Page 20 of Puck the Coach's Son
I don't see him come in. I feel him come in. The bar pressure drops the way it dropped when he walked out the first time. Conversations get quieter. Jax, upright on a stool now with a bar towel to his face, sees Maddox and flinches in a way that's going to make him embarrassed about himself later.
Phoenix told him to go home. I don't know that, but my body knows it the way my body has known everything tonight. Maddox didn't go home.
He's crossing the bar. He's coming to me.
My hands are on the table.
I can't move my hands.
He stops in front of the table. He puts a hand on the table next to my hand. Not on top of my hand. Next to it. Close enough that I can feel the heat of his knuckles. His shirt cuff has a spot of blood on it the size of a small coin. I think it's Jax's blood. I'm not sure whose blood.
“Sweetheart.”
I look up.
His face is a thing I've been avoiding for two days. It's not a safer thing to look at now. The dark blue eyes. The stubble. The corner of his mouth that doesn't smile so much as pull back on one side. The scar above his eyebrow that was there when he walked into practice on day one and that he hasn't explained to anyone.
“We're going outside.”
I hear my own voice before I know I'm going to say anything.
“Coach.”
It comes out quiet. I don't know why that's the word I said. There's no coach here. My coach is somewhere in this city thinking I'm on a team bonding night and not in a bar getting claimed by the enforcer my coach has benched twice this week. The wordcoachcame out of me because the inside of my head is a closed circuit and the only authority in the circuit is my father.
Maddox hears it. His mouth does a thing. Not a smile. A registration.
“Yeah,” he says. “Outside.”
He doesn't grab me. He doesn't have to. He tilts his head toward the back of the bar, toward a door I hadn't noticed, and pushes off away from the table. My body stands up after him like a thing I'm only renting.
Phoenix catches my eye as I pass. His face is the face of a man watching a car crash he can't look away from. He doesn't reach for me. He doesn't say anything. I think he wants to. I think he knows better.
Grayson is at the front of the bar near the main door, scanning the street through the window. I wonder what he's looking for. I don't wonder long. There isn't enough of me left to wonder long about anything that isn't moving in front of me.
Maddox pushes through the back door.
I follow him.
The alley behind Vigil smells like old beer, bleach, something rotting in a dumpster. There's a security light over the door that turns Maddox into a silhouette with a bright edge. The bricks are painted black. A bike is chained to a pipe. Somewhere a car passes on the street at the far end. Its headlights sweep the wall and go.
He turns.
He puts a hand on my chest.
He walks me back until my shoulders hit the brick.
The brick is cold through my shirt. My shirt is new. My shirt was new this morning when I put it on in the apartment I share with Paul and thought,this is fine, a team night is fine, I can do a team night.I can feel every point where the brick presses my shoulder blades. I can feel where his palm is open on the middle of my chest. I can feel, underneath his palm, my own heart going like it's trying to get past his hand.
He doesn't say anything for a second.
He's looking at me in a way that makes the looking into a separate act. It's a thing he's doing. It's a thing being done to me.
“Breathe,” he says.
I didn't know I had stopped.
I breathe.
