Maybe they’re right to be afraid of you. Maybe you can’t be trusted. Maybe it’s in your blood.
My dad used to say people like us were built wrong from the start. Too angry. Too reactive. Too much.
“Owen?” Remy touches my elbow. My entire body goes alert from one stupid little touch. “You okay?”
“Hm?” I blink down at her. Where did she come from? “Yeah, just tired.”
Families are leaving. I’ve been caught in my own loop to the point that I didn’t notice the time.
“We can get ready to go now. Before we leave, though, we should—oh!Hello.”
A little girl with curly black hair is tugging on Remy’s sleeve. She holds up a crayon drawing. “I made this for your friend,” she whispers.
Remy takes the drawing. It’s a picture of me… I think. It’s definitely a person. Or a purple zebra.
“Thank you,” Remy says, all smiles, because today she has smiles for everyone but me. She passes me the drawing. “Owen, I think this is yours.”
I take it carefully, because the art is terrible, but her face is not. I’d frame this stupid drawing if it made her look at me that way again. “Thank you, Remy. And thank you, Picasso.”
The girl giggles. “That’s not my name.”
“My mistake.” I hold the paper out at arm’s length. “Rembrandt? Van Gogh?”
“It’s Jenny.”
“Jenny.Well, Jenny, when you become a world-famous artist, it’ll be nice to know that I have an original piece.”
Jenny giggles and darts away toward her waiting parents and a cluster of older sisters, all in their skate gear. They wave to me, and I wave back, then hold the picture aloft, pointing from the scribbles to my face and back. The older girls laugh, and Jenny beams with pride.
When I finally turn back to Remy, her posture has softened. All of her hard lines have gentled. For one dangerous second, hope flares hard enough to hurt. “We should go. I just got a text that Dante’s car is outside.”
The drive over here was agonizing, and I don’t expect the return trip to be any better. I want her to touch me again, even if it’s just the brush of her fingers on my bare elbow. I want her to tell me that this is going to be okay.
She doesn’t have to love me. As long as she doesn’t hate me, I’ll survive this.
Probably.
Chapter Sixteen
Remy
By the time practice wraps and the Venom arena starts emptying out around me, I’m running almost entirely on caffeine, stress, and emotional avoidance.
The fluorescent lights in the media office buzz faintly overhead while I stare at my laptop hard enough to blur the spreadsheet in front of me. Sponsorship metrics. Engagement projections. Damage control timelines. All the things I’m supposed to care about.
Meanwhile, my brain keeps replaying the exact sound Owen made against my thigh the other night.
Fantastic.
I press the heels of my palms into my eyes for a second. Professionalism is officially hanging on by a single frayed thread.
The office door opens behind me.
I know it’s him immediately.
Not because I hear him. Owen moves light and sure for someone built so solidly. But the air changes when he walks into a room. He brings this strange gravitational pressure with him that my nervous system has apparently decided to respond to like an emotionally unstable houseplant spotting sunlight.
“Coach wants the updated youth outreach numbers before tomorrow,” he says.
