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 theEldridge 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 literallyanything 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.
