I think about Sage.
The thought arrives uninvited and refuses to leave, settling into the space between breaths with the warm persistence of her peppermint-and-cherry-blossom scent. Her face in Coach Mercer's office, bright with the specific joy of a woman being offered the chance she has been denied her entire life. Her tactical analysis of my performance, delivered with a passion so genuine it bypassed my defenses before I could raise them. Her hand on my thigh, the slap that cracked through my silence with the precise, affectionate violence of a woman who refuses to let me disappear into my own head.
And the fear that follows.
What if that man is on the team?
The question surfaces from the dark water where I keep the thoughts I cannot examine during daylight hours.
What if he enrolled here after being a total flake at the last program? What if his face is waiting in a roster I have not yet seen, his name printed beside mine in a lineup that forces me to occupy the same ice as the person who disassembled my mind and used the pieces for leverage?
What if he notices Sage?
The thought makes me bite my bottom lip so hard the skin splits. The metallic tang of blood fills my mouth, copper and salt, the taste grounding me in the physical present while my imagination sprints toward a future I cannot control.
Would he try to approach her? Would he see in her defiance the same quality he identified in my quietness and exploit it with the same calculated patience? Would he lean close to her the way he leaned close to me and whisper things that sound like compliments and function like chains?
I huff, the sound vibrating against the metal locker. The blood on my lip is warm. The taste is familiar. A souvenir from every moment in the last two years when my teeth have been the first responders to an anxiety my fists could not reach.
Stop.
You have to stop.
This man impacted your life negatively and it fucking sucks. It sucks in ways that language cannot contain and therapy can only approximate. But you have to move on. You have no choice. The alternative is the fog. The alternative is the facility. The alternative is losing another six weeks of your life to the ghost of someone who does not deserve the rent he is charging in your skull.
I close my eyes.
The breathing pattern resumes. Four counts in. Six counts out. My hands flatten against the locker on either side of my head, fingers spread, the metal cold against palms that are hotwith the residual energy of a punch I delivered to an inanimate object because the animate target is not here to receive it.
How is it fair?
The question is old. Worn smooth by repetition, like a stone tumbled in a river for years until its edges dissolve and its surface carries the polish of a grief that has been handled too many times.
How is it fair to be taken advantage of by someone who used your trust as an access point? To be ridiculed in front of the team, publicly, where the laughter served as evidence that you were less than what your jersey number promised? To be reduced to a target in spaces where you should have been a teammate?
And then, when all the eyes were gone. In the silence that followed the laughter. In the fucking shadows where witnesses could not reach and accountability could not follow.
That is when you were wanted.
Not respected. Not valued. Not seen as a person whose boundaries constituted a boundary rather than a challenge.
Wanted in the way predators want prey. With a hunger that has nothing to do with affection and everything to do with control.
The heaviness settles in my chest. Dense and dark and carrying the specific gravity of an emotion that sits at the intersection of rage and grief and the exhaustion of carrying both for so long that my body has forgotten what it feels like to be light.
I want to scream. To put my fist through this locker and the one beside it and every metal door in this row until the sound fills the room and drowns out the memory and the memory's echo and the echo's echo that plays on a loop in the quiet hours when my brain decides that sleep is less important than reliving the worst moments of my existence in high definition.
I focus on breathing instead. Because that is what I was taught. Because the alternative is destruction, and destruction is what he wanted from me: the slow, self-inflicted kind that erodes a person from the inside until the shell standing in the locker room is hollow and the hollow can be filled by whoever gets there first.
No one gives a fuck.
The thought is old too. Practiced. The mantra of a mind that learned isolation as a survival strategy and now deploys it as a cage.
No one cares. It has always been that way. It will always be...
A touch.
Soft. Arriving at my left hand with the gentle, unhurried contact of skin against skin. Warm fingers curling around my fist where it rests against the metal surface, the touch tentative at first, then firm, grounding the hand that just punched a locker with the patient pressure of someone who understands that aggression and pain often share the same vessel.
