His eyes flare. “I didn’t feed anything to the?—”
“Your team did. Your dad did. Your silence did.”
The ugly part of me goes hunting for more blood. “It’s not the money, is it?” I ask, low. “Or maybe it is. Maybe you like the world where the napkins match and nothing leaks and nobody throws a punch in public. I’m never going to be that. I grew up eating burnt scrambled eggs in a pan with a bent handle and taping my skates with cheap tape and teaching myself to stop bleeding in locker rooms that smelled like bleach. That’s who I am. And you—” I gesture vaguely, like his name is too heavy today. “You’re not built to carry me in daylight.”
He sits very still. “That’s not why.”
“Then why?” I demand.
His mouth opens. He’s not lying when he answers; that almost makes it worse. “Because Kyle won’t put me in a position where I have to manage fallout. He won’t—he won’t make a scene or pick a fight with a ref or get ejected because he couldn’t control himself. He won’t hand the press a story plated in silver and expect me to swallow it. He won’t take me into back rooms and ruin me and risk putting it on the front page.
There it is. Said as gently as he can manage. Said like a cut with a clean blade is somehow better than a dull one.
“Right,” I say, and hear the blade hit the floor between us. “Thanks for the translation.”
“Magnus—”
“No, that’s good. That’s perfect.” I stand straighter, give him my best grin, the one with too much tooth. “Let’s just make it seem like I’m the only one who’s making the choices.”
I get up from the bed, pulling on my jeans.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You meant it exactly like that,” I say. “You want the fire in your bed and the ice on your arm. You want the thing that makes you feel alive where no one can see it, and the thing that makes you look good where everyone can.”
He closes his eyes like he can shut me off. “Stop.”
“Good to know what the problem is,” I say lightly, because light hurts worse. “Me.”
“I didn’t?—”
“It’s fine,” I lie. “You want Kyle because he won’t embarrass you. He’ll never shove you up against your own life and make you choose it.”
“Stop putting this on him,” he snaps, finally losing the cool. “This is about us. You and me. And the fact that you’d rather blow it up than wait.”
“I’ve been waiting since the first time you looked at me like you wanted to eat your own rules alive,” I say. “I’m done.”
He goes still again. The quiet this time is different. It’s not a door; it’s a cliff.
“I have practice,” I add, because cowardice likes a schedule. I grab my hoodie from the chair, my wallet from the dresser. I don’t slam anything. I don’t kick. I don’t make a mess he’d have to clean.
“Magnus,” he says.
I look at him. He looks like exactly what he is: a man who wants two truths and hates that one of them is me. It makes me cruel because it’s easier than being broken.
“Go back to your safe little world, Hale,” I say, crisp, almost friendly. “You wear it better.”
I don’t wait for him to answer. I walk out, pull the door closed behind me, and keep walking until the elevator swallows me whole. Only when the doors slide shut and the building’s mirror throws my own face back at me do I let my breath leave like a punch.
Practice can have me. The ice can have me. He can have his silence.
I get the last word. It tastes like victory for about ten seconds. Then it tastes like nothing at all.
By the time I step through my apartment door that night, silence hits me like a wall. The counter’s cluttered with unopened mail and empty bottles of electrolyte water I never finished. I kick off my shoes and drop my keys too hard on the table, the sound shattering the stillness.
My phone buzzes. Not him. I’ve heard nothing all day. It’s Phoenix:
Practice at 9 tomorrow. Try not to come in hungover this time, yeah?
