Page 49 of Unmanageable

“I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t look at me anymore. She pulls the duvet up to her chin, clutching it like armor, making herself as small as humanly possible in the middle of the vast bed. She’s trying to disappear into the mattress.

“Don’t you dare,” I say firmly. My voice is thick, and I have to swallow hard to keep it from failing. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Scottie. Not a single fucking thing.”

I want to reach for her.

Every instinct I have—everything that makes me a man, a teammate, a person—is screaming at me to pull her into my arms and tell her I’ll kill anyone who ever made her feel like this.

But the way she’s flinching, the way she’s huddled there like I’m the monster under the bed… I can’t move.

“I’m going to sit in the chair,” I say quietly. I grab my pillow, moving slowly, making sure she can see every move I make. “I’m right here. I’m not leaving, but I’m going to sit over there. You have the bed. Okay?”

She doesn’t answer. She just stares at the wall, her breathing coming in those short, jagged hitches.

About ten minutes later, she gets up. She doesn’t look at me as she walks to the bathroom. The door clicks shut, and then I hear the water.

She spends over an hour in that shower.

I lie there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, feeling the crushing weight of the ghosts I can’t body-check into the boards for her.

My entire life is built around protection. Around being the wall. Around stopping the thing that’s coming for my people.

And I am sitting here in this stupid cabin, and I am utterly, completely useless.

When she emerges, the room fills with steam. She’s wearing a different shirt, her hair soaking wet and plastered to her neck. Her skin is scrubbed raw—an angry, mottled red on her arms and chest.

She won’t look at me.

She crawls back into bed on the furthest edge, her back to me.

I stay in the chair. I stay because I promised I would, but the distance between us feels like a canyon I don’t know how to cross without falling to my death.

I lie there listening to her shallow, haunted breathing.

Every time she shifts, I tense up, ready to move, ready to help, but I know the best thing I can do is stay exactly where I am.

The sun starts to creep through the blinds, casting long, dusty stripes across the floor.

“Scottie?” I say into the silence.

Nothing.

“You’re okay,” I whisper. “I’m right here.”

I hear a small, muffled sound—a sob she tries to hide in the pillow. Then silence. I sit there in the wooden chair, watching the light change, and wait for the girl I’m falling for to come back from wherever she’s been.

13

Finn O’Connell

I am standing in the crease, digging the edges of my skates into the fresh ice and tapping my posts with a rhythm that usually anchors me. Tap, tap, left. Tap, tap, right. It’s an old ritual, a way to find my center before the world turns into a blur of black rubber and flashing lights.

Today, though, my center is about forty feet away, leaning against the players’ bench and looking like a ghost wrapped in a black leather jacket.

Scottie hasn’t said ten words to me since we cleared out of the motel.

She didn’t touch breakfast at the diner down the road, and she didn’t even drink her coffee—which, for Scottie, is the behavioral equivalent of a normal human being simply choosing to stop their own heart.