13. Ineligible #3
When he opened them again, there was no argument there. Only grief. “You think that’s all I know how to do.”
She hated how much the answer mattered.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that it is the shape your love has taken for a long time.”
The silence after that was vast.
Noah stared at her as if she had touched something he kept armored even from himself.
In the fluorescent hallway, with his thumb swelling under fresh tape and scandal pressing in from all sides, he looked less like the smiling heartbeat of the Wolves locker room than a man stripped down to the old survival code underneath.
Take care of your people first.
Even if it drowned him.
He nodded once. A tiny, wrecked movement.
“That sounds true,” he said.
Her throat burned.
This was why heartbreak was crueler with good men than bad ones. Bad men let you leave clean. Good men stood there holding the evidence of their own damage and made forgiveness feel like a moral temptation instead of an emotional one.
She checked her watch because she needed a gesture colder than tears. “Your minute is over.”
Something flickered in his face—pain, yes, but also acceptance. He would not push. He never pushed once she drew a line. That restraint had always been part of what made him feel safe.
Now it made him tragic.
“Will they rule before Friday?” he asked.
Process. At last.
“I don’t know,” she said. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you outside channel.”
He nodded. “Right.”
She shifted her bag higher on her shoulder. “You should get your hand imaged.”
His eyes lifted, surprised despite everything.
“That,” she said, “is not personal. It is common sense.”
A breath left him that might once have become laughter in another life. “You still sound like you’re scolding me.”
“I am.”
He looked at her like he wanted to memorize even that.
Then he stepped aside from her door completely, giving her the hall. “Goodnight, Talia.”
There had been nights when her name in his mouth felt like a hand at the small of her back. A promise. A secret. Now it was only distance measured precisely enough not to bleed in public.
“Goodnight,” she said.
She walked past him without touching.
The first thing she noticed outside was the cold. The second was the camera.
Not a television crew. Student media. One girl in a puffer coat with a campus press badge and a phone already lifted chest-high. Another student beside her with a mic windscreen stamped NORTH LAKE NOW. Two more lingered near the steps pretending not to be waiting for athletics faces to emerge.
The university had moved from rumor to spectacle in less than a day.
Talia descended the front steps into air so sharp it hurt her teeth. Snow whirled under the streetlamps in fine white needles. Behind her, the front doors opened again. She didn’t turn. She didn’t need to.
The reporter’s voice carried immediately.
“Noah—Noah, is it true players could be ruled ineligible before the St. Brendan rematch?”
Another question over it. “Did you delete evidence in the tutoring investigation?”
Then, sharper, crueler because it was younger and therefore bolder: “Did you screw your own team?”
Talia stopped at the bottom of the steps before she could stop herself.
For one second all she could hear was the wind and the memory of skates cutting ice.
Then Noah answered from somewhere behind her, his public voice back in place by force alone. Calm. Controlled. Giving them nothing they could weaponize into fresh blood.
“I’m not making statements tonight.”
A beat.
Another question. “Are you still eligible?”
Noah didn’t answer that one.
Talia turned then, against her better judgment.
He stood under the lobby lights bareheaded in the snow, broad shoulders squared, coat open to the cold like he had forgotten his own body existed.
The reporters’ phones were pointed at him.
Through the glass behind him, Halcyon Academic glowed institutional and pitiless.
From this distance she could see almost none of his private face.
Only she knew how wrecked he was.
Only she knew he had come upstairs just to tell her he was done asking anyone to carry his lies.
Only she knew the man inside the image, and right now that knowledge felt less like intimacy than a bruise.
A final question cut through the dark.
“Mercer, did Dr. Shah turn you in?”
Noah’s head snapped toward the sound.
Everything in Talia went still.
The students with phones leaned forward, greedy for fracture.
Snow gathered on Noah’s dark hair, his shoulders, the tape hidden under his coat sleeve.
For one terrible second, she saw all the possible versions of what he could do with that question.
Deflect. Refuse. Protect himself. Let her stand alone in the blowback of doing the right thing.
Instead, in that same level voice, he said, “Dr. Shah did her job.”
The wind seemed to stop.
No elaboration. No bitterness. No rescue either. Just the truth laid down flat in front of strangers.
It hit her harder than if he had begged.
One of the reporters started another question, but Noah was already moving down the steps toward the lot, jaw set, walking through the snow and the cameras and the narrowing campus like a man who had finally understood that taking the hit was not the same thing as undoing it.
Talia stood under the streetlamp with the cold needling through her boots and watched him go.
Halfway across the lot, he flexed his left hand once and visibly winced.
Then his phone rang.
He pulled it from his pocket, checked the screen, and stopped dead in the falling snow. Even at a distance she saw his whole body change—shoulders locking, head lifting, attention sharpening into pure alarm.
He answered fast.
And whatever he heard made him start running.