17. Short Bench #3
Noah spat the tape wad into the trash. “Probably.”
Owen leaned back against the wood lockers. “You hear from her?”
Noah stilled for half a heartbeat, then resumed unfastening the wrist wrap. “Interesting transition.”
“Not really.”
He looked over.
Owen’s expression was tired but direct. Best-friend honesty, not nosiness.
Noah let out a breath. “Yeah.”
“And?”
“And she’s busy being smarter than everyone in a three-building radius.”
Owen’s mouth twitched. “That bad, huh?”
“That good.”
He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
Maybe that was the whole point now.
Owen studied him. “You look different when it’s her.”
Noah laughed under his breath. “Terrifying feedback.”
“You look…” Owen searched for the word. “Less useful.”
Noah turned fully, brow lifting.
Owen shrugged. “You spend so much time being what everybody needs that half the time you disappear in the middle of it. With her, you don’t. You just look like a guy.”
The words landed harder than any chirp could have.
Noah looked down at his wrapped hand in his lap, at the red indent tape had left in his skin. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Probably not your favorite thing,” Owen said dryly.
“No.”
“But maybe good for you.”
Noah thought of Talia in the hearing room, refusing to be turned into accessory or excuse. Thought of her text this morning: Try not to confuse surviving with being fine.
Thought of the way she never let warmth become permission to blur what mattered.
Yeah, he thought. Maybe.
The room had thinned by the time his phone vibrated again.
Unknown number.
He almost ignored it, then answered. “Mercer.”
A pause.
Then Talia’s voice, low and controlled and too immediate after a day of text boxes and press lights. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
Everything in him went alert and softer at once.
He stood without thinking and walked toward the back hallway away from the room’s echo. “No. You okay?”
“I’m between meetings,” she said. “Which means I have four minutes before someone else decides my ethics dissertation should also solve the university’s public messaging problem.”
He leaned against the wall outside the equipment room. The cinder block held cold through his practice shirt. “That sounds restful.”
“I aim for balance.”
He could hear campus in the background on her end—door opening, distant voices, the squeak of shoes on old tile. Real place. Real day. Her life not orbiting his crisis, which was part of why he trusted her.
“How bad is it out there?” he asked.
“Ugly,” she said plainly. “But less chaotic than last night. The ruling gave people a shape to argue with.” A beat. “You were good at the podium.”
He closed his eyes once.
The compliment shouldn’t have mattered that much. It did.
“I was angry.”
“Yes,” she said. “You usually are when you stop lying.”
He laughed quietly, because God, there she was.
Then silence settled for one breath too long.
When she spoke again, her voice had changed. Not softer. More precise. “I didn’t call to talk about the press.”
His hand tightened reflexively against his side.
“Okay.”
“The leak of witness names is being narrowed,” she said. “I can’t tell you more than that, and I shouldn’t be telling you even this, but I need you prepared in case tomorrow gets louder again.”
His shoulders squared instinctively against impact. “Prepared how?”
“Prepared for the possibility that the story shifts before the game,” she said. “Prepared for someone trying to drag every statement you made back into bad-faith noise. Prepared not to let it own your bench.”
He stared at the far end of the dim hallway where the rink door stood cracked, cold air breathing in around the frame.
“Do you think it was someone in athletics?” he asked.
A pause.
“I think institutions teach people where they’ll be protected,” she said carefully. “And then act shocked when someone follows the map.”
He breathed out through his nose.
On the other end, he heard papers move, a door shut, her world continuing around the edges of his.
“Talia.”
“Yes?”
He didn’t know, for a second, what he meant to say. Thank you felt too small. I miss you felt too dangerous. Are you coming tomorrow felt like asking for something he had no right to ask.
What came out was the truest thing available.
“I’m done doing this the old way.”
Silence.
Then, very quietly, “I know.”
He rested his head back against the wall.
The building hummed around him—vents, distant skate sharpeners, a puck struck absentmindedly in some back room. The life of a rink. The life he had left, for now.
“I have to go,” she said, and he could hear that she meant it, not as retreat but as fact. “And you have a game to get ready for.”
“Yeah.”
Another beat. Dense. Quiet. Carrying far more than either of them could safely unpack on a Tuesday in a scandal.
Then she said, “Play like the truth belongs there too.”
The line went dead.
Noah stood in the hallway with the phone still at his ear long after the call had ended.
From inside the locker room, Coach’s voice cut through the building.
“Mercer! Bus itinerary changed. Get in here.”
He pushed off the wall and looked down at his left hand, taped and aching and steady enough for one more fight.
Then he walked back toward the room, toward the short bench, toward St. Brendan, while somewhere beyond the rink walls the next leak was already looking for a microphone.