19 #2
“Then she tells me everything. She was raped by four dudes who drugged her and videoed the whole thing. She tells me I was safe, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard because I knew it.
I knew she trusted me in bed. I knew she let me have parts of her no one else got near.
I knew that meant something, and she still made me feel insane for wanting it to matter outside the dark. ”
Rider’s voice came low. “Both can be true.”
I stared at him.
“She can have a reason that explains the rules,” he said. “That doesn’t erase what those rules did to you when she refused to let you understand them.”
Ryan nodded. “Trauma explains behavior. It doesn’t make the damage imaginary.”
Briggs pointed at Ryan with his goalie stick. “That English degree finally paid rent.”
Ryan didn’t look away from me. “You love her?”
I hated how fast the answer came. “Yeah.”
“Still?”
“Unfortunately.”
Briggs winced. “That is both tragic and deeply relatable to several Taylor Swift bridges.”
Cade looked at him.
“What? We’re on ice. I’m allowed one emotional-support pop-culture reference.”
Ryan ignored him. “Does she love you?”
I thought of her face when she said it. The way her voice had sounded like a wound opening. “Yeah.”
“Then what are you asking us?” Cade said.
I looked down at my skates.
That was the problem.
I didn’t know.
The question inside me kept changing shape every time I tried to hold it.
It wasn’t, Do I love her? That answer was carved into my ribs.
It wasn’t, Did she hurt me? She did. It wasn’t, Did something terrible happen to her?
Yes, and the thought of it made me want to put my fist through every wall between me and Darian Colton.
I skated away a few feet, then turned back.
“What do you do when love isn’t enough to forgive someone?”
The words sat on the ice between us, ugly and honest.
No one answered right away.
Briggs set his stick across his shoulders and leaned his forearms over it. “I’m going to say something that may shock everyone, given my reputation as a deeply stable man.”
Cade murmured, “That reputation is fictional.”
“I support fictional worlds.” Briggs looked at me. “Maybe love isn’t supposed to do the whole job by itself.”
Ryan nodded slowly. “Love is the reason you show up. Not the whole repair.”
“That sounds like a greeting card for emotionally damaged athletes,” I muttered.
“It can be true and annoying,” Rider said.
Cade shifted his weight on his skates. “You don’t owe her instant forgiveness because she finally told you the truth.”
My jaw tightened.
He held my stare. “And you also don’t get to punish her forever because she survived badly before she learned how to tell you why.”
That one hit harder.
Briggs made a quiet noise. “Mercer with the blade work.”
“I’m serious,” Cade said, his eyes still on me. “You can be hurt without being cruel. You can need time without making her beg. You can say you’re not okay and still stop acting like the only way to protect yourself is to cut first.”
Ryan’s expression darkened slightly. “You’ve been cutting at her all this time.”
I looked at him. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I think you know and still kept doing it because hurting her was the only proof you had that she mattered.”
The silence afterward was sharp enough to draw blood.
Briggs stared down at the ice. Cade looked away, not because Ryan was wrong, but because everyone in the rink knew he wasn’t. Rider kicked his blade back and forth across the ice. My hand tightened around my stick until my busted knuckles screamed.
Ryan didn’t soften. “You wanted her to react. You wanted her to crack. You wanted proof she wasn’t untouchable after she made you feel disposable. Then Maddox cracked her open in front of you, and now you’re standing here sick because you finally saw the wound you kept poking at.”
I hated him in that moment.
Not because he was wrong.
Because he was not wrong enough.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
Ryan’s voice dropped. “No. You didn’t. But you know now.”
The words traveled through me slowly.
Before, my anger had been blind enough to feel righteous. She hurt me. She used me. She made me want something she refused to name. Every cruel thing I did afterward had come wrapped in the justification of a man who thought heartbreak made him owed.
Now I knew enough to see her rules differently. Her panic differently. Her no lights and no names as survival instead of cruelty. I knew enough to understand why wanting me had probably terrified her more than hating me ever could.
And I still hurt.
That was the part that made me feel like a monster.
“I still don’t forgive her,” I said quietly.
Cade’s voice came steadily. “Maybe don’t decide that on the ice with a swollen face and four men who barely qualify as adults.”
Briggs lifted one finger. “Excuse you. I pay taxes.”
“You do not,” Ryan said.
“I pay in vibes.”
Cade shook his head, then looked back at me. “Call your mom.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Call Gayle.”
“No.”
“Yes,” Ryan said immediately.
“I asked you idiots.”
“And we gave you a referral,” Briggs said.
I stared at them. “I’m not calling my mother to explain rage sex and forgiveness.”
Rider made a strangled sound. “Maybe skip the coffee-table logistics.”
Ryan’s mouth twitched despite himself. “Use broad themes.”
Cade skated one slow circle around me, annoying and calm.
“You’re asking men who love you and also have a combined emotional toolkit of violence, sarcasm, and protein intake.
I killed my girl’s ex for crimes just as vulgar, so I’m not a good reference.
Call the woman who actually knows how your head works. ”
“My head works fine.”
Ryan looked at Briggs. Briggs looked at Cade. Cade looked at Rider, and Rider looked at me.
The disrespect was organized.
I pointed my stick at them. “I hate this team.”
Briggs brightened. “You love this team. You’re just allergic to being perceived.”
“I regret ever becoming captain.”
“No, you don’t,” Cade said.
I hated that too.
Practice turned ugly after that in the way I needed.
We ran drills until my ribs burned and my lungs forgot how to make room for thoughts.
Briggs chirped every missed shot. Ryan set me up for one-timers and insulted my finish when I didn’t bury them.
Cade stayed quiet except when he didn’t, which was somehow worse because his comments landed like they had been sharpened in private.
Rider disappeared for an early class.
By the time we left the ice, my gear was damp, my hand throbbed beneath the tape, and my body felt wrung out enough that Aura’s voice was no longer the only sound inside my head.
In the locker room, Briggs dropped onto the bench with a groan and started unlacing his skates like they had betrayed him personally.
“If anyone asks,” he said, “this was a wellness skate.”
Ryan peeled his jersey over his head. “No one would believe that.”
“My wellness is aggressive.”
Cade sat across from me, his elbows on his knees, watching as I unwound the tape around my hand. The gauze beneath it had stained through again.
“You need to rewrap that.”
I glanced up. “You always this controlling after practice?”
“Yes,” Cade said.
Briggs leaned around him. “He has binders for emergencies.”
“I have one binder.”
Ryan nodded. “That he admits to.”
Cade ignored both of them. “Call your mom tonight.”
I pulled the gauze loose and hissed when dried blood tugged against the split skin. “You’re relentless.”
“You respond poorly to gentle.”
Ryan tossed a towel at me. “And you go quiet when you’re spiraling. Gayle should hear from you before she has to hear through someone else that you got into it at The Sin Bin.”
That sobered the room slightly.
There had been a fight. A public one. Maddox had left bloody, and secrets had teeth in a town full of bored college students. My mother hearing a twisted version from someone else would gut her.
“I’ll call her,” I said.
Briggs leaned back against his stall. “Say it with less hostage energy.”
I shot him a look.
He smiled. “Beautiful. Healing already.”
Later that night, my apartment was too quiet. The kind of quiet that didn’t feel restful. The kind that moved in after a storm and started touching everything the storm had left behind.
The coffee table was still crooked.
I had tried to straighten it twice and stopped both times, standing over the cheap wood with my hand on the edge and my stomach twisting like touching it would replay Aura laid across it, crying afterward, asking me to forgive her with her Sin Bin uniform wrinkled in her hands and her mouth swollen from mine.
I left it crooked.
Maybe that made me a coward. Maybe it made me honest.
The rain had started again sometime after dinner, tapping against the window in soft, uneven patterns.
My ribs ached every time I breathed too deeply.
My knuckles were cleaned and rewrapped, thanks to Cade leaving supplies on my counter like a rich, emotionally repressed nurse.
My mouth had stopped bleeding, but the split reopened if I moved it wrong.
I sat on the edge of the couch with my phone in my hand and stared at my mother’s contact until the screen dimmed.
Then I tapped it awake.
Mom.
The word alone made my chest hurt.
I hit call before I could talk myself out of it.
She answered on the second ring. “Easton?” Mom’s voice came through warm and instantly worried, because mothers had a tone for when they were pretending not to panic, and mine had never been good at hiding it from me. “Baby, what’s wrong?”
I closed my eyes. “Hey, Mom.”
“Don’t ‘hey, Mom’ me in that voice. What happened?”
A laugh almost came out, but it died before becoming sound. “You always know.”
“I made you. I know when the wiring sparks.” Something rustled on her end, probably her moving away from the living room so Skylar and Vivi couldn’t hear every word. “Tell me.”
I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees, the phone pressed tightly to my ear. “I got into a fight.”