My body moved before my brain did. I set the ball down. Stepped back. Line it up.
And I kicked.
Hard.
The sound—BANG.
The ball slammed against the bleachers right by her head. Loud. Violent. Sharp enough to make her flinch so hard that she dropped everything in her arms. The papers scattered, her yelp cuts through the air, and her whole body curled in on itself as if I just shot a bullet instead of a ball.
Every single head snapped up.
Miles stiffened, and so did Matthew. Aly froze mid-sentence, staring. But me? I just lowered my foot back down, rolled my shoulders, and walked. No explanation. No apology. I just kept walking. I didn’t turn back, but I felt it. Their eyes. Her shock. Their questions. The silence trailed after me like smoke.
Good. Let them feel it. Let her feel it. She belongs to me, and I will make sure everyone knows before she knows it herself.
—
I didn’t go to the locker room. I went to the bathroom and locked myself in a stall like a coward.
The metal click of the latch sounded too loud, like an accusation. The fluorescent light hummed above, buzzing into the raw silence I’d carried in my chest for years.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the cold tile, back pressed to the stall door, knees up, fingers splayed over my chest because I couldn’t think of where else to put them.
Fuck.Iscared her.
The image replayed in my head in ugly little looped frames: the ball sailing, the splintering bang, her hand jerking, the papers exploding from her grip like birds.
Her yelp—small and human, full of shock—the sound I’d been dying for and that I’d never deserved. I’d wanted that sound to be for me, to be soft and surrendered and mine. Instead, I’d manufactured it. I’d made her flinch.
My breath came out in ragged, shallow pulls. I squeezed my eyes shut until black shapes spun behind my lids. That little noise she made lodged itself under my ribs, a stone that scraped and would not move.
I had just pushed a boundary I’d sworn not to cross, all because I couldn’t stand someone else making her smile the way she smiled now.
My chest hurt in new, unfamiliar ways.
The ache wasn’t just fury or hunger. It was the double-edged thing you feel when you realise you’ve become the kind of person you swore you wouldn’t be.
A small, awful knowledge settled: I’d done to her what my life had taught me to do to keep from being abandoned, hurt first, so I wouldn’t be hurt differently. I’d used fear as a leash.
I pressed my forehead to my knees and tried to breathe like someone had taught me in some other, quieter life. Slow in. Slow out.
The method didn’t care about the mess of my intentions. It only took the air and gave it back. I counted the breaths because counting tricked the brain out of—out of whatever spiral I was tail-spinning in.
The stone in my chest shifted. Regret rose like bile. If she’d run, if she’d run away this time, what would I have done? What would I do?
The thought of that possibility squeezed something raw and hot behind my chest. I would not survive her leaving because of me. The idea was not theoretical. It was a weight.
I would fix what I could. I would swallow whatever pride I had left. I would stop pretending that distance and cold were the same as protection. I would—God help me—figure out how to reach her in a way that didn’t frighten her. I would learn to bethe man who could earn the right to stand in her world without breaking it.
It was ridiculous, but if she left me—if she fucking left me, I would have nothing left. Nothing.
How could I even imagine a world without her in it?
Without her looking at me and knowing I existed, that I was here, seeing her. Really seeing her the way no other man could. The way no other people could. We both have lived in the same darkness for so long; she can’t leave me here alone.
I stood up. My knees ached. My hands were slick. I wiped them on my shorts and unlocked the stall with fingers that shook, then pushed the metal door and stepped back into the bright, noisy bathroom.
The mirror above the sinks reflected a face I barely recognised: too pale, eyes rimmed red from something like a fever, guilt, maybe, or the realisation that I’d finally cracked something I couldn’t glue back together with silence.
