Page 89 of Break Away
“I didn’t say it did,” Briggs snapped.
There it was—the first visible crack in a line that had been running through all of us for months.
“I’m saying I’m not going to stand here and pretend she didn’t spend a year turning him inside out before slamming the door in his face.” Briggs dragged both hands through his hair, then pointed at the floor like he needed all of us to understand the weight of what he was saying. “Metaphorically. Mostly.”
“Briggs,” Rider said.
“No.” Briggs looked at me, then at Cade. “No, I’m sorry, but no. We watched it. We watched him wait around for crumbs like he was fine with it, watched her act like he was embarrassing for giving a shit, and now everyone’s shocked he’s pissed? Come on.”
Cade’s expression hardened. “Being hurt doesn’t give him a free pass to be cruel.”
“I’m not asking for a pass,” I said.
All four of them looked at me.
My voice came out lower than I expected. Rougher. “I’m asking for five fucking minutes where someone doesn’t tell me to be the better person for the girl who made me hate being one.”
The hallway went quiet.
Ryan looked away first, his jaw ticking. Briggs stared at the floor like he wanted to tear it apart one board at a time. Rider’s face shifted in a way I couldn’t read.
Cade held my gaze, and that was worse because he had seen the beginning. He had known me before I started letting girls touch me to watch Aura burn, before I turned every party into a chance to prove I could be touched without caring, and before I became the kind of guy who kissed women with my eyes open just to see whether Aura would bleed.
Cade had seen me in his penthouse with red eyes and split knuckles, holding myself together with rage and humiliation.
He knew exactly how far I had fallen.
“I can’t take much more of this,” I said.
The words escaped before I gave them permission, and none of them moved.
I looked toward the end of the hallway and the room that used to be mine, the closed door I hadn’t opened in months because I refused to step into a place where Aura still existed in the shadows.
“If it wasn’t for hockey, I’d transfer. I’d move back to Crystal Falls and be the man my family actually needs. Hear me when I tell you this: I can get my degree anywhere. Hockey costs me nothing, and it’s the only thing keeping me at KFU instead of going home.”
Briggs’s head snapped up.
Ryan’s face went still.
Cade stepped forward. “East.”
“I mean it.”
“No, you don’t,” Cade said.
I laughed, but it broke in the middle. “Don’t tell me what I mean when you have no fucking clue what being me costs.”
“You’re captain.”
“Yeah, by default, and I never wanted it. I only benefit if a scout gives enough of a shit to look twice.”
“You weren’t captain by default, and you know it,” Cade said.
The words hung between us, ugly and honest.
I scrubbed a hand over my face and tasted blood where I had bitten the inside of my cheek. “The ice is the only place she doesn’t own. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got right now. The Furnace. The blue line. Sixty minutes where I know the rules and nobody gets to look at me like that and make me want to hand them the knife again.”
Ryan’s voice dropped. “Then stop giving her the knife.”
