“Lights out?”he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.“Lights out.”
He flicked the switch.
In the dark, I listened to him get into bed.I listened to the radiator hiss.
I touched my chest, right over the Frost Demons logo.My heart was still hammering, loud and frantic.
Entanglements.
The word floated up from the dark, heavy and cold.
We hadn’t almost been caught.It’s not like the team didn’t know I was gay.But it’s one thing to know someone is gay and something completely different to know who that guy is gay with.That’s why I’d avoided relationships at my last school.I can’t let them distract from the game.
Chapter 25
Scouting Report
Austen
The decay rate of a relationship is rarely linear.
In my experience, it doesn’t follow a steady downward slope.It follows a step function.You are on one level—stable, constant, safe—and then a single event occurs, a variable shifts, and you drop instantaneously to a lower plateau.
The event was the knock on the door.The variable was fear.
It had been forty-eight hours since Ryan pounded on Room 317, forty-eight hours since Luke shoved me off his lap with enough force to bruise, forty-eight hours since I started feeling like Luke’s dirty little secret.
I sat at my desk, my back to the room.five a.m.
Usually, this was our “quiet friction” time.Luke would be waking up, grumbling about the cold floor, making his way to the coffeemaker.I would be reviewing my schedule for the day.We would exist in a comfortable, shared orbit until he went off to practice.
Today, the silence was sterile.
Rustle of sheets.Heavy thud of feet hitting the floor.Zip of a gear bag.
“I’m heading out,” Luke said.His voice was rough, tight.
I turned in my chair.He was dressed—hoodie up, hat low.He wasn’t looking at me.He was looking at the door, his hand on the knob.
“You have a lift block at six,” I said.“It’s only five.”
“Going early.Need to stretch.”
“I made coffee.”
“I’ll grab some on the way.”
He opened the door.The hallway air rushed in, cold and smelling of floor wax.
“Luke?”
He paused, but he didn’t turn.His knuckles were white on the door handle.
“We iterate,” I said, offering the phrase that had become our shorthand forwe keep going, we fix this.
He stood frozen for a second.Tension in his shoulders, the way his head dipped.For a moment, I thought he might turn around.I thought he might drop the bag and come back to me and apologize for the thousandth time for the shove, for the panic, for the hiding.
