whole.
“I… can’t,” I say slowly, feeling the words scrape. “Not tonight.”
DeShawn’s face collapses into exaggerated heartbreak. “Why would you hurt us like this?”
Andre’s gaze holds mine for a beat longer than necessary. “You got something going on?”
The question is simple. The answer isn’t.
I keep my expression neutral and roll my shoulders like it’s just scheduling. “Friend from LA is in town,” I say.
DeShawn’s eyebrows shoot up. “Friend? Like friend friend?”
Jonah snorts softly. “He means a girl.”
I let out a short laugh that sounds wrong in my own ears. “No,” I say, too quick. Then I force myself to soften it into something casual. “Just a friend.”
Andre’s mouth twitches. “So, you’re bailing on pot roast for a friend.”
“I’ll make it up,” I say. “Next time.”
DeShawn points at me. “Next time you’re eating two servings. You can’t just reject Midwestern hospitality like that.”
“I’ll suffer through it,” I promise.
Jonah shakes his head, amused. “You’re doomed.”
The conversation shifts as easily as it arrived. Someone complains about their knees. Someone else makes fun of DeShawn’s playlist. A couple of guys are talking about a game on TV tonight, the kind of casual sports chatter that fills space and makes it feel less sharp.
I move through my routine, showering fast, dressing, packing my bag. I laugh when I’m supposed to. I nod at the right moments. I’m good at being present in a room without giving away what’s happening under my skin.
The whole time, though, my chest hums with nerves.
Because he’s coming.
Six months. It’s been six long months since I’ve had Rafe in my arms. Since I’ve smelled him up close and felt the weight of him leaning into me like he belongs there.
Since I’ve heard his laugh in the same room instead of through a phone speaker or a voice note sent at two in the morning from some hotel hallway in another country.
The tour ended a week ago. He went back to LA. He didn’t have to come here immediately, but he is anyway. He’s flying into Minneapolis today, getting a car straight to my place.
My place.
Even thinking that still feels strange. This house.
This new neighborhood. This city that creaks under snow and doesn’t smell like the ocean.
The trade forced a life change so fast I never got to grieve properly.
I just moved. I just adapted. I just performed flexibility like my career depends on it, because it does.
But Rafe flying here makes it real in a different way. It means he’s stepping into the life that replaced ours. It also means he’s stepping into my cold.
I leave the facility with my shoulders pulled tight against the wind.
The parking lot is a sheet of ice that glitters under floodlights, and my breath comes out in thick clouds.
My car is coated in a thin layer of frost. I scrape it off with bare hands because I’m impatient and my gloves are somewhere in my bag, and my fingers go numb within seconds.
This is my life now, I think, half amused, half miserable.
I drive home through streets lined with snowbanks higher than my knees. The city feels quieter than LA in a way I still haven’t adjusted to. There are no palm trees with lights wrapped around them. No warm air. No constant hum of nightlife. Everything is muted by winter.
My phone sits in the cupholder, face up. I keep glancing at it like it might bite me.
At a red light, it buzzes.
Rafe: Landed. Getting the car now.