19
Easton
By Tuesday morning, I had learned there were worse things than getting punched in the ribs by a basketball player who deserved more than he got.
One of them was skating with bruised knuckles, a split mouth, and a team full of men pretending they weren’t watching me like I might turn violence into a conditioning drill if someone blinked wrong.
The Furnace was cold enough to make my lungs burn.
Early-morning ice always had a different bite to it, cleaner and meaner, the kind that got under your pads and into your bones before your body remembered it loved the pain.
The lights overhead bounced off the fresh-cut ice in long white streaks, and the glass still held fog along the edges from the Zamboni’s last pass.
No crowd. No music. No students screaming my name like I was anything worth watching. Just the scrape of blades, the slap of sticks, the snap of pucks against boards, and four idiots I trusted most acting like the entire rink was a group therapy office with better traction.
Briggs was in net, which meant none of us were safe from commentary.
“Wade,” he called as I circled behind the goal, “are we pretending your ribs are fine, or are we allowing honesty into the building today?”
I caught the puck off the boards and kept moving. “You’re talking a lot for a man who wears thirty pounds of padding and still flinches when Hannah yells.”
“Hannah has the voice of a woman who could discipline a tornado.” Briggs dropped into his stance, glove up, eyes bright behind the cage. “I respect natural disasters.”
Ryan skated past me backward with the smooth, annoying ease of a man who now got paid actual money to be hard to hit. He had joined morning skate because he was in town, because he was nosy, and because apparently semi-pro life hadn’t beaten the interfering older-brother streak out of him yet.
“You’re favoring the left side.”
“I’m skating.”
“You’re skating mad.”
“I’m always skating mad.”
“No, you usually skate like you’re trying to murder the concept of offense. Today, you’re skating like breathing has wronged you personally.”
Cade glided along the blue line, his stick loose in one hand, annoyingly composed for a man who had spent the last few months recovering from his own nightmare and still somehow looked like he’d been built in a lab for rich-boy threat assessment. “He’s also gripping his stick too hard.”
I cut my eyes toward him. “You coaching now?”
“No. Observing.”
“Do less.”
Rider coasted past the faceoff circle and sent a puck toward me with the blade of his stick. “He’s right.”
“Didn’t ask you either.”
“That has never stopped anyone here.”
Briggs tapped both posts with his stick. “I would like to observe that his mouth is still busted, his hand is wrapped like a mummy, and he looks like he slept in a storm drain.”
“I slept in my apartment.”
Ryan’s mouth twitched. “Same aesthetic.”
I fired the puck. Briggs blocked it with his pad and made a dramatic little wounded noise, then kicked the rebound toward the circle like he was offering me charity.
“Uncalled for. I’m here as emotional support.”
“You’re here because you have abandonment issues and a goalie complex.”
“That is a rich diagnosis from a man whose coping mechanisms include moving into a sadness cave and beating up a basketball player in the rain.”
The puck slid loose near the crease. I reached it first and snapped it high. Briggs caught it cleanly in his glove and held it there like an insult.
“See? This is why violence does not solve everything. Sometimes violence gets saved.”
Ryan laughed under his breath.
I didn’t.
The problem was, they were funny. The bigger problem was, I didn’t have enough room inside my body for funny. Every time one of them cracked a joke, my brain tried to take the exit, but Aura’s face was already standing in the doorway.
Aura in my apartment, holding her Sin Bin shirt against her chest while she asked me to forgive her.
Aura telling me the lights stayed on. Aura telling me he said her name over and over so the whole school would know exactly whose body was being passed around.
Aura saying she loved me like the words were a bleeding thing she had finally ripped out of herself and placed in my hands too late.
I had stood there and told her I couldn’t forgive her, then watched her walk out.
That was what kept catching in my throat. Not the fight. Not the blood. Not the fact that Maddox still had his teeth because Aura told me to stop.
It was the door closing softly behind her.
The quiet click.
The way her leaving had sounded considerate, even after I gutted her.
Ryan skated up beside me and bumped his shoulder against mine. Not hard. Just enough to bring me back. “You’re somewhere else.”
I looked down the ice. Cade was collecting pucks near the boards. Rider traced a slow line near the circle. Briggs had pushed his mask onto the top of his head and was drinking from his bottle with his gaze fixed on me, no humor left in it.
“I’m here.”
Ryan gave me a flat look. “Physically.”
“Dangerous concept,” Briggs called. “A man can be on the ice and still be emotionally lost in a swamp.”
Cade sent a puck sliding toward us with the blade of his stick. “Do not encourage him to use metaphors.”
“Swamp was restrained,” Briggs argued. “I had a whole haunted-marsh option.”
I skated a slow circle, letting my blades carve a clean curve into the ice. My ribs pulled on the turn, deep and ugly, and I swallowed the wince before any of them could make it a project.
Ryan saw anyway because Ryan always saw too much.
That was becoming inconvenient.
“You should’ve taken another day,” he said.
“I don’t need another day.”
“You need a week and a therapist.”
Briggs lifted his glove. “And possibly a priest, but only for the beating you put on Maddox.”
“Not funny,” Cade said.
“Wasn’t trying to be.” Briggs’s expression sobered. “I hope every time that guy chews for the next month, he remembers why his jaw hurts.”
The air shifted, and none of us spoke for a few seconds. I could hear the rink settling around us—the hum of the lights, a distant clank from somewhere near the equipment room, the faint hiss of ice beneath Cade’s slow glide.
I stared at the faceoff circle until the red line blurred.
“Maddox was easy,” I said.
Ryan’s head turned.
I rubbed the taped heel of my stick across the ice. “That’s the fucked-up part. He opened his mouth, and I knew what to do with that. I knew where to put it. Rage has a place to go when there’s a face in front of you.”
Cade skated closer, quiet now. Briggs pushed out of the crease, his pads whispering against the ice.
“And when there isn’t?” Briggs asked.
I swallowed because that was the question.
When there wasn’t a Maddox. When there was only my apartment and Aura crying in a wrinkled Sin Bin uniform beside my crooked coffee table. When there was no door to slam anyone into, no jaw to split, no man on the pavement to make smaller than the damage he had bragged about.
Just her.
Just me.
Just everything we had done to survive each other.
Ryan rested both hands across the top of his stick. “What happened after she took you home?”
I almost told him to mind his business.
The words were right there. Mean. Easy. Familiar.
But Cade was watching me like he already knew I was about to choose the same old exit, and Briggs looked less like he wanted gossip and more like he was ready to be useful if I gave him even one honest thing to hold.
Rider had gone still near the boards, giving me enough space to pretend he wasn’t listening.
I hated all of them a little for being decent.
“We fought.”
Briggs snorted. “Shocking development.”
I looked at him, and he lifted both padded hands. “Respectfully.”
“We fought,” I repeated, my voice rougher. “And then we fucked on my coffee table like two people trying to make pain louder than the truth.”
Ryan looked away first, his jaw tight. Cade’s expression didn’t change, but his grip on his stick did. Briggs went still in full goalie gear, which should have looked ridiculous but didn’t.
“Was she okay?” he asked.
I looked at him.
He didn’t flinch. “I’m not asking for details. I’m asking because after what happened at the bar, after what Maddox said, that matters.”
The question hit harder than I expected. Maybe because he asked without accusation. Maybe because I had been asking myself the same thing since the second she walked out my door.
“She wanted it,” I said, and my voice sounded scraped raw.
“We both did. That’s part of the problem.
It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t me comforting her.
It was anger and hurt and everything we never said turning into hands and teeth because apparently we’re both too damaged to use words before we burn the room down. ”
Ryan nodded once, slowly. “And after?”
I dragged a hand through my damp hair, then hissed when my ribs caught. “After, she asked me to forgive her.”
The rink felt colder.
Cade skated closer until he stood beside Ryan, both of them in front of me now. Briggs drifted in from the crease like an armored emotional-support menace while Rider coasted closer from the boards.
I laughed once, and it didn’t sound human.
“That’s the part I can’t stop hearing. She asked me to forgive her, and I told her I couldn’t.”
Briggs’s face changed. “Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?”
I looked at him.
He shrugged, but there was nothing lazy in it. “Different things, bro.”
“She broke me,” I said, and the words came out before I could make them less pathetic.
“She made me feel like a joke for loving her. Like everything that felt real to me was something she was embarrassed by once the sun came up. I spent a year thinking I was reading her wrong or wanting too much or turning sex into something bigger because I couldn’t handle being casual. ”
Ryan’s gaze sharpened, but I kept going because stopping now felt like bleeding halfway and calling it done.