14. Cole
Cole
Something happened.
I came back from the walk at two in the morning, and the text I sent Maya before I left is still unanswered on my phone.
You okay?
Two words. Blue checkmarks. Read. No response.
The house is dark. Dante's door is closed. I stand in the hallway between our rooms longer than I should, my hand loose at my side, my thumb still aching from typing a message she opened and ignored.
When I finally go into my room, the ceiling stares back until the light changes. Morning comes anyway.
Dante comes downstairs, and before he says a word, I clock the lower line of his shoulders, the slower reach for the mug, the half-second pause before the measured pour.
He moves through the kitchen with the same economy—coffee, pour, mug—but none of it sits right. The bruise on his lip has faded to dull purple at the corner where teeth caught skin. The mark on his jaw is still visible if you know where to look.
I know where to look.
"Morning," I say.
"Morning."
He keeps his eyes on the coffee. Last night his avoidance was defensive, all turned shoulders and answers clipped too fast. This morning his eyes stay there, his shoulders stay square, and every answer arrives with room around it.
"Sleep okay?"
"Four hours."
At least he's honest about that.
I drink my coffee. He drinks his. The mugs click softly against the counter, and the cabinet behind him still has Barry's Irish Breakfast on a shelf I stocked myself.
I leave first. His Econ isn't until nine.
"See you at practice," I say.
"Yeah."
The morning speaker series fills three pages of notes. None of it sticks.
Practice starts at ten. The passes connect the way they always connect. On the ice, we're flawless. Dante feeds me a backhand pass through traffic without looking, and I bury it top shelf. We turn back for the reset without a glove tap.
Off the ice, he still keeps his eyes somewhere else.
We shower and change while the locker room empties in stages. I wait for Dante by the film room door. He arrives with his notebook under his arm, hair still damp, jaw set.
Addison runs film in the review room. Dante takes the front row, and I sit beside him, the three-inch gap between our chairs measured by habit.
Addison pulls up the Eastbrook tape and points at the forecheck structure in the second period.
"The aggressive gap control on zone entries is creating turnovers," Addison says. "Three forced turnovers in the second period off the same structure. Maddox's piece in the Chronicle last month had the numbers on our forechecking pressure metrics. She was ahead of us on this."
Dante's pen stops against the page.
"Good reporting," Addison says. "Better than some of the scouting reports I get from the conference office."
Dante writes a note, short and precise, then underlines it twice. His notes are flat, hierarchical, all emphasis handled through placement, and underline marks never show up in them. He underlined her forechecking metrics.
I find Maya at the Chronicle office that afternoon.
Third floor, corner desk. She's writing, shoulders rounded toward the screen, fingers moving without pause.
I lean in the doorway and watch her for ten seconds before she notices me, which is unusual.
She always knows when someone enters her space.
"Hey," I say.
She looks up. Her smile reaches her mouth but stalls before her eyes, and her voice comes in a shade too bright. "Hey. How was film?"
"Good. Addison credited your forechecking piece in the room. Called it better than the conference scouting reports."
A reaction flickers across her face, controlled before it fully forms. "What did Dante do?" she asks. Fast.
I tilt my head. "He sat there. Wrote something down. Underlined it."
"Good for him."
"You care what Dante does in film review now?"
"I care about whether the coaching staff takes my analysis seriously. Dante's reaction is a data point."
The sentence is too clean. Maya's casual speech has rough edges, interruptions, half-thoughts. This one comes out even, already polished before it reaches me.
"Maya."
"What?"
"Look at me."
She looks at me. Holds my gaze. Chin up, jaw set. Then she breaks first and looks back at her screen.
Maya doesn't break eye contact with me. She hasn't since she was fifteen.
"What happened when he came to check on you?" I ask.
"He checked on me. He left."
"How long was he there?"
"An hour. Maybe more. I wasn't tracking it."
Her mouth goes still on the lie.
I don't push. I sit on the edge of her desk beside her chair and bump her shoulder with my knee. "You eating tonight? I'm making the bolognese."
"I have a deadline."
"You always have a deadline. Seven. Elm House."
"Fine." Then, softer, "What time?"
"I just said. Seven."
I go home and start the sauce. Onions first, then garlic.
They had sex.
The knife stops mid-cut. My chest tightens so hard the kitchen narrows to the blade, the garlic, my hand hovering above the board.
I set the knife down before I do something stupid and press both palms flat to the counter.
Breathe.
Dante's fake fine. His wrong shoulders. His refusal to meet my eyes.
Maya's broken gaze. Her pre-built sentences. The speed of What did Dante do? before she even asked if practice went well.
The hour-plus silence between my text and Dante's response. The mark on his jaw. Four faint points of pressure where a hand gripped his face.
Nine years of knowing her.
I was thirteen when my father drove four hours through the dark with me in the back seat and came back with a woman and a girl who carried a garbage bag for a suitcase and had eyes that trusted nothing in the car.
I touched her once. We were seventeen. Summer. Her bedroom with the door locked, my mouth between her legs, the sounds she made while I knelt on the carpet at the foot of her bed. Once. I stopped. I closed the door. I went to my room. We never talked about it.
Five years of carrying the memory of those sounds into every bed I've been in since. Five years of knowing exactly what Maya Maddox sounds like when she stops managing.
Dante. The man who called her a tourist, who called her a parasite, who bought her specific brand of tea and hid it on my shelf. The knife handle bites into my palm.
Because I sent him.
I asked him to go to her apartment. I put his name in a text and pressed send and went back to my meeting. And while I sat in a conference room talking about athletic department budgets, his mouth was on hers.
I know it the way I know where the puck is going before it leaves the blade. His jaw. Her voice. The hour he didn't answer. I can't stop fucking reading it.
My eyes sting. I press the heel of my hand against them. My jaw locks hard enough to make my teeth ache. My fingers are white on the edge of the counter.
I pick the knife back up and dice the garlic. My hand is steady even if nothing else is. The garlic becomes paste under the blade. I scrape it into the pan, and the sizzle fills the kitchen.
The sauce simmers while I stir.
Maya arrives at seven. She brings wine, a bottle of red, nothing expensive. She sets it on the counter and looks at the stove.
"Smells good," she says.
"Sit down."
She takes the counter stool with her back to the wall. She's wearing my hoodie, the gray one with the split seam, the one she took from the back of the couch three weeks ago. Her hair is down, tucked behind one ear, and the hoodie collar has slipped to show the line of her collarbone.
I open the bottle and set a glass of wine in front of her. My fingers brush hers on the counter. She doesn't pull away. Her eyes lift to mine and hold for a second longer than the glass requires.
"Thank you," she says. Soft. The voice she uses with me when she isn't bracing so hard.
"Always."
Her fingers tighten once around the stem of the glass.
Dante comes downstairs at 7:10 in a different shirt, his hair damp from a second shower.
He sees Maya. He stops at the bottom of the stairs for a half-second, one foot angling toward the kitchen before the rest of him follows. Then he's in the kitchen. Opens a cabinet. Gets a glass of water. Drinks it standing at the counter and carries it with him.
"Hey," Maya says. Her voice is casual. Her hand tightens on the stem of her wine glass.
"Hey," Dante says.
To the water glass.
The distance between them is precise. Four feet.
The distance between Dante and me is different.
He stands at the counter where he stood this morning when he wouldn't meet my eyes. The gap between us carries the weight of his fake fine and the bruise on his lip and the walk I took at midnight because I couldn't stand in the same house with his silence.
I plate the pasta into three bowls. Maya stays on the counter stool with her back to the wall. Dante takes the stool on the other side, water glass beside his bowl, and I sit between them.
"Eat," I say.
We eat.
"Deadline still Friday?" I ask Maya.
"Still Friday. But Kenji's out sick so I'm covering his section too."
"The Hartwick preview?"
"And the recruiting roundup. Two pieces, one editor." She twirls pasta around her fork. "I'll manage."
"You always manage," I say. "That's the problem."
She looks at me. The fork pauses. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means you'd manage yourself into the ground before you'd ask anyone for help."
"That's rich coming from the man who cooked dinner for three people after a full practice and still hasn't sat down for more than thirty seconds."
"I sat down."
"You sat down and immediately started watching both of us like a film session."
She caught me. Her eyes hold mine, the same challenge in them she's been throwing at me since we were thirteen.
I hold her gaze and let the corner of my mouth lift.
"Habit," I say.
"Bad habit."
"My best one."
Her shoulders ease a fraction. She shakes her head and goes back to her pasta, but the corner of her mouth curves.
"The piece Addison referenced in film today," Dante says, turning to Maya. "Your forechecking analysis. The pressure metrics were strong."