“Kitchen.” He gestures before he moves.
I follow because I always do.
The party has thinned to stragglers who stayed too long out of habit. A couple of guys were shrugging into jackets, a rookie whispers something to an assistant coach and gets shooed toward the door. The music was off; the quiet felt like it had bones. In the kitchen the lights were too bright and the counters too clean, as if someone had already tried to scrub the night into something digestible.
Dad stood on one side of the island. He didn’t tell me where to stand; the room told me. The window over the sink was a black square reflecting our faces back at us. Behind us, the last door closed and the lock slid into place with a soft, final click.
He held my gaze a second longer than was comfortable. Not angry, alert. Like a man counting wind shifts.
“What’s going on between you and Triston?”
No preamble. No pretense. Just the line.
I had a dozen small lies I could wear like scarves…He’s worried about the team, he’s checking in, he’s being nice because of Andrew, but they were thin fabric in a cold room. I lifted a hand and set it down again because I didn’t know what to do with it.
“Nothing.” I said, and even the word flinched. I swallowed. “We talked.”
“Right.” His mouth barely moved, but the muscle in his jaw did. “And you two have been ‘talking’ for weeks?”
Heat rose under my skin. I thought of hallways and shadows and the way the rink hums when the compressor kicks. I thought of a shed and the word I said in a voice I barely recognized as mine. It lived just under my tongue now, warm and dangerous.
“We see each other a lot.” I managed. “It’s a small world.”
“It’s my world.” He paused. Then. “And you’re my kid.”
I could have said I’m nineteen. That legal adulthood is a technicality when the person across from you still sees pigtailsand skinned knees. Saying it would have been a cheap swing. He wasn’t talking about law. He was talking about belonging.
“I know.” I said, because it was the only honest thing in the room that didn’t burn to shit. “I’m not trying to—” I stopped.Hurt youwas the end of that sentence. It felt like an accusation to say it out loud.
He leans on his palms, knuckles whitening against the butcher block. “Triston is ten years older than you.” He said, but it wasn’t the number that scraped; it was what he put under it. “He was your brother’s teammate. He’s my captain. He’s been in the room I work in every day since before you finished high school. Do you understand what that means, Sammie?”
That my life is stitched into theirs. That if I pull one thread, the whole sweater can unravel.
“It means you trust him.” I said, because that’s where my mind went, hopelessly.
“It means I thought I did.” He shoots back, too fast, then closes his eyes like he’d fired and wanted the bullet back. When he opened them, his voice became softer. “It means if he so much as breathes wrong near you, I can’t coach him. I can’t lead this team. I can’t…I can’t be your father and his boss and pretend I’m not a person.”
The honesty of that knocked the air out of me. “We didn’t—” I began, and couldn’t finish either direction the sentence tried to go.
“Don’t make me be the bad guy for asking you to be careful.” He wasn’t pleading, but something in it reached toward that. “Don’t make me the wall you bounce off just to prove you can.”
I bristled on reflex. “This isn’t about rebellion.”
“No?” He questions, pinning me with a look that knows every dart I might throw. “It’s about hunger you think will starve if you box it up and label it wrong.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen enough boys on buses to know what that look means.”
“You’re not talking about me.” I snap. It stung that he was, and that he thought he had to translate me through them to understand me.
“I’m talking about humans.” He said simply. “And young.” He studied my face, and I hated that I stood straighter like that would make me older. “Is he forcing anything? Has he put hands on you you didn’t want? If he has, I will—” He stops himself so hard it shakes his shoulders. “Say no and I’ll believe you. Say yes and I’ll handle it. But don’t stand in the doorway pretending you’re not in the room.”
The directness of it shakes me and steadies me at once. “No.” I said, clearly. “He hasn’t…forced.” My cheeks burned at the end of the sentence. “I’m not a thing to be dragged anywhere.”
He exhaled like some fist in his chest loosened. It didn’t open. It just loosened.
“Then fucking hear me.” he growls with his voice low. “He’s not for you, Sam. Not now. Maybe not ever. He is a storm you think is weather. He will blow your life apart and call it air. That’s what men like him do when they don’t know how to want softly.”
Something inside me bucks at that—not because it wasn’t partly true, but because it wasn’t the whole story. I had felt softness under his control, a careful angle in the way he didn’t touch until I asked. The storm had a center. I stood there and remained myself.
“You don’t know him.” I said before I could swallow it.
