Page 10 of Her Rival

"Sounds like a nightmare."

"She'd love you, you absolute clown. You're the same animal." Brynn hauled the tray up onto her shoulder. "Just don't do your whole thing with her."

"I don't have a thing."

"You have such a thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you decide somebody's a threat and you chirp them till they hate you, so you don't have to find out if they'd have liked you." She said it light, breezy, already turning back toward the bar. Not even landing it like a punch. Just an observation, tossed over her shoulder, the kind of thing the people who really know you can say without slowing down.

It hit the side of my head and went in clean anyway.

"That's not a thing," I said, but she was already gone, back behind the bar, and Moose was asking me something about Phoenix's power play, and the moment closed over like water.

I left before midnight, which for me on a win night was practically monastic.

Out in the lot the air had that desert thing it did after dark, the heat lifting off the pavement so you could feel the day still coming up through your boots even with the sky gone black. Caldwell Arena sat dark across the street, the big curved bulk of it, the place I'd hoisted the trophy eight months back. I stood by the car and looked at it a second, the way I sometimes did, just to remind myself it was real.

My phone was in my pocket. I'd turned it back on that afternoon, because you couldn't leave it off forever. Coach texted, the team group chat moved fast, life happened. I pulled it out to check the time.

Two voicemails. Both 931.

I stood in the lot of the bar I loved, under the building where I'd won the biggest thing a man can win in my sport, holding a phone full of a place I'd cut out of myself with a dull knife at eighteen and never let grow back.

My mother's number. My sister's, probably, on the second. They tag-teamed it sometimes, when one couldn't get through, they handed it to the other, like I was a debt they were collecting in shifts.

I didn't listen to either one.

I'd figured out a long time ago that the voicemails couldn't hurt me if I didn't play them. As long as they sat there gray and unopened, they were just data. Little gray rectangles. The second you press play you let the voice into the car with you, and the voice knows exactly where all your old wiring runs. It can reach right in and find the kid who used to stand in a church pew in an Easter suit he hated, getting yelled at on the drive over and smiled at the second they hit the parking lot. Learning before he could read that the face you show the world and the thing happening at home are two different items, and you'd best keep them filed apart.

I'd built my whole personality on keeping them filed apart. Loud out here. Locked up in there. It had won me a championship and a locker room full of brothers and a life my parents would've called sinful if they'd ever bothered to look at it.

I deleted both voicemails without playing them. Thumb, swipe, gone, gone.

Then I sat in the dark a minute longer than I needed to, because the thing about deleting them was that it never felt as good as it should have. And it got quieter the more times I did it.

Here's the part I never told the guys. The part I hadn't told anybody in eight years, because telling it was the whole problem.

Locked up in there had a start date.

Her name was Hannah, and her daddy ran the church the whole town answered to, which made her the closest thing we had to royalty. It made me, a kid who played a sport nobody within five hundred miles understood, a curiosity they kept around as long as I kept winning. I loved her the way you love the first one. Total and stupid and dead certain it was the only time it would ever happen to me. And one night at the edge of a field, the whole black sky sitting on top of us, I told her the things I'd never said out loud to a living soul. That I'd quit believing somewhere around twelve and just kept moving my mouth on Sundays. That the town fit me like a coat two sizes too small. That the only thing I wanted on God's green earth was to go somewhere nobody had heard my name and be nobody at all. I told her I was getting out. I asked her to come with me.

She told her daddy.

I've had eight years to work out why, and the honest answer is the plain one. Staying with me had started to cost her something, and she came from a house that knew the price of everything. Turning me in made her clean again. It made me a sermon for about a month, the boy who'd lost his faith and tried to take the pastor's daughter down with him. By the time I climbed on the bus at eighteen there wasn't a soul at that station. Her included. And every true thing I'd ever handed her came back to me in my own mother's voice, read out like a list of what was wrong with me.

So I learned it early, and I learned it clean. The second you let somebody see the real one, you've handed them the knife and pointed at the soft parts. They don't even have to hate you to use it. They just have to want something more than they want you.

Everybody does, eventually.

I bought distance after that, the way other men buy trucks. Distance never once turned me in.

Whatever, I thought. Their loss. My whole life, their loss.

I drove up into the hills, to the big glass house nobody knew was mine, let myself into all that silence, and went to bed thinking about Phoenix's power play and a two-goal night and Brynn's best friend. The fast-talking, mean-smart nightmare coming to town to ask me about my feelings on Monday.

You decide somebody's a threat and you chirp them till they hate you.