Chapter 52
Jamie
I see Marcus Hale the second we walk in.
Not because I'm looking for him. Because he's already looking at Rhys.
That's the first thing. Before I've processed the face or matched it to anything Rhys told me — I notice a man across the bar who cannot stop watching Rhys walk through the door.
Tracking him. The way you track something you've decided belongs to you.
I stay where I am and just watch him.
Rhys doesn't look at him.
That's also how I know. Rhys, who reads every room the second he enters it, who always knows where I am before I've decided where I'm going — he walks in and carefully, very deliberately does not look at that side of the bar.
He nods at me.
I nod back.
We've been doing that all week. Professional. Careful. The distance I put between us maintained like a structure neither of us has figured out how to dismantle.
All my fault, but it still fucking hurts.
He goes to find Bennett.
I turn back to the bar. And I watch Marcus Hale watch him go. The fury that moves through me is so immediate and so complete that I have to set my glass down before I break it.
Because I know who this is now.
I know exactly who this is.
This is the man who moved his furniture and set up a projector and made a room look like it was underwater and said I love you to a kid who had nobody.
Who sat in a locker room every single day while that same kid scrubbed marker off his own locker and found somewhere else to look.
Who heard what happened in the shower and said nothing.
Who told teammates that Rhys had been making him uncomfortable and then let the story do the rest and went on with his life.
This man stood right next to him every day and chose silence. Chose himself, while he left someone so deserving of everything this world has to offer, to suffer alone.
And now he's standing in this bar watching Rhys with those eyes — those grieving, possessive, you-were-mine eyes — like he gets to feel that, as if he gets to stand there and miss what he destroyed with his own two hands and look at it from across a room like it's something that was taken from him, not something he left out in the rain to drown.
My hand is flat on the bar.
The wood is cold under my palm.
I breathe through my nose.
I watch him watch Rhys laugh at something Bennett says, the real laugh, the one I know, and I watch Marcus's jaw move like the sound of it hurts him.
Good.
I want it to hurt him. I want everything to hurt him.
I want to cross this bar and get in his face and tell him exactly what I know and watch him understand that someone knows. That Rhys wasn't as alone as Marcus made him feel. That the story Marcus told doesn't hold anymore.
That Rhys is loved.
I want to put him through the wall, but I stay where I am.
Because it's the night before a game and the scholarship and the future and my father's voice — always my father's voice — telling me this is not the place and this is not the time and you do not get to lose control here.
I stay where I am and I watch him and I hate him with everything I have. Marcus doesn't approach Rhys. He just watches.
All night.
And I continue to watch him.
Every time Rhys moves the eyes follow — patient, careful, unashamed. Like surveillance. Like someone who spent a year telling himself he had no choice and has spent the time since trying to reconcile the man he was with the choice he made and can't.
The fury in my chest gets quieter as the night goes on.
The specific cold quiet that has always been worse than heat. The kind that compresses into a single point behind my sternum and sits there waiting. Like I could make a diamond just from the pressure in my chest.
I watch Marcus watch Rhys and I think about Rhys on the phone telling me about Eldridge.
About having nobody to call. About getting on the ice every single day and putting every piece of it into the game because the ice was the only place it couldn't reach him.
And this man is standing here looking at him like a loss.
With the audacity of grief. Like he gets to stand here and want him back.
Like he could take what’s mine.
My jaw aches.
Kowalski says something to me.
I don't hear it.
I notice the moment it starts. The Eldridge winger drifting toward our side. Cooper laughing because Cooper doesn't know yet. The gathering of bodies with that practiced easy energy of people who've done this before and know exactly how it goes. Then Rhys's name in a mouth that has no right to it.
I turn. I take it in fast. The winger. The grin. The setup. Bennett going rigid. Cooper's laugh dying. Rhys standing there contained, alone, with the stillness of someone who has been in this exact moment before and knows how to absorb it. The winger opens his mouth again.
And the bar disappears.
I am nine years old.
I am nine years old in the kitchen doorway and my father is at the table and I have just come inside from playing with the boy from two streets over and my father is looking at me with that expression — not angry, never angry, just still — and he says sit down, Jamie in the voice that means something has been observed and whatever I did was wrong and a decision has been made with a punishment at the end.
I sit down. He doesn't look away from me.
Do you know what I see? he says.
I don't say anything.
I see a boy who doesn't understand what things cost. He picks up his drink. Sets it down. I see a boy who is going to cost himself everything if he doesn't learn to be more careful.
He stands up.
Go get your skates.
The stick.
The ice at ten at night.
Again.
Again.
Again.
You do not get to be this.
Be different.
Shove it down.
I am fourteen in a car for four hours in silence and my shoulders are bruised under my shirt and I have learned — I have learned completely — that there are things you do not show.
There are things you do not let anyone see.
There are things that if they become visible will be used to take everything from you and you will have no one to blame but yourself for letting them be seen.
Control.
That's the cure.
That's the only cure.
Control.
Control.
Control.
You feel it and you bury it and you keep your face still and you give them nothing and you survive.
You do not get to be this.
I am in a bar. I am in a bar and the person I—
The man I—
Fuck. Focus.
I am in a bar and my father's voice is so loud I cannot hear the winger anymore. Cannot hear the laughter. Cannot hear anything except the internal machinery of a person who has spent his entire life being conditioned to go very still when the thing that could cost him everything becomes visible.
Don’t be obvious.
Be different.
My hand is tight around my water glass.
My father built this.
Brick by brick, night by night, skate until your hands bleed, again, again, again — he built this stillness into me so deep it doesn't feel like a choice anymore.
It doesn't feel like anything. It just happens.
The room goes loud and the thing that I want more than everything else is right there in the open and something older and deeper than conscious thought takes over and I go still.
I go silent.
I go somewhere behind glass where I can see everything and touch nothing.
Somewhere I’m silently drowning and no one can see.
The laughter carries.
Rhys hears it.
I see him hear it.
I see the way he tenses. And I am trying — I am fighting to get back into my body, to get out from behind this glass, to find the version of myself that moves forward and opens his mouth — and my father's voice is there every single time I get close to breaking free.
Do you understand what this looks like.
Do you understand what happens.
Everything you've built.
Everything I built you for.
Don't.
Stop looking at him like that.
It’s disgusting.
You’re disgusting.
Be different.
I see Rhys absorb it alone. I see Bennett beside him not knowing what to do.
I see Marcus across the room watching with an expression that turns my stomach — not surprise, not shame, just this flat resigned watching, like he expected this.
And I am standing ten feet away.
Ten feet away.
And my mouth is closed.
And my father is dead and his voice is the loudest thing in the room.
And I hate him.
I hate him.
I hate him so much I can barely breathe around it.
For the first time in my life I let myself feel it completely — the full clean burning hatred for a man who called fear discipline and called cruelty preparation and carved shame into me so deep that I am standing ten feet from the person I love while he is being humiliated and I still cannot make my body move.
He's dead.
He's dead and he's still here.
He's still in this room with me.
Still reaching his hands into my life and taking things from me.
He's still winning.
And I am so furious I can barely breathe.
I open my mouth.
Fuck you.
Rhys's voice.
I turn.
He's already moving.
Fuck all of you.
He doesn't look at me.
Not once.
He turns and walks out and the door swings shut behind him and I am finally, finally out of my head and back in my body and back in this room and he is gone.
Fuck.
I'm moving before I decide to move.
Through the bar. Past the Eldridge guys. Past Cooper who says my name. Through the door and into the cold.
The street in both directions.
Empty.
Just the pavement and the cold and the bar noise bleeding through the door and nothing.
He's gone.
I stand there.
I put my hands on my knees.
Breathe.
What I let happen settles over me.
Not a choice.
That's what I have to face right now.
It wasn't a choice in the way choices feel. It was a reflex. A conditioned response built into me so early and so completely that by the time I understood what was happening Rhys was already out the door.
My father made me this way.
But I keep letting him.
I straighten up.
Pull out my phone.
Call him.
It rings out.
I call again.
Nothing.
I text him.
Nothing.
I stand on the pavement outside the bar where I just failed the person who matters most to me and I understand — fully, finally, with no place left to hide — that the thing my father spent my whole life beating out of me has been there the entire time.
It never left.
He just made me ashamed of it.
And tonight that shame cost me everything.
I don't sleep. I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and go through it over and over.
The glass.
The stillness.
His face when he walked out.
I text him at midnight.
Jamie:
I'm sorry
Nothing.
One AM.
Jamie:
Please call me
Nothing.
Two.
Jamie:
Rhys, please
Nothing.
I put my phone on my chest.
Think about Marcus watching him all night with those eyes full of grief for a thing he destroyed himself.
I understand those eyes now.
I understand them completely.
And I hate that I do.
I’m not him.
I’m not my father.
I’m not Marcus.
――――――――
Game day.
No morning practice.
I text him at seven.
Nothing.
Eight.
Nothing.
He's reading them.
Choosing silence the way I chose it last night — not out of cruelty, out of self-preservation — and I have no right to be hurt by it.
I know exactly what it is to be the one who keeps reaching and keeps getting nothing back.
I've been doing it to him for months. Now he's doing it to me. Now I know how it feels.
The pre-game skate is the longest forty minutes of my life.
Rhys is there on the ice. Present. Professional.
Moving through drills with that locked-in quality he gets when he's decided to be somewhere else inside himself while his body does what it's trained to do.
He passes accurately. Calls plays. Does everything right.
And exists in the same space as me like I'm not there.
Not anger. Not hurt. Just — removed. The Rhys who fell asleep on my chest and left his hand open on the pillow.
Gone.
Like a switch.
I know that switch. I built mine over twenty-one years. He built his at Eldridge.
When Fitch dismisses us I drive straight to his house and Blake opens the door.
I look past him and Rhys's door is closed shut.
"He doesn't want to see you," Blake says.
"I know."
"Jamie—"
"I know." I stay where I am. The cold at my back. The closed door in front of me. "I need him to know I understand what I did. That I know what it looked like. Just let me explain, please."
Blake says nothing for a bit, but I see it all in his eyes.
"He's been here before," Blake says. "You know that. He's stood in that exact place and watched someone make that exact choice." He holds my gaze. "He's not angry. That would almost be easier." He pauses. "He's just protecting himself. That's all he has right now." I look at the closed door.
"Can you tell him I'm sorry," I say. "Tell him it won't—"
"Will it?" Blake says. "Happen again?"
Blake looks at me, waiting for me to say something, anything.
And I don't answer because I cannot promise that yet and Rhys deserves more than a promise I'm not sure I can keep and we both know it and Blake nods once.
"Go get ready for the game," he says and closes the door. I stand at the porch. The quiet on the other side of that door is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
Tonight I play Eldridge.
Tonight I get on the ice with Marcus Hale — the man who watched Rhys alone for a year and felt his grief from across a room — and I have to be focused and be the person I have spent my entire life becoming.
And for the first time standing here I don't know if that person is someone I want to be anymore.
Or if I ever really chose him.
Or if he was just what was left after everything else got beaten out.
I walk away from the door.
And I carry that with me into the worst game of my life.