She cuts him off.
Clean. Decisive. The interruption arriving at the precise syllable where Maxwell's name would have been completed, her voice slicing through the word before it can fully form and exist in the air between them. She does not want to hear it. Does not want the name occupying the acoustic space that she is currentlyfilling with her presence and her authority and the specific, protective neutrality that she has adopted since the shower stall.
Neutral.
She does not sound angry. Does not sound frightened. Does not sound sad or disgusted or any of the emotional registers that the situation would logically produce in a woman who just learned that the man she has been kissing was sexually assaulted by a teammate who is currently enrolled at the same institution.
She sounds neutral.
And that is terrifying.
Because Sage Holloway is never neutral. Wildcard operates in two modes: fuming with annoyance or radiating with joy. She is combustion or sunshine. Volume or laughter. The specific, relentless, emotionally transparent energy of a woman whose feelings are displayed on her face with the readability of a scoreboard and whose voice communicates her internal state with the broadcast fidelity of a PA system.
She is never neutral.
And neutral, on Sage, reads as the specific, controlled quiet of a woman who is processing information that is too significant for her standard emotional channels and has redirected the processing to a deeper, more deliberate system that does not display its conclusions until they have been fully formed.
Neutral Sage is not calm Sage.
Neutral Sage is the Sage who has decided something. And the decision is being assembled in a place that her face does not reveal and her voice does not betray and the people around her will not learn about until she chooses to act on it.
"Come on." Her voice again. Carrying the practical, urgent authority that overrides the emotional weight of everything thathas just occurred. "He's going to get worse if we don't dry him off."
The twins agree.
I feel movement. The specific, coordinated choreography of three bodies navigating a man's dead weight through a locker room doorway, the twins providing the lift and the direction while Sage provides the guidance and the urgency. Towels against my skin. The cold air of the corridor replacing the shower's steam. The specific, jarring temperature differential that should wake me up and instead accelerates the descent, the shock of cold converting the fog from a gradual lowering into a rapid drop.
I try to stay awake.
My eyelids fighting the weight pressing them closed. My consciousness clinging to the fragments of sensory input that are still reaching my brain through the narrowing channels: the twins' footsteps, coordinated and steady. Sage's peppermint scent, close and persistent. The ambient hum of the campus beyond the locker room walls, carrying on without awareness of or interest in the crisis occurring within them.
She is pack now.
The forms were submitted. The administrative deadline met. The temporary arrangement that Coach Mercer's waiver-and-pretend policy enabled has been formalized into a structure that the league will accept and the institution will recognize and the twins will honor with the same loyalty they have applied to every commitment they have made in six years of friendship.
She is pack.
Which means she is mine to protect and I am hers to hold and the arms that found me on the shower floor have the pack-sanctioned right to find me again.
And Maxwell does not know that yet.
But he will.
The world narrows. The corridor darkens. The voices compress into a single, distant frequency that my fading consciousness can no longer separate into individual sources.
She stayed.
In the shower. On the floor. Through the panic and the tears and the specific, devastating exposure of a man whose worst moment was witnessed by the person whose opinion matters most.
She stayed.
And the last thing I register before the darkness takes the remaining light is the pressure of her hand on mine, her fingers interlaced with my limp ones, holding on with the specific, fierce, unbreakable grip of a woman who does not let go of things that matter to her.
The world truly goes black.
CHAPTER 32
Stay
