Chapter 20
Rhys
“Blake.”
Silence from the other room.
“Blake, I’m having a bad morning.”
More silence. The bratty kind.
I stare at the ceiling of my bedroom and consider my options. “Okay, fine. But if I don’t get pancakes I’m going to be a moody little bitch all day. And I don’t have class. So I’ll just be here. All day.”
My door flies open. Blake stands in the doorway holding a spatula, hair still messy, staring at me with the expression of a man calculating whether I’m worth the murder charge.
I stare back, daring him.
He crosses the room and launches himself onto my bed.
We wrestle like absolute idiots for thirty seconds and I feel marginally better by the time we’re both lying there out of breath, staring at opposite walls. He holds the spatula up between us. “Fine. Pancakes. But you clean up after.”
“Absolutely not. Look how sad I am.”
“Then no pancakes.”
I glare at him. He stares back, completely unmoved. Blake has gotten to know me well enough to know all my angles and is immune to every single one of them. I hate him sometimes.
“Fine,” I mutter.
He points the spatula at me. “And you tell me why you came home soaking wet last night with your face looking like that.”
I groan into the pillow.
“Pancakes,” he says simply, and leaves.
The smell of blueberry pancakes does what nothing else has managed this morning — it gets me up, gets me to the table, gets me almost human again. I sit across from Blake and for a few minutes I just eat and let the syrup and the butter do their work.
“I love you,” I tell my plate.
“I know. Now talk, or I eat the rest.”
I push the food around. He waits. Blake is exceptionally good at waiting for me to figure out my feelings. “The captain,” I finally say. “Jamie. The one I’m always complaining about.” I pause. “He punched me yesterday.”
Blake looks up slowly. Gives me the specific look that means he believes me and also doesn't believe that's anywhere close to the whole story. “You’re incredibly annoying,” he says. “But I doubt it came from nowhere.”
"Wow. Amazing support from my best friend. Thank you."
“I’m just saying—”
"We kissed," I blurt out. "In the locker room. Just one time. He panicked and ran." I stab a blueberry. "I found him two days later and pushed him on it. Basically called him gay to his face." I pause. "He hit me, so I told Fitch."
Blake sets his fork down. Tries but fails to not let surprise completely take over his face. “You told on him.” He’s processing this. “You. Reported it.”
“Yes.”
“And why did you tell your coach it was because you’re gay?”
The question sits there, direct and quiet, the way Blake does things.
No judgment in it. Just the actual question.
I put my fork down too. “Because that’s what it feels like,” I say.
“The way he reacted. I’ve seen it before and I—” I stop.
Push my plate an inch to the left. “You know what happened at Eldridge. You’re the only one who does.
And I just—I can’t let something like that happen again. ”
“I get it,” he says.
And he does. That’s what I know about Blake — he doesn’t need me to explain the rest of it. He was there when I first transferred here. He knows what I carried in with me. And before he even really knew me, he was there for me. He picks his fork back up. Contemplative for a moment.
"This sounds a little familiar, Rhys."
I look at my plate instead of him. "It's not the same."
He's not accusing me of anything. Just laying it flat.
"This is you getting hurt again."
"Jamie's not—" I stop.
"I'm not saying he is." Blake looks at me, or rather, right through me. "I'm saying I watched you go through something like this once already. And right now you're sitting here feeling bad that he hit you. Which." He pauses. "I don't love."
"I knew he couldn’t handle it and I pushed him on it anyway."
"I know, but that doesn’t make it okay."
We eat in silence for a while.
The problem is the other side of my brain — the honest side, the side I hate — keeps pulling at the framing of the whole thing.
Jamie Nash cares about exactly one thing and it lives on a sheet of ice.
The look on his face the first practice after Fitch took captain away was the look of someone losing the only thing that mattered.
I know that look. I’ve felt it.
Maybe I pushed too hard. Maybe I should have just let him be.
If he wants to pretend nothing happened, who am I to force him to face the truth.
"I feel bad," I admit. "A little. For how I handled it.
Not for reporting it — he put his hands on me and I'm done saying nothing when people put their hands on me.
But." I pause. "He could have lost everything and he’s obviously going through something. "
Blake raises an eyebrow.
“A little bad,” I repeat firmly.
But maybe — just maybe — we can figure out how to stop being at each other’s throats for the rest of our time here.
For the team. For the season. For the future I’m also trying to build.
The thing is none of what happened in that coffee shop was actually about me.
Not really. I know that. I pushed and he snapped and I know the difference between someone who hates me and someone who hates themself.
Doesn't mean I was wrong to report it. Doesn't mean I don't feel the weight of it sitting in my chest like something I can't put down.
I steal the last pancake off Blake’s plate and he doesn’t even fight me on it. That’s how I know he feels sorry for me.