Ryan coughed once into his fist while Rider looked at the ceiling like he was praying for strength.
Briggs lowered his voice. “Unresolved sexual disaster is actually pretty accurate.”
I pointed at him. “Not helping.”
“I’m helping in spirit.”
Cade’s expression didn’t change. “I’m serious.”
“So am I.” I tossed the tape into my stall hard enough that it bounced off the wood. “Aura isn’t the reason I’m not moving back.”
Cade watched me for a long second. “Then what is?”
My jaw flexed.
For a moment, all I heard was the hum of The Furnace, the showers running somewhere down the hall, and the muffled noise of the team still riding the high of Coach announcing captains. The dull ache of that letter on my jersey felt like a hand pressing harder against my chest.
“My life isn’t the same as yours,” I said finally.
Cade’s face softened, and that pissed me off worse.
I looked away from him and stared at the floor between my skates.
“I’ve got my mom calling me because the car is making a noise she can’t afford to diagnose. Skylar pretends she doesn’t need shit because she knows I’ll send money Idon’t have. Vivi melts down when her routine gets wrecked, and my mom is too tired to always catch it before it happens.”
Nobody interrupted me, so I kept going.
“I’ve got North Cut shifts, classes, captain responsibilities, and scouts sniffing around like they can’t smell my desperation for it from a mile away. Now I have this team looking at me like I’m supposed to know how to keep everyone from falling apart.”
I hated saying it out loud, but it helped that nobody tried to fill the silence.
I dragged a hand over my jaw and let out a humorless laugh.
“Aura was never supposed to become another thing I had to survive.”
Briggs’s expression changed first, and the rest of them looked anywhere but at me.
“She was supposed to be the one place I didn’t have to carry anything,” I continued, quieter now. “Instead, she became another weight. Another person I had to chase, read, handle, wait for, and beg to be honest. I don’t have room for that anymore.”
The truth sat there, ugly and breathing.
Briggs leaned forward, his elbows braced on his knees. “Okay.”
I glanced at him.
He nodded like he was accepting something he didn’t like. “Okay. I get that.”
Rider looked at me. “It still doesn’t mean you should be alone in a shit apartment with neighbors who sound like an episode of Cops.”
“My neighbors are fine.”
“You texted the group chat last week that someone was screaming about a stolen crackpipe at midnight,” Ryan said.
“It was handled.”
“You texted, ‘If I die over this missing glass pipe, tell Coach I hated conditioning.’”
Briggs pointed at him. “That is concerningly specific.”
