I don’t let him pick. I cross the space in two strides and have a fist wrapped in his towel before I finish thinking. He’s bigger but greener; his eyes flare wide as a fish. The room erupts—stalls bang, skates scrape, everything bright and stupid.
“Jason.” Grady’s voice at my shoulder, steady as a post. A hand clamps my bicep. Another grabs my taped wrist and I see white for a second, pain and rage tripping over each other to be first. “Hey. Not the hand,” Grady mutters, adjusting his grip. “Use your words like a big boy.”
Kade’s mouth keeps running because he’s twenty-two and immortal. “Hit me, man. Make the headline match the photo?—”
My fist cocks on reflex. The room tilts toward violence in that delicious way that always felt like home before I learned better. A shout threads through the noise—Riley’s voice in my head, fierce and exhausted: Pick the right opponent.
I freeze in the split second it takes to hear her. Grady heaves. Timo hooks my other elbow. The towel slips; Kade staggers back with a theatrical stumble that will look great when he tells it later. I breathe fire and try to exhale smoke.
“Enough,” Grady says, hauling me a step, then another. “Cooler. Now.”
“Get your boy, Grady,” someone jeers. “He’s gonna propose on the bench.” More laughter. A few owwws like we’re in middle school.
I let myself be dragged because the alternative ends with fines and blood and Riley’s job on a pyre I built. My pulse is a drumline in my throat. I taste metal that isn’t blood yet.
At the threshold to the corridor, I twist out of Timo’s grip and plant a hand on the doorframe until the world stops doing that zoom-in thing. Grady studies me like a bomb with a timer. “You good?” he asks.
“No,” I say, honest. “But I’m done.”
“Prove it by walking,” he says, and for once I listen. The locker-room noise swells, then dims as the door thuds shut.
The corridor smells like cleaner and cold air. Quieter—but only in the way of a storm eye. Down the hall I catch a flash of honey-blonde and a clipboard. Riley, moving fast.
I go that way like gravity just remembered my name.
She spots me and doesn’t break stride. Of course she doesn’t. She pivots into a narrower service hall that smells like detergent and old ice, clearly planning to outmaneuver me via geometry. I lengthen my stride and cut her off at the corner, palm braced against cinderblock so I don’t touch her without permission. The wall is cold. I’m not.
“Don’t do that,” she says, low, eyes flashing warning. “We’re in a camera zone for about thirty more feet.”
“Great,” I say. “Then listen fast.” My voice scrapes. Anger is an instrument I quit and still know all the fingerings for. “Whatthe hell was that in there? Miles talking to you like I’m a car you need to get out from under before it explodes.”
“He was telling me the truth,” she fires back, chin up. “You are a car with a gas leak and three flat tires who insists on drag racing because the crowd is watching.”
“Cute metaphor. You rehearsed that for the owner?”
“I don’t rehearse reality,” she says. “I document it.” She taps the clipboard like a gavel. “Reality: you were compensating. Reality: you almost put a rookie through a locker. Reality: I am one rumor away from losing a job I bled for.”
“I’m not letting that happen,” I say, meaning it so hard my ribs ache. “I will burn my contract before I watch them?—”
“Stop.” She puts a palm up. Not touching, but it feels like a shove. “You can’t bulldoze optics. You can’t buy me safe. What you can do is skate smart and stop giving them angles.” She steps closer, eyes bright with anger that is ninety percent terror. “And you can stop making me your shield.”
The word hits like a body check I don’t dodge in time. “Shield?”
“You push,” she says, voice steadying into surgical. “And when it backfires, you expect me to stand there with a plan and a towel and a statement that makes everyone feel better about loving a wrecking ball.”
“I never asked you to?—”
“You never had to.” She blows out a breath, as if she can force calm back into place. “You are very good at making chaos look like fate. I’m very good at stitching people back together. Bad combo, Jason.”
Defensiveness rears up, ugly and eager. I strangle it because it won’t help. “I’m trying,” I say, smaller than I want. “Last night, today—I’m trying to be the guy who listens.”
Her mouth softens by a millimeter, then hardens again. “Then hear this: I can’t survive you if you won’t meet me in themiddle. I can’t survive you if the price of being near you is being the story instead of doing my job.”
“You’re not the story,” I say, even though the notifications buzzing in my pocket disagree.
“I am when you touch my face on a bench,” she says, precise enough to make me flinch. “I am when you square up in a locker room because a child with skates learned a new word.”
Heat rides up my neck. “He called you—” I bite it off. Names won’t help. “I won’t let them talk about you like that.”
