Chapter 31
thirty-one
ROOK
Schmidt’s car reeks of pine air freshener and barely contained rage.
Sitting in the passenger seat, I keep pulling at the seatbelt, trying to find a position where it doesn’t feel like it’s slowly strangling me, but there’s no escape.
Schmidt’s grinding his teeth so hard I’m waiting for one to crack.
In the rear-view mirror, Leo Cooper is just staring out the window.
But I don't care about them.
Because my brain keeps replaying the look on Morgan's face.
The way the color drained out of her face, leaving nothing but pale white shock. The way her shoulders locked, bracing for impact from a blow I’d already delivered. The way she walked away—not running, not storming, just…leaving—like I wasn’t even worth the energy of her getting mad.
My brain chimes in, helpfully: She bailed from that room like she did after you fucked her in the library, after you sprayed her on the ice, and after you broke her heart at summer camp. You're an absolute disaster of a human being, and nobody should have given you a microphone.
“Walk me through it.” Schmidt’s voice interrupts my self-loathing, each word careful. “What was the fucking plan, Rook?”
The words trigger something primal—that old, familiar panic that screams fill the silence, deflect the danger, make them laugh before they can get angry—and even though I know it's the wrong approach, my mouth opens and the performance begins before I can stop it.
"You know what the funniest part was?" I launch into it, the words tumbling out like vomit. "The AV guy—"
Schmidt turns his head to look at me, and his expression kills my joke dead, and his question hangs there, simple and devastating. "Rook…"
“I was trying to help her!” The words explode out too loud, bouncing off the windows. “Galloway gutted her program, Schmidt. He took everything—their travel budget, their equipment budget—so I had to do something big to help them out…"
“Did you ask her if she wanted help?” Leo’s voice cuts in from the backseat, flat and clinical. “Did you show her the video?”
The question lands, and my stomach plummets. My mouth keeps moving, but the conviction’s bleeding out fast. “It was supposed to be a surprise. You don’t get that kind of impact if you telegraph it. The donors needed to feel something, to see them as real people fighting real battles—”
“The impact,” Schmidt interrupts, and now his voice is shaking, “is that you just declared war on Galloway in front of every donor in the state.”
"I—"
"No." His hands flex on the wheel, knuckles white. “You think he’s going to let that slide? You think he’s not going to bury you? Bury the team?” He looks at me, his eyes wild with anger. “We have a championship to defend, and you just—Jesus Christ, Rook.”
“I wasn’t trying to be—”
“She didn’t need a savior," Leo chimes in from the backseat.
I twist around to stare at him, the rental tux creaking. “What?”
He meets my eyes in the dim light, his gaze unflinching.
“She needed a partner. Someone who would stand beside her, not above her.” He pauses, letting each word land like a verdict.
“You didn’t help her tonight. You made her an exhibit.
You took her private fight and turned it into dinner-theater for rich people. ”
My ribs feel like they’re caving in. I want to argue, to defend myself, but the words die somewhere between my brain and my throat. And, as the car pulls up to the curb outside my apartment building, Schmidt throws it in park but won’t look at me.
The silence presses against my eardrums. My skin feels too tight, like it might split if I don’t move, don’t speak, don’t something. The old programming kicks in one last time, desperate and pathetic, the showman in need of an audience, noise in need of listeners.
“Hey…” I clear my throat, forcing my usual grin. “You guys want to come up for pizza and beer?"
Please don’t leave me alone with this. I’ll juggle. I’ll tell jokes. I’ll set myself on fire if it means not being alone with what I’ve done.
“No.” Schmidt’s refusal is flat, and he still won’t look at me.
“You need to sit with this one,” Leo adds from the back.
The rejection rocks me as I fumble with the door handle, my fingers suddenly useless. I finally get it open and stumble out onto the sidewalk, the November air sharp against my flushed face. I turn back, some desperate part of me hoping one of them will call out to offer some kind of lifeline.
But the car is already pulling away, taillights disappearing into the dark.
I stand there on the empty sidewalk until the cold starts seeping through the thin dress shoes, making my toes go numb. Then I turn and face my building, dreading the three flights I'll need to climb while carrying the weight of what I’ve done.
My legs feel disconnected as I climb. The stairwell reeks of old pizza and whatever died in the walls last month. Someone’s music thumps through thin walls—a party somewhere, people laughing, living their normal lives while mine implodes in slow-motion—and each step echoes too loud.
The apartment door sticks like always. I have to shoulder it open, nearly falling into the darkness when it finally gives.
I don’t turn on the lights, navigating by muscle memory and streetlight, kicking aside what feels like a month of laundry.
My knee connects with the coffee table, and I bite back a curse.
I stand in the middle of it all, still wearing this ridiculous tuxedo that makes me look like a kid who raided his dad’s closet. I yank at the bow tie until it comes loose, but the relief is minimal. The real constriction is in my chest, tightening with each breath.
I head for my room and sink onto my unmade bed, springs protesting.
And, suddenly, I’m not in this shitty apartment anymore. I’m on the hood of my truck three years ago. The bonfire smoke stings my eyes. There's a girl beside me—beautiful, brilliant, looking at me like I might actually be worth something—whose hair catches the firelight as she asks a question.
“So…what happens when we leave here?”
That moment mattered.
She mattered.
The silence between us mattered.
And I don’t know how to exist in that kind of meaningful quiet.
So I destroyed it.
I made jokes. I turned our connection into a punchline. I made her vulnerability into material for my desperate one-man show. I watched her face shut down. I watched her walls slam back up. And then, worst of all, I watched her walk away.
And the connection between that moment and tonight is undeniable.
The boys are right. Tonight wasn’t about helping Morgan. It was about me. About my need to fill the silence with noise, to turn something real into something I could control with a microphone and a spotlight. I took her pain—real, private, hard-won pain—and I made it mine to give away.
The worst part? She’d started to trust me again. In that library, working on my disaster of a paper, she’d let her guard down. She’d laughed at my stupid hockey metaphors. She’d been patient with my brain that operates like a pinball machine on cocaine.
And she’d looked at me like maybe I’d changed.
The worst part?
I had changed.
My captaincy had become a little more serious, and our results on the ice had started to improve.
I'd started taking my studies more seriously, and felt the improvement.
I'd still been me—James, Rook—but spending time with Morgan had made me better, and I'm confident time with me had helped her, too.
And, sure, she'd panicked after we'd fucked.
But maybe that could have been saved, in time, with patience and effort.
Yet instead of putting in the work, giving her time and space, I'd gone for the big play and validated her worst fears in front of three hundred people. I'd proven I'm still the kid on that hood, demolishing anything real before it can demand something real from me.
This is what Leo meant.
This is what I need to sit with.
Because this can't be solved by a frantic energy, the need to fix it, or another grand gesture. That’s all just more performance, more noise, and more of the same poison I’ve been mainlining since I was seven.
The real work—if there’s any redemption possible after this nuclear meltdown—isn’t loud, and it isn’t public.
It’s quiet, it’s small, and it’s showing up every day and doing the unglamorous work of being better. Actually better, not just performing better for whoever’s watching. It’s the kind of work you do when no one’s watching and when there’s no applause.
I lie back on the bed and, for the first time in my life, I don’t try to fill the silence.
I let it bury me, overwhelm me, and press down on me so hard I might never get up from this bed again.
Because maybe that’s what has to happen first—a complete burial of the performer, the jester, the emotional janitor who’s been running the show for twenty-one years—before anything real can grow.
So I close my eyes and let the darkness press in.
No jokes. No diversions. No audience.
Just me and the wreckage.
Alone and quiet.