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“Coward or caretaker,” she says, and writes it at the top of the pad, and underlines it twice. “Fine. But for the record, the reader’s going to side with the caretaker.”

“The reader’s going to be wrong.”

“The reader’s going to be kind. There’s a difference, and —”

“— it’s the whole class. Yeah. You said.”

She almost smiles. Catches it. Doesn’t. And I sit there wanting the smile she wouldn’t give me more than I wanted the thing we just did, which should scare me a lot more than it does.

I walk her to her car, because it’s midnight and dark and there’s no version of me that lets her cross a lot alone — even the version that’s been told forty times this isn’t a thing. She lets me, which is its own quiet argument neither of us has out loud. At the car she stops with her hand on the door and looks at me like she’s deciding whether to say something, and I stand in the cold and let her not decide, because I’m getting good at letting her not.

“This isn’t happening again,” she says.

“No.”

“I mean it. Twice is a pattern. Twice is a problem. We have six weeks of a class and a grade we both need, and I cannot be — this. With you. It’s a disaster.”

“Total disaster,” I agree.

“So we’re clear.”

“Crystal.”

She gets in the car. There’s a fresh skin of snow on the windshield, and I brush it off with my forearm while she’s digging for her keys — four seconds, nothing, the kind of thing you do without deciding to do it — and when I straighten up she’s watching me through the glass with a look I can’t name. I don’t try to name it. I just wait until the engine turns and the headlights come on, because you don’t leave until they’re running; my mom taught me that without ever once meaning to teach me anything.

She pulls out of the lot. I stand there in the January cold with a study-room reservation for the same time next week and the specific, deeply inconvenient certainty that I’m lying, and so is she, and neither of us is going to stop.

Third time. There’s going to be a third time. And the part I can’t get around, standing in an empty lot at midnight talking myself hoarse, is that I’m not dreading it.

I put that where I put everything. Then I go home, and I don’t sleep, and it’s not the sex I lie awake on.

It’s the hand on her back. And the fact that she let it stay.

Chapter 5

Margo

There’s a version of me that only exists eleven feet in the air, and she’s the only one I actually trust.

We’re forty minutes into practice, running the sequence that’s been eating my week — the back-to-back, the basket toss into a full, cradle, quick load, pyramid. And I’m up. Weightless, that half-second at the top where the gym drops away and there’s nothing holding me and everything is. It’s perfect. It’s clean. I hit the full and come down into Cameron and Jordan’s hands like I was poured there.

And then the load. And then it falls apart. Again.

“Bail!” Ethan’s voice, from the back, sharp as a whistle. I bail — tuck, ride the cradle down, feet to the mat, because a flyer who doesn’t bail clean is a flyer who ends a season early — and the pyramid collapses in slow polite pieces around me. Sienna steps down. Kara swears softly. Delaney makes the face.

“That’s the third time.” Delaney, hands on hips, sweat-slick and furious in the way only a perfectionist gets furious, which is at herself first. “It was me. I loaded late.”

“It wasn’t you.” I’m already resetting, shaking out my wrists. “It’s the count. It’s a half-beat tight since Ethan moved the transition.”

“The count is fine,” Ethan says, crossing the mat, clipboard energy even without a clipboard, because Ethan Cole captains the way some people conduct weather. “It’s Nationals-legal and it’s staying. You’ll hit it.”

“I will absolutely hit it,” I tell him, bright, because you don’t argue with Ethan mid-practice. You agree with Ethan, and then you quietly hit it your own way. “Give me the reset.”

Kara claps twice. “From the toss, full group, walk the load. Priya, watch your timing on the back tuck, you’re early.” Kara Bennett runs the all-girl sections like a woman defusing ordnance and co-captains the rest by sheer competence. When she says walk it, we walk it. Slow. Counting out loud like freshmen, because it’s better slow — it’s always better slow. And I put the fix away with the rest of it, and I don’t let myself feel the small hot shame of a stunt that won’t land, and I know exactly what I’m doing when I do that, and I do it anyway.

Because here’s the thing nobody outside this gym understands about me: this is the one place I’ve ever been where the work is the whole point, and there’s no performance under the performance. Up there, you can’t manage anybody’s feelings. You can’t be bright at gravity. You just go up and trust six people to catch you — and I do, completely, which is genuinely hilarious, because trusting anyone anywhere else on earth feels like handing them a knife and turning around.

“Water,” Ethan calls. “Five. Then full-out, top.”