I skated until I couldn't feel my arms, again. You think I would have gotten used to it at some point. When it was over he drove me home and locked my bedroom door from the outside and that was where I stayed for a week. Nothing else except for hockey. He drove me to the rink and watched every session from the boards and drove me home and locked the door again.
A week of that.
No explanation given to anyone. My mother left food under the door and I could hear her breathing on the other side and she never said a word and I never said a word and we just — existed on either side of that door in the same silence of people who understand that saying something will only make it worse. When the week was over he unlocked the door and didn't mention it again.
Not once.
Not ever.
He put it somewhere and sealed it and the message was very clear.
The message was clear, every time.
My shoulders ache.
I stand up and pace.
Find my shirt on the floor. My jeans. My phone. I don't turn the lamp on. I don't look at Rhys again because if I look at him again I'll lay back down and I cannot get back down.
I’m too close to breaking.
I move through the dark and I get to the door and I open it. Blake is in the kitchen. He looks up when I come out of Rhys's room. Takes one look at my face and I know, I just know, he sees the fracture. He sees the point where I’m about to tear in two.
"Morning," he says. Cautiously.
I don't say anything.
Four steps to the front door. I count them. I hold myself together and hold my breath and move toward them and if this person says one more word to me I'm going to lose whatever is left of the tiny thread I'm hanging onto.
"Jamie." Just my name. Low. Laced with concern.
I shake my head, get to the door, and open it. Walk out into the cold and don't look back.
????????
Campus is grey and empty and silent and I move through it fast and the cold doesn't help and the movement doesn't help because the problem isn't in my body.
It’s in my fucking head. I can’t think, I can’t breathe. I’m about to claw these memories out of me.
So I end up at the rink.
No skates.
I just stand at the boards and look at the empty ice and feel the humiliation of a person who has run out of places to go and keeps ending up at the same one.
The place I love and hate at the same time.
I put my forearms on the boards and drop my head forward. I know how to be good at things. How to work. How to want something and aim everything at it without stopping. How to show up so consistently that people don't think to question whether I'm okay because I have never given anyone a reason to question it.
What I don't know how to do is this.
This thing where someone looks at me the way Rhys looked at me last night and I don't immediately make it smaller. Where I let it matter. Where I lie in someone's room and feel safe and don't wake up at five in the morning needing to run.
My father's voice in my head.
You do not get to be this.
Fourteen years old on the ice at ten at night and the stick across my shoulders andagainandagainandagainuntil being that thing — wanting that thing — became so tightly associated with pain that I can't separate them anymore. Can't feel one without bracing for the other. I've spent years convincing myself that's strength. Standing at these boards right now it feels like something else entirely.
