The words punch straight through the gap and catch on my ribs. Rage doesn’t coil so much as arrive. One second I’m on the bench in the locker room, tape dangling from my wrist; the next I’m a storm in the doorway, heat still in my veins from the ice and something meaner riding shotgun.
The room freezes. Sophie’s eyes cut to mine—warning. Riley’s don’t. She’s got that spine-straight posture that says the floor can break before she does. Miles turns, phone clutched like evidence.
“What was that?” I ask, voice too even. Even is worse than loud; even means I’m past caution.
“It was me telling her what the owner’s going to do if this keeps spiraling,” Miles says. He holds up the screen—the bench photo cropped to sin. “This is gasoline, Maddox.”
“Then stop holding a match,” I snap. My hand curls before I tame it. The tape bites my skin like a leash I asked for.
Riley steps in, palm up between us, trainer stance like she can referee the part of me that only answers to collision. “Jason. Not here.”
It’s too late. The image, the tone, the implication that she needs saving from me—it needles old scar tissue I thought I sanded flat. “You telling her to run?” I ask Miles. “You volunteering to take my spot while you’re at it?”
“Grow up,” he says, clean as a cut. “This isn’t about spots. It’s about you not making her collateral damage again.”
Again lands like a slap. My jaw grinds. I look at Riley, at the smudge of fatigue under her eyes, at the clipboard she’s holding close—no hero repscircled in red, a message I don’t need to read twice to know it’s meant for me. The knot in my chest tightens.
“Out,” Sophie says brightly to Miles, already shepherding him toward the hall with a smile that says she’ll set him on fire outside if necessary. He lets himself be moved, one last look at Riley loaded with warnings I don’t like him owning.
The door shuts. The room exhales. I don’t.
“Say it,” I tell Riley, because if Miles is going to call me a wrecking ball I refuse to pretend I don’t hear the impact. “Say you want me benched. Say you want me gone.”
Her chin lifts a millimeter. “I want you healthy,” she says. The words are clean. They still find every bruise. “And I want to keep my job. Those things only look like opposites if you’re determined to be a headline.”
A laugh scrapes out of me, ugly. “So it’s on me.”
“It’s on both of us,” she fires back. “But I’m the one following protocol while you treat pain like a dare.” She nods at my wrist. “You’re compensating again. I can see it from the door.”
Locker-room laughter bursts at an unrelated joke and still feels like it’s at me. I step closer, because distance makes me stupider. “Miles doesn’t talk to you like that.”
“He talks to me like a colleague,” she says, heat under the control. “Try it.”
It lands. I hate that it lands. The rage is still there, hot and useless, but under it is the older ache—the one with her name on it. I unpeel the tape from my wrist like it’s the only thing I can safely hurt.
A knock syncs with Sophie’s voice through the door: “Locker room. Boys are circling.”
Riley’s eyes don’t leave mine. “You want to fight?” she says quietly. “Pick the right opponent.”
I breathe through the urge to swing at a ghost. “Understood,” I say, and it sounds like a lie even to me.
The door barely clicks behind Sophie before the locker room remembers I exist. The sound hits like sleet—cold, needling, everywhere at once. Sticks clack against stalls. Someone whistles the wedding march because subtlety died in here years ago.
“Yo, Maddox,” Kade calls from across the benches, towel slung like a cape. “You bringing your trainer to date skate or is that extra?” Laughter pops—quick, bright, mean. A glove slaps tile in applause.
I could ignore it. I should. Instead the laugh gets under my pads and pries. “Focus on your plus/minus, Kade,” I say, voice flat. “You’ll need something to show your grandkids.”
“Aw, carve me up, Daddy,” he croons, and that word detonates a fuse I didn’t know I left exposed. A couple guys hoot. Phones sit face-down, but I can feel a lens somewhere, hungry.
I stand. The bench shrieks against rubber. “You want to try that again?”
The room leans in like a crowd around a car wreck. Coach is somewhere else, probably terrorizing video. No adult supervision. Perfect.
“Relax, starboy,” another rookie says, grinning with too many teeth. “We’re just saying your medical personnel seems…attentive.” He mimes a forehead touch. It’s so close to what actually happened that for a second the room blinks into last night: fever heat, a cool cloth, the exact sound she made when she realized I was burning.
“Say one more word about her,” I warn, quiet. My hands hang loose at my sides, but the bones hum. My father’s voice tries to rise—throw first, apologize later—I bite down hard on the ghost.
“Which word?” Kade asks. “Ethics? Boundaries? Or?—”
