Page 89 of Locke

“Nothing to talk about.”

“The roughing penalty in the second.”

“Rome got hit.”

“Rome got hit and fourteen other guys on this roster kept their gloves on.”He steps into my path and halts, forcing me to stop.“You didn’t.What was that?”

I gust out a breath of frustration.“It was nothing.A harmless penalty.”

“It was an unnecessary penalty.You’re lucky it’s harmless or it would be Patrick talking to you, not me.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I scrape my fingers through my hair and look away.

“What about the woman you told me about?”Van asks.“Is she the cause of this?”

My head whips back his way, because yeah… she’s the cause.I don’t give him that though, remaining stubbornly silent.

“Look, man,” he says softly, as if I were a caged animal.“If things went south, I get it.Been there, done that.But you have to get your shit together.”

I say nothing.

“If you can fix it with her, fix it,” he says.

I flinch at that, a visible sign that he clocks and steps closer to me.“I took Simone’s patience and I ground it down for a year before I got my head out of my ass,” he says.“She’s a remarkable woman and she never once made me feel like a clock was running.But there was a point in time where I understood that what I was protecting wasn’t worth what I was losing.”He taps a finger to my chest.“You’ll get there or you won’t.But tonight’s two minutes becomes next week’s ten and next month’s suspension, and Rowe will have no choice and you know it.”

With that, he spins on his heel and leaves me.

I stand in the corridor under the hum of fluorescent lights and let what he said settle.I try to figure out what I’m really feeling.

It’s different from a week ago.

The anger at Livia is mostly gone.It burned through in the first week, the hot version of it, anyway.What replaced it is less definable but somewhat self-directed and shameful.

She pushed too far.

She pushed beyond an agreed boundary using my past.

But she did it because she cares.

And those are things I’m having a hard time reconciling.That is why I’m really angry.

I can’t figure this shit out.

Chapter 28

Livia

Locke’snameisn’tonthe sign-in sheet, but I’m not surprised.We’ve been doing a good job of avoiding each other.

All my instincts want to continue to push him, but he asked me to leave it alone, so I’m going to abide by that.

No matter how much it hurts.

I tuck the clipboard under my arm and move to the center of the turf.“All right, five stations.You know the drill.”