Jason
Lines Crossed
The corridor smells like sanitizer and rubber, the kind of clean that burns. I’m unlacing when I hear Miles say it through the cracked training-room door—voice low, steady, criminally calm: “You can’t save him—and you’re about to cost us both our jobs.”
The words punch straight through the gap and catch on my ribs. Rage doesn’t coil so much as arrive. One second I’m on the bench in the locker room, tape dangling from my wrist; the next I’m a storm in the doorway, heat still in my veins from the ice and something meaner riding shotgun.
The room freezes. Sophie’s eyes cut to mine—warning. Riley’s don’t. She’s got that spine-straight posture that says the floor can break before she does. Miles turns, phone clutched like evidence.
“What was that?” I ask, voice too even. Even is worse than loud; even means I’m past caution.
“It was me telling her what the owner’s going to do if this keeps spiraling,” Miles says. He holds up the screen—the bench photo cropped to sin. “This is gasoline, Maddox.”
“Then stop holding a match,” I snap. My hand curls before I tame it. The tape bites my skin like a leash I asked for.
Riley steps in, palm up between us, trainer stance like she can referee the part of me that only answers to collision. “Jason. Not here.”
It’s too late. The image, the tone, the implication that she needs saving from me—it needles old scar tissue I thought I sanded flat. “You telling her to run?” I ask Miles. “You volunteering to take my spot while you’re at it?”
“Grow up,” he says, clean as a cut. “This isn’t about spots. It’s about you not making her collateral damage again.”
Again lands like a slap. My jaw grinds. I look at Riley, at the smudge of fatigue under her eyes, at the clipboard she’s holding close—no hero reps circled in red, a message I don’t need to read twice to know it’s meant for me. The knot in my chest tightens.
“Out,” Sophie says brightly to Miles, already shepherding him toward the hall with a smile that says she’ll set him on fire outside if necessary. He lets himself be moved, one last look at Riley loaded with warnings I don’t like him owning.
The door shuts. The room exhales. I don’t.
“Say it,” I tell Riley, because if Miles is going to call me a wrecking ball I refuse to pretend I don’t hear the impact. “Say you want me benched. Say you want me gone.”
Her chin lifts a millimeter. “I want you healthy,” she says. The words are clean. They still find every bruise. “And I want to keep my job. Those things only look like opposites if you’re determined to be a headline.”
A laugh scrapes out of me, ugly. “So it’s on me.”
“It’s on both of us,” she fires back. “But I’m the one following protocol while you treat pain like a dare.” She nods at my wrist. “You’re compensating again. I can see it from the door.”
Locker-room laughter bursts at an unrelated joke and still feels like it’s at me. I step closer, because distance makes me stupider. “Miles doesn’t talk to you like that.”
“He talks to me like a colleague,” she says, heat under the control. “Try it.”
It lands. I hate that it lands. The rage is still there, hot and useless, but under it is the older ache—the one with her name on it. I unpeel the tape from my wrist like it’s the only thing I can safely hurt.
A knock syncs with Sophie’s voice through the door: “Locker room. Boys are circling.”
Riley’s eyes don’t leave mine. “You want to fight?” she says quietly. “Pick the right opponent.”
I breathe through the urge to swing at a ghost. “Understood,” I say, and it sounds like a lie even to me.
The door barely clicks behind Sophie before the locker room remembers I exist. The sound hits like sleet—cold, needling, everywhere at once. Sticks clack against stalls. Someone whistles the wedding march because subtlety died in here years ago.
“Yo, Maddox,” Kade calls from across the benches, towel slung like a cape. “You bringing your trainer to date skate or is that extra?” Laughter pops—quick, bright, mean. A glove slaps tile in applause.
I could ignore it. I should. Instead the laugh gets under my pads and pries. “Focus on your plus/minus, Kade,” I say, voice flat. “You’ll need something to show your grandkids.”
“Aw, carve me up, Daddy,” he croons, and that word detonates a fuse I didn’t know I left exposed. A couple guys hoot. Phones sit face-down, but I can feel a lens somewhere, hungry.
I stand. The bench shrieks against rubber. “You want to try that again?”
The room leans in like a crowd around a car wreck. Coach is somewhere else, probably terrorizing video. No adult supervision. Perfect.
“Relax, starboy,” another rookie says, grinning with too many teeth.
“We’re just saying your medical personnel seems…
attentive.” He mimes a forehead touch. It’s so close to what actually happened that for a second the room blinks into last night: fever heat, a cool cloth, the exact sound she made when she realized I was burning.
“Say one more word about her,” I warn, quiet. My hands hang loose at my sides, but the bones hum. My father’s voice tries to rise—throw first, apologize later—I bite down hard on the ghost.
“Which word?” Kade asks. “Ethics? Boundaries? Or—”
I don’t let him pick. I cross the space in two strides and have a fist wrapped in his towel before I finish thinking. He’s bigger but greener; his eyes flare wide as a fish. The room erupts—stalls bang, skates scrape, everything bright and stupid.
“Jason.” Grady’s voice at my shoulder, steady as a post. A hand clamps my bicep. Another grabs my taped wrist and I see white for a second, pain and rage tripping over each other to be first. “Hey. Not the hand,” Grady mutters, adjusting his grip. “Use your words like a big boy.”
Kade’s mouth keeps running because he’s twenty-two and immortal. “Hit me, man. Make the headline match the photo—”
My fist cocks on reflex. The room tilts toward violence in that delicious way that always felt like home before I learned better. A shout threads through the noise—Riley’s voice in my head, fierce and exhausted: Pick the right opponent.
I freeze in the split second it takes to hear her. Grady heaves. Timo hooks my other elbow. The towel slips; Kade staggers back with a theatrical stumble that will look great when he tells it later. I breathe fire and try to exhale smoke.
“Enough,” Grady says, hauling me a step, then another. “Cooler. Now.”
“Get your boy, Grady,” someone jeers. “He’s gonna propose on the bench.” More laughter. A few owwws like we’re in middle school.
I let myself be dragged because the alternative ends with fines and blood and Riley’s job on a pyre I built. My pulse is a drumline in my throat. I taste metal that isn’t blood yet.
At the threshold to the corridor, I twist out of Timo’s grip and plant a hand on the doorframe until the world stops doing that zoom-in thing. Grady studies me like a bomb with a timer. “You good?” he asks.
“No,” I say, honest. “But I’m done.”
“Prove it by walking,” he says, and for once I listen. The locker-room noise swells, then dims as the door thuds shut.
The corridor smells like cleaner and cold air. Quieter—but only in the way of a storm eye. Down the hall I catch a flash of honey-blonde and a clipboard. Riley, moving fast.
I go that way like gravity just remembered my name.
She spots me and doesn’t break stride. Of course she doesn’t.
She pivots into a narrower service hall that smells like detergent and old ice, clearly planning to outmaneuver me via geometry.
I lengthen my stride and cut her off at the corner, palm braced against cinderblock so I don’t touch her without permission. The wall is cold. I’m not.
“Don’t do that,” she says, low, eyes flashing warning. “We’re in a camera zone for about thirty more feet.”
“Great,” I say. “Then listen fast.” My voice scrapes. Anger is an instrument I quit and still know all the fingerings for. “What the hell was that in there? Miles talking to you like I’m a car you need to get out from under before it explodes.”
“He was telling me the truth,” she fires back, chin up. “You are a car with a gas leak and three flat tires who insists on drag racing because the crowd is watching.”
“Cute metaphor. You rehearsed that for the owner?”
“I don’t rehearse reality,” she says. “I document it.” She taps the clipboard like a gavel. “Reality: you were compensating. Reality: you almost put a rookie through a locker. Reality: I am one rumor away from losing a job I bled for.”
“I’m not letting that happen,” I say, meaning it so hard my ribs ache. “I will burn my contract before I watch them—”
“Stop.” She puts a palm up. Not touching, but it feels like a shove. “You can’t bulldoze optics. You can’t buy me safe. What you can do is skate smart and stop giving them angles.” She steps closer, eyes bright with anger that is ninety percent terror. “And you can stop making me your shield.”
The word hits like a body check I don’t dodge in time. “Shield?”
“You push,” she says, voice steadying into surgical. “And when it backfires, you expect me to stand there with a plan and a towel and a statement that makes everyone feel better about loving a wrecking ball.”
“I never asked you to—”
“You never had to.” She blows out a breath, as if she can force calm back into place. “You are very good at making chaos look like fate. I’m very good at stitching people back together. Bad combo, Jason.”
Defensiveness rears up, ugly and eager. I strangle it because it won’t help. “I’m trying,” I say, smaller than I want. “Last night, today—I’m trying to be the guy who listens.”
Her mouth softens by a millimeter, then hardens again. “Then hear this: I can’t survive you if you won’t meet me in the middle. I can’t survive you if the price of being near you is being the story instead of doing my job.”
“You’re not the story,” I say, even though the notifications buzzing in my pocket disagree.