Page 63 of Slashed Bonds

Nobody on the coaching side has noticed.

My lip’s still split from the lobby.

She did that. Elbow, back and up, clean under the jaw, without looking at me, while she was busy getting off Cash. I’ve been hit by men who trained for a decade to do it, and none of them found the angle that fast.

I haven’t wiped the blood. I’m not sure why.

Yes, you are.

Coach and Roz are at the far end of the bench with their backs to us, and their attention is on the reason for all of it. The Omega. Roz’s ringer. The one she’s spent eleven weeks and a tank of gas a day driving to some barn in the county to watch.

Halloran’s been head coach here nine years.

He’s a small man with a large voice and a face like a closed fist, and he’s kept this program alive through four years of being buried by doing the one thing the committee can’t punish, which is winning the games they let us play. He doesn’t like us. He’s never pretended to. He likes what we do on a sheet, and he’s told us more than once that if we could do it without the rest, he’d sleep better.

Roz is the one who fights for us.

Halloran’s the one who lets her.

I hadn’t understood it. I’d seen the file. I’d seen the ruling. Nobody spends eleven weeks on a player with the word doping stapled to her name unless they’ve seen something worth the risk of being wrong.

Then she walked into the lobby.

And the first look didn’t match the file either.

The file said prodigy. Fallen. The first look said goth kid with a dog. All black, all silver, a face built for daring you to say something.

Now I’ve got a minute. I can look properly.

And she’s hot as fuck.

Not the word I’d normally reach for. I don’t reach for words much at all, which everyone reads as stupidity or menace depending on how tall they are. But I’m sitting here with my hand on Niko’s shoulder and I don’t have a better one.

She’s standing with her arms crossed. Hair down to her waist, black, with red bleeding through it in the arena light. Bangs across her eyes so I can’t get a clear read on them from here, which I suspect is the point. Leather jacket. Fishnets under torn tights. Boots that have seen weather.

And her mouth.

Dark red. Nearly black in the wrong light. The kind of red you put on when you want people to notice you didn’t smile.

The same red as the ends of my hair.

I notice that the way I notice a load-bearing wall in the wrong place. Not as a thought. As a problem for later.

She has the same vibe as the three of us.

That’s the odd part, and I’ve been turning it over since the lobby.

Not a costume. Not a girl who bought the look. Something in the way she stands, weight forward, one shoulder toward the door, hands where she can use them. The way her scent went quiet in the lobby instead of loud.

We’ve all done that. All three of us. Learned to go quiet in rooms.

I learned it in a house with two languages in it and no safe one.

My mother’s Korean when she was pleased, which was rarely, and my father’s German for everything else. I grew up translating between them at the dinner table and learned early that the safest position was the one where nobody remembered you were there. You get good at it. You get so good at it that people start assuming there’s nothing behind the face, and you let them, because a man nobody’s watching can watch everyone.

That’s the whole of me, if you want it.

Architecture school and a hockey stick and a face people have decided is empty.