7. Chapter 7
Rory
The glasses come out of Eli’s hoodie pocket in two pieces.
He lays them on his knee one half at a time, careful, and I lean forward in the chair beside the couch.
The round wire frames have snapped at the bridge.
He was wearing them when I waved at him by the cafeteria this morning.
Now he sits with his shoulders hunched, looking down at the broken halves of his glasses, and I wonder how long he’s been trying to get by without them.
He didn’t knock, either. Eli Navarro always knocks, even when my door is open.
Today he just appeared a while after the final bell, went straight to the two-seat couch, and pulled the folded throw off the armrest onto his lap.
He’s said nothing for the better part of an hour while the building empties around us.
The buses have gone. The lockers have stopped slamming.
Somewhere down the hall, a floor buffer has started up.
I let him sit. Silence in my office is allowed to take as long as it needs.
His mouth twists, and he rubs a sleeve under his nose. I turn my gaze to the corkboard, giving him a little privacy. Among the notes and doodles is the diagram Eli drew me last year of the sideline gear cart, labeled in the world’s tiniest handwriting so I’d understand his job.
He’s one of my kids. This room has been his place to come for a year, and I hate that he looks so miserable in it now.
His shoulders start to shake. Then Eli comes apart on my couch, both hands over his eyes, the broken glasses sliding off his knee onto the cushion.
The sobs are ugly and heaving, too hard for him to speak through.
The split in his lip from last week has faded to a thin dark line.
I look at it and want to put my arms around him.
I stay where I am, close enough for him to reach if he wants to.
“It’s Cole.” It comes out wet and wrecked from behind his hands, so small I almost miss it.
Then he takes his hands down and says it again, at the floor.
“Cole. It’s Cole Braddock.” His breath drags.
“He’s been bullying me since September. I don’t even know why.
I never did anything to him. Why does he do this to me? ”
Cole Braddock. The star quarterback, the boy whose name is on every football poster in the building. All this time, Eli has been turning up to wash his gear and fill his water bottle. I look down at the glasses on the cushion, and Eli’s hand shoots out and grabs my wrist.
“You can’t tell anyone.” His eyes are red-rimmed, enormous without the glasses. “Please. Please don’t report it. Reporting will only make it worse. It just... it’ll only get worse.”
I want to get up and go find Cole. Right now. But Eli is holding on to me as if I’ll leave the second he lets go, so I slide out of my chair and kneel in front of the couch. I take the hand clamped on my wrist and hold it in both of mine.
His fingers are ice-cold.
“Eli. Look at me.”
He lifts his head.
“I’m going to help you.” I hold his gaze. “You’re not going to have to deal with this by yourself. That’s a promise.”
His chin trembles. He nods, barely, and I give his hand a gentle squeeze.
“And I need you to hear one more thing. You deserve to be treated with respect and kindness. You matter, Eli. You don’t have to make yourself useful for that to be true. And when you’re ready to face him, I’ll be right there beside you.”
The crying comes back for a second, quieter this time. He doesn’t cover his face. I stay with him while he cries, and when his grip loosens, I reach for the broken glasses on the cushion.
Then I do first aid, because that part I can fix tonight.
I get up to fetch the tape from my desk and sit beside him on the couch.
Holding the broken ends together takes a little patience, but I wind the tape around the bridge until they stay put.
It’s an ugly patch. The lenses sit crooked when he slides them on, but he looks at me through them and almost smiles.
“Thanks, Ms. Hale.” At the door he pauses, hood up. “I’m okay.”
He isn’t. He goes anyway, and the corridor takes his footsteps away. I stand beside the couch with the tape dispenser in my hand until I can’t hear him anymore. Then I put it back on my desk.
The towel is still folded in my bag. Last Monday, I told him he didn’t have to give me a name right then. Today he trusted me enough to do it. He’s begged me not to report it, but I can’t help him by keeping this between the two of us. I grab my bag and head for the athletics wing.
For once, I don’t hesitate at the junction. The wing has gone five-o’clock empty, gold and navy cinder block under every third light panel. Bram’s door is open, and I’m two steps from it when Cole Braddock walks out.
He has his gym bag on one shoulder, wings furled neat under his jacket. Six foot six, nearly filling the doorway, and he steps aside to let me through as politely as anyone could ask.
“Oh. Hey, Ms. Hale.” And he smiles at me.
It’s a great smile. Warm and easy, exactly the sort I would usually return. I can still feel Eli’s fingers on my wrist. I don’t smile back, and I hold Cole’s gaze long enough that he ought to notice.
The smile doesn’t flicker.
“Cole,” I say, and walk past him into the office. Whatever he makes of that, he can make of it on his way down the corridor.
Bram is on his feet before I clear the doorway. Behind him the whiteboard lists the players by position, brADDOCK at the top of the column for quarterbacks. The narrow galley of the room smells like him, cedar and rain on warm stone, which is not information I need right now.
“Rory.” For a second, he looks pleased to see me. By Bram Stryge standards that’s a brass band and a fruit basket.
I’m about to be so unfair to that gladness.
I set my bag on the visitor chair, pull out the towel, and put it on his desk, on top of his legal pad. When I unfold it, the dried blood shows against the navy cloth.
“What is this?” He looks from the towel to me.
“It’s Eli Navarro’s blood.” I plant my feet. “Last Monday I found him hiding in the old-wing storage room before first bell. His nose was bleeding and his lip was split. He said he fell in the locker room.”
Bram leans over the desk to look at the blood, and I keep going.
“This afternoon he came to my office with his glasses broken in half. He cried until he could hardly speak, and then he told me who’s been hurting him. Cole Braddock. Your star player, Coach. It’s been going on since September, and you have to do something. He has to be stopped.”
Bram doesn’t move. His eyes stay on the towel, and his jaw tightens.
“No.” Quiet. Certain, the way he’d correct a date in class. “It can’t be Cole. There has to be a mistake.”
“Eli told me it was him.”
“Cole Braddock is a good student.” His voice stays level. “I have coached that kid four years. And in four years there has never been one complaint against him. Not from a teacher. Not from a player. Not one, ever. I know his parents. I know how he was raised.”
I know the Cole he’s talking about. I’ve just passed him in the doorway. I’ve seen him smile at teachers, and I’ve never had another student come to me about him. But I know Eli, too. I’m not going to stop believing him because the name he finally gave me is inconvenient.
“There’s no complaint because Eli is terrified of what Cole will do to him if he makes one,” I say. “He’s been putting up with this for months because he’s scared that asking us for help will make it worse.”
“Do you have anything else that proves it was Cole?” His gloved hand flattens on the desk beside the towel. “I believe you when you say Eli was hurt, but those are serious accusations.”
“Eli says it’s him. Why isn’t that enough for you to take him seriously?”
“I am taking him seriously. But if I accuse him and I’m wrong, I could ruin a seventeen-year-old’s future. I need to be sure.”
“Then get sure fast. Eli has a future too, Bram. What happens to him while you’re making up your mind?
” I lean forward, both hands on the edge of his desk.
“I am going to do whatever it takes to help that boy, with you or around you. Tomorrow morning this goes to admin. I’m putting what Eli told me in writing for Principal Patricia Oakes, along with what I saw.
I’m not waiting until Eli gets hurt again.
You can put your name next to mine, or I can go alone. But I’m going.”
“You think I don’t protect my kids.” He comes around the desk. The office is narrow, and his voice has dropped into a register I can feel through the floor. “Eli is mine too. That wing is mine. Every kid in it.”
“Then it happened in your wing, and you never saw it.” His wings pull tight against his back. I should stop, but I’ve never been good at doing what I should do. “Do with this whatever you want.”
I take my hands off the desk and straighten to face him. Bram bends until we’re face to face, green eyes blazing, close enough that his breath moves my hair. I hold my ground.
“If Cole did this without my noticing,” Bram says, his voice rough, “then I failed both those boys. You think I don’t know that?”
His gaze drops to the towel, then comes back to me. For the first time since I walked in, he looks shaken. I want him to tell me he’ll help. I need to hear it from him, and for a moment I think he’s going to say it.
He doesn’t. I glance at my bag on the visitor chair.
“Think about it,” I tell him. “You know where to find me.”
“That would be easier if you stopped running every time I got close.”
My gaze snaps back to his. Well. Apparently we’re having this conversation now.
“I’m standing right here, aren’t I? How much closer would you like me?”
His eyes drop to my mouth. Heat climbs into my cheeks.
“Closer than you are now.”
That is not the answer I was expecting, and he’s still bent toward me, close enough that I can feel his breath. I wish I didn’t feel all my lady parts respond, all at once, but I do. It’s an entire storm down there.
“That’s not a very professional answer, Coach.”
“You didn’t ask a very professional question.” One corner of his mouth lifts into the sexiest, most sinful smirk I ever laid eyes on. “Unless you ask all your colleagues that.”
“Only the ones who insist on looming over me.” I lift my chin. “Is it really necessary for you to be quite this tall anyway?”
“You didn’t seem to mind when I picked you up.”
Oh, I didn’t. Not one bit. My gaze drops to his mouth again. I should step back. I should say something brisk about professional boundaries and leave. Instead I want to kiss that smug little smile right off his face.
My brain malfunctions and I’m vaguely aware that I’m moving as I grab two fistfuls of his hoodie, pull him down, and kiss him.
He goes absolutely still, his mouth firm under mine.
For one awful second I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Then my palm slides up to the bare stone of his neck, and he kisses me back.
His skin is warm beneath my hand and getting warmer by the second.
His hand closes on my waist, steadying me as I lean into him, and a low sound rolls through his chest and straight into my hands.
I feel that sound all the way down to my knees. His other hand comes to my back, drawing me closer, and for a moment I don’t want to be anywhere else. His mouth is warm and hungry on mine.
I’ve missed this. I’ve obsessed over the memory of his kiss for over a week. I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep pretending otherwise while I’m holding on to him like this.
Above us his wings snap half open and rattle the blinds on the interior window. The sound jolts me enough to remind me where we are. In his office. With the door open and Eli’s bloodstained towel on the desk.
I break the kiss and push back off his chest.
His eyes have gone almost all the way black; his pupils are so dilated. My lipstick is on his mouth, red smeared on gray, and his wings are still half open behind him. He lets me go, and neither of us says one single word.
I still don’t have his answer. I leave the towel where it is. He can look at it while he decides. Tomorrow I’m going to Patricia, with or without him.
I’m out the door before he can say anything. Apparently it’s now my signature move.
The corridor is after-hours empty, and my heels are the only sound I can hear, click, click, click, past his window and toward the junction.
My mouth is smudged with lipstick. I don’t need a mirror to know it.
I don’t fix it, either. The last time I looked at Bram, he was wearing the rest of it, and I can’t seem to stop thinking about his face.
Four days ago, I told that man we’d be colleagues, Monday through Friday. Like always.
It’s Monday.
I’m in so much trouble.