I cross to the wall and he looks up when I’m three steps out, and his face responds in stages. Surprise, then recovery, then the start of reassembling into the guy who’s always fine and always ready to help — but the recovery fails halfway up his face.
“Hi,” I say, before he can finish assembling.
“Hi.” He tries to force a smile, but it doesn’t make it.
“Mind if I sit?”
He shifts his bag with his foot. “Sure.”
I sit. The wall is exactly as cold as I thought it would be, and I’m wearing a coat that wasn’t designed by someone with “sitting on cold stone” in mind. There’s barely any space between his leg and mine, and I notice while I’m tucking my hands into my pockets.
“Ivy texted me,” I say, trying to focus on anything but that fact. “About the game.”
“Yeah.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Not our best.”
“She said you played your heart out.”
He snorts. “She’d fight anyone who said I didn’t, even if I’d bailed like Gavin.”
“Who?”
He looks at me sideways, not turning his head, just his eyes. He’s deciding whether to move on without sharing. His mouth even starts to shapeit’s fine, then doesn’t, because something in him is too tired to lift it.
“Gavin,” he says. “The captain.”
The last word comes out with something close to disdain.
“What about him?” I ask.
“He’s done.” He says it like he’s been holding it on his tongue all night. “He’s checked out, and I’ve been covering for him all season, but tonight I couldn’t cover and play at the same time. We lost, and I—” He stops. “Sorry. You don’t need this dumped on top of you.”
“I asked.”
“Right.”
His knee is pressing gently against mine now. I don’t know when that happened, and neither of us moves. It feels like something he needs, whether he realizes it or not, and it feels like something I need, too.
Because, right now, he seems so alone.
“The freshmen don’t know how to handle it,” he says, quieter. “Theo took a bad hit tonight and came off shaking. I had to talk him through it because nobody else was, and then I was back over the boards trying to hold the whole thing together, and we still lost, and I?—”
The sentence doesn’t finish.
He takes a breath.
“Hey.” I bump his knee with mine, gently. “Don’t censor yourself.”
“I feel like I have to, sometimes,” he says. “I think we all do.”
I don’t respond immediately, and he looks at me, and there’s a flicker of something — recognition, maybe. Because his words confirm what I’ve thought since that day in the courtyard: he’s the only one who sees through who I’ve been trying to be.
I’ve been carrying a version of him in my head, too. One that isn’t right or fair. It’s the version that got blamed at the toga party rather than thanked. It’s the version I got angry at, not the version I forgave.
We’re both bad at hiding from each other, it turns out.
“I told Mason it’s over,” I say. “I told him it’s not going to work.”
He goes still. He doesn’t ask what I told him or why or how he took it. He exhales, long and slow through his nose, his shoulders coming down, like one thing he’s been carrying has been set down.
