Page 63 of Break Away
“She was right about that part.”
My head came up. “You want to do this right now?”
“I want you on the ice with your head in the game instead of back in that bar hearing her say it again.”
Briggs looked between us. “I think you deserved to be pissed at her, so my vote is to get out of your head.”
Cade’s eyes stayed on me. “That doesn’t mean he deserved to use whatever she lived through as a weapon.”
“I didn’t know!” I snapped.
The room stopped moving around the edges.
I hated the way my voice carried, the way the freshmen went still, and the fact Cade didn’t flinch. I hated Rider’s eyes softening slightly, like anger didn’t scare him when he knew where it came from.
“I didn’t know,” I said again, quieter. “I still don’t.”
“You don’t need to know to know you hit something bad,” Rider said.
Briggs nodded once, all humor gone from his face. “Sure, but if he’d understood what the fuck he was hitting, he wouldn’t have pressed on that nerve. He was taking another shot in the same fight they’ve been having for months.”
“That supposed to make me feel better?”
“No,” Briggs said. “It’s supposed to make you stop treating one blind swing like proof you’re some kind of monster.”
Cade picked up his stick and stood without coming closer or making a show of it. “You can be hurt without making her pay interest on it forever.”
The sentence landed beneath my ribs and stayed there.
I wanted to throw it back at him and say he didn’t know what it felt like to love someone who made you feel stupid for wanting more. His girl had chosen him loudly, publicly, and in every way that mattered, while mine had looked me in the eye after a year of giving me pieces of herself and made me feel like I had imagined every soft second between us.
Cade wasn’t the enemy, and that was what made it harder.
He wasn’t standing across from me trying to win. He stood there with an A on his chest, telling me the truth because he cared enough to risk me hating him for it.
I looked away first. “My mom can’t know I’m like this.”
Briggs’s face changed. “Gayle is here already?”
“Hotel. She’s bringing Skylar and Vivi before warmups.”
Rider’s brows pulled together. “How was the hotel?”
“The lobby lights hit Vivi wrong, and Skylar’s pretending she isn’t pissed that Mom wouldn’t let her wear the skirt she packed because it’s forty degrees outside.”
Briggs’s mouth twitched. “Skylar is terrifying.”
“She’s fourteen.”
“Fourteen-year-old girls are terrifying. That’s known science.”
Cade’s voice softened. “Your mom okay?”
That was the question I had been trying to avoid.
I reached for my helmet and checked the straps even though I had already checked them twice. “She says she is.”
Briggs groaned. “That means no.”
