Page 137 of Puck the Coach's Son
Theo is in a locked bedroom forty minutes away with a security guy on his lawn and a father who is going to take his phone in the morning.
I lie down.
I don't pull the duvet up. I lie on top of it, sweats and bare chest, the cut over my eye starting to seal. I stare at my ceiling. The ceiling of a bedroom I have seventy-two hours to leave.
I try to picture a room in Blackridge. I can't.
I try to picture Theo in a room in Blackridge. That I can picture. That comes in like it was already there. Theo on a couch I haven't bought yet, laptop on his thighs, team hoodie that isn't the Huskies', a dog I haven't met on the floor. Theo's feet under my leg. Theo with the lamp behind him making his hair yellow at the edges. Theo in a bed in a house I haven't rented, turned toward me, breathing like he breathed on my chest three nights ago.
I picture it and I can't unpicture it.
Oh.
I say it out loud to the ceiling I'm about to lose.
“Oh.”
My chest does a small, strange thing. Not the adrenaline thing. A different thing. The quiet thing under the adrenaline thing, which had been running underneath the whole season and which I had been calling other names. I called it protective and possessive and territorial and competitive.Fine, whatever, I like the kid.The quiet thing has a name. I have known its name for a week and I have been calling it other names to keep my mouth shut in case I said it to him before he was ready.
I say it to the ceiling.
“I'm in love with him.”
The ceiling doesn't fall.
“I'm in love with Theo Laurent.”
It sits in the room like a small animal. It doesn't bite me. It doesn't leave.
My hand goes to my chest. I press. I breathe.
I've been in love with him since that first night here in my bed. Maybe I've been in love with him since the locker room when I said he had a pretty mouth to watch him flinch and he flinched and then he looked at me, actually looked at me, and I knew I was sunk. I have definitely been in love with him since the bench by the reservoir, with his face in my shoulder and my arm holding most of his weight because his legs weren't doing it for him.
The boy I…
The boy I love. Dear Paul, the boy I love is your son. I almost said it in your arena, in your office, with your fist in my face. I didn't say it because he hadn't heard it yet and the first person to hear it should be him.
He will hear it. I decide it against the ceiling. He will hear it from my mouth, and he will hear it in time, and Blackridge or Frosthaven or the moon is not going to stop me from getting it to him.
I pick the phone up. I open the thread. I type.
I'm okay. I love you. Wait for me.
I don't send it. Paul has the phone. Paul readingI love youin my handwriting would be a gift to Paul's story about me, the grooming predator, the man using the son as a weapon. I will not hand Paul that line. Theo will hear it first or he will read it first, but nobody else gets it before he does.
I save the draft. I put the phone face-down on the pillow beside me.
I lie in the dark in an apartment that isn't mine anymore, in a city I'm being pushed out of, in a contract that's about to be voided, with four hundred miles in one direction and one boy inthe other, and I breathe, and I let the sentence live in the room with me.
I'm in love with Theo Laurent.
I am going to get him back.
I don't know how yet. I have twelve hours to figure out the Blackridge piece. I have Phoenix working a line to Diane. I have seventy-two hours on this apartment and forty-eight on the offer, and I have a boy in a locked bedroom who saidI'll wait for youwith his hand on my back while security was turning me.
I close my eyes.
Wait for me, kid.
