Page 62 of Break Away
“You and Rider should start a club.”
Briggs raised his glove. “Can I join if it comes with snacks?”
“No,” Cade and Rider said at the same time.
Briggs muttered something about oppression, but he stopped smiling after that.
I could handle the chirping, Briggs turning every emotion into a team emergency, and Rider watching me like he was waiting for the exact second my spine cracked. Their silence was worse because it meant they had all decided something was wrong and were trying to determine who had the right to say it first.
Cade won because he always did when the room got too heavy.
“You’re still thinking about the Sin Bin.”
My hand stilled on the stick.
Briggs’s head turned slowly toward him. “Bold opening move.”
Rider leaned one shoulder against his stall. “Correct one.”
“I’m thinking about the game,” I said.
Cade’s expression didn’t change. “You’ve retaped that blade three times.”
“I like it clean.”
“You like control,” Rider said. “Different disease.”
I looked at him. “You all done?”
“No,” Cade said. “You’ve got your mom and sisters in town, you’re still working North Cut, you’ve got the C tonight, and after what happened with Aura, you’re walking around like one wrong breath will split you down the middle.”
The name hit the room harder than it should have.
Aura.
I bent my head and pressed the tape flat around the blade. “I’m not talking about her before a game.”
“You don’t have to talk about her,” Cade said. “You’re already doing a pretty loud impression of someone not talking about her.”
Briggs, for once, didn’t make the easy joke. He shifted in his pads, his face serious beneath the mess of blond hair falling across his forehead. “She got under your skin.”
I laughed without humor. “She’s been under my skin for over a year. The Sin Bin wasn’t special.”
Rider’s voice lowered. “That line was.”
I didn’t ask which line.
I knew.
It had replayed in my head since the second she walked out of the bar and left me sitting there with tepid water in my hand and something rotten in my chest.
You don’t get to take what I survived—when you don’t know what I survived—and twist it into a personality flaw.
I pressed the tape down too hard, and it wrinkled beneath my thumb.
Cade saw it. “East.”
“Don’t.”
