Chapter 51
Rhys
Friday night and the Eldridge team is already here.
Game day is tomorrow. I found out this afternoon when Fitch called a short meeting to tell us they'd arrived, to keep our heads down, to not engage.
Standard pre-game protocol. Play it clean and stay out of trouble.
I sat in the back of that meeting and stared at the floor and said nothing and felt like I was back there again.
The team goes to the bar anyway.
Cooper's idea, obviously. Team tradition, he calls it, like we've done it more than twice. Pre-game ritual. Everyone goes, everyone loosens up, everyone remembers they're a team and not just guys wearing the same jersey. I go because staying in my house alone with my brain is worse.
Later, I see Jamie at the bar with Kowalski, back slightly turned, water in hand, and for a second we just look at each other across the room.
Awkward is the wrong word.
It's more like — charged. Like two live wires that have been kept just far enough apart all week, waiting for the spark to ignite. The phone call was real and the things said on it were real and none of that has been resolved or addressed or folded into anything clean. It’s just lying there, exposed.
We've been at practice together every day since and kept it professional and said the right things about positioning and reads and the Eldridge defensive scheme and carefully, carefully not said the other things.
Just, waiting for him to make a move, I guess.
He nods at me.
I nod back.
I go find Bennett.
The bar is loud and alive and exactly what a bar full of hockey players the night before a rivalry game sounds like.
Our guys on one side, on edge but trying to look loose.
Eldridge on the other side, doing the same thing.
Two teams pretending they're not watching each other.
The air is charged like a fight is waiting to happen.
I get a drink and park myself with Bennett and Cooper and let the noise wash over me.
I'm fine.
I'm absolutely fine.
I'm not looking for Marcus.
I'm not scanning the Eldridge side of the room every thirty seconds trying to find a face I haven't seen in a year. I'm not tracking the door. I'm not thinking about the blue room or the parking lot or a week locked in my own chest with nowhere to put any of it.
I'm having a great time.
"You okay?" Bennett says.
"Perfect," I say.
He looks at me with those big trusting eyes.
"You look like you're going to throw up," he says.
"Thank you, Ben. Really. You're such a comfort during hard times. I’m so lucky to have you here."
"I'm just saying—"
"I know what you're saying. I'm fine." I take a long drink. "Tell me about something. Anything. Talk to me about literally anything else."
He starts telling me about a documentary he watched about deep sea fish and I focus very hard on that and not on the Eldridge side of the room and it works for about ten minutes.
Then it lands.
The feeling of being watched. The hairs on the back of your neck rise. Not bar-watched. Not the casual ambient awareness of a crowded room. Watched like a fixed point. Like a target.
I look up. Marcus Hale is standing twenty feet away looking directly at me. He looks exactly the same. That's the first thing—same jaw, same build, same easy way of holding himself like every room is his room. Caramel eyes. One dimple on the left side that I used to think about constantly.
He's not smiling right now.
He's watching me with an expression I can't read from here and can't look away from and can't stop the flood of memory that comes with it — the blue light, his hands, I think we can make this work — and my whole body goes rigid.
I make myself look away and I take a drink.
Bennett is still talking about deep sea fish.
It starts small. The way these things always start small.
One of the Eldridge guys — a winger, big, I recognize him from film but don't know his name — drifts toward our side of the room. Says something to Cooper. Cooper laughs because Cooper laughs at everything. Another guy follows. Then another.
The conversation gets louder. I'm not paying full attention. I'm tracking Marcus in my peripheral vision like a bad habit, watching him watch me, and I'm talking to Bennett and telling myself I'm fine and then someone says my name.
"Callahan, right?" I look over. The winger. Up close he's bigger than he looked in film. Grinning like he already knows the punchline. "Yeah," I respond.
"Heard you transferred." He looks at his teammate beside him. Looks back. "Heard why too."
The bar doesn't go quiet. It's too loud for that. But the small pocket of space around us shifts. "Did you," I say. Flat.
"Yeah." He takes a drink. "Couldn't hack it at Eldridge, right? Couldn't keep your hands to yourself." He grins wider. "Or was it your mouth that was the problem."
Bennett goes very still beside me.
Cooper, to his credit, stops laughing.
"Walk away," I say. Calm.
"Relax." He holds up his hands. Mock surrender. "Just making conversation. Trying to get to know the competition." He looks around at the guys near us. "Heard you like getting to know people. Especially on the team. Heard you're very—" he pauses, letting it land, "—friendly."
I hear it.
The laughter. Not everyone. Not most people. But enough. Two, three guys from Eldridge, the low cruel kind of laugh that's designed to carry just far enough.
I don't move.
What I'm aware of, in the way you become aware of everything when your body goes into a state of high alert: Bennett beside me, tense and not sure what to do. Cooper three feet away, uneasy. Watching. Marcus still across the room. Also watching. Not stopping it either. Just staring at me.
And Jamie. Jamie, who I clocked the second this started because I always notice Jamie.
Who is at the bar ten feet away and has gone still.
Who has heard every word. I watch his face.
I watch him put it together — the winger, the laugh, the look on my face, and then his eyes moving past me to where Marcus is standing and staying there a beat too long and I watch him figure out exactly who Marcus is.
I see it happen.
The recognition.
And then I watch Jamie Nash go blank.
Not angry. Not moving. Not opening his mouth.
Just — still.
Ten feet away with his water glass and his blank face and his silence. The winger is still talking. I've stopped hearing the words. The words don't matter anymore.
I'm watching Jamie not move.
I'm watching Jamie not say a single word.
And I know this. I know what it looks like when someone who is supposed to be on your side is quiet and what it means.
I've been here before.
Same silence.
Same choice.
My chest doesn't crack this time.
It just goes cold. Empty.
He’s not choosing me.
I put my drink down on the nearest surface. I look at the winger.
"Fuck you," I seethe.
He blinks. He expected something else. Anger, maybe. Deflection. A fight. Not this. I look at the rest of them. The guys who laughed. The guys who stood there and let it happen.
"Fuck all of you," I say.
I turn around.
I don't look at Jamie.
I just walk out.
The cold outside is immediate and sobers me up and I walk into it and keep walking and don't stop until the bar noise is far enough behind me that I can't hear it anymore.
Then I stop.
Stand on the pavement.
My hands are shaking.
Not from the winger.
Not from Marcus.
Not from any of that.
From Jamie.
From the look on his face when he figured out who Marcus was and still — still — said nothing. Stood there ten feet away and made the same choice Marcus made in a different room in a different place.
I’m not worth it.
I’m too much.
I press the back of my hand against my mouth and bite down hard enough to hurt because the second my chest starts shaking this isn’t the kind of crying I can control. This is the old kind. The humiliating kind.
The kind that comes from being wanted privately and abandoned publicly.
He's not Marcus.
I've been saying that for months.
He's not Marcus. He's different. He shows up. He called me. He told me about the beatings and the locked room and his father's words and all the ways he's been broken that he's never told anyone before. Jamie let me see the ugly parts of him nobody else gets to touch. The bruises under the skin.
He's not Marcus.
But standing here now with my lungs burning and my face cold and my chest splitting open anyway, I can’t find the difference between the two men who looked at me in a room full of people and decided loving me was not worth it.
I can’t.
I’m so tired. So unbelievably tired of being understanding when it’s my heart getting broken.
I start walking because standing still hurts too much.
No direction.
Just away.
My phone is in my pocket vibrating and I don't take it out.
Whatever he has to say right now I don't want to hear it.
I’m tired of the sorrys.
I already know.
I've always known.
I just didn't want to be right.
He didn’t choose me.