“Brody cries at everything.”
“He told me it was allergies.”
“He doesn’t have allergies.”
She laughs. I eat whatever she brought and it’s good and the house feels less like a house I’m rattling around in alone when Aurora is in it — it always has, since before she lived here, since we were kids and she’d show up somewhere I was and just make the room better without trying.
She leaves at eight.
Kisses my cheek. Tells me to sleep. Takes the empty containers.
The door closes.
Brick finds me on the couch.
Jumps up. Sits next to my arm the way he does when he’s got something to say and he’s waiting for me to be ready to hear it.
I pick up my phone.
The Enforcers message.
I look at it for a long time.
More money. Established roster. Perennial contender. An organization that’s been to the Final four times in six years offering me a spot in something already built.
Everything the Cyclones aren’t yet.
Brick stares at the phone.
“What,” I say.
He looks at me.
“I know what you’re going to say.”
He keeps looking.
“Don’t.”
He blinks once. Slow. Then looks back at the phone like the point needs emphasizing.
“What am I gonna do,” I say. Out loud. To the room. Just to put it somewhere outside my chest. “What the hell am I gonna do with this.”
Brick doesn’t answer.
The room doesn’t either.
I put the phone face down.
Sit there with the expert panel still taped inside my locker room door three miles away. Aiden’s voice from practice. Liam’s five sentences. Brody’s stick hitting the boards first.
Thirty-one on my back for four seasons. I helped build this building.
I don’t know what it looks like anywhere else.
I’m not sure I want to find out.
Chapter twenty
