Page 126 of Like a Power Play
“Hey, are you okay?” I ask.
She nods, sucking in a breath, slower this time, but still shaky.
“I’m fine,” she says, turning back to her phone. I scan the locker room, everyone else still caught up in their own post-warm-up rituals. When I look back at Peyton, her cheek is sucked inward between her back teeth as she gnaws a hole through it.
Clearly, she is not fine.
I take one last glance around the room, before grabbing her wrist and tugging her into a bathroom stall. She doesn’t fight me. She doesn’t say anything. She just flies into it with me, the lock clicking shut behind us. A crease etches between her worried brows, and she looks at me, bewildered.
“What are you doing?” she whispers, her breath grazing my chin. Her round eyes look up at me as she shifts back, though only an inch before the stall blocks her. I study her for a moment. The dip in her cheek, the stutter in her breath. I recognize this look. It’s the one she had after that phone call with her dad. The one she had after reading that article last week. She gets it before every game. But this is the full, unabridged version of it. The extended edition, only, in the worst possible way.
Her throat bobs as she swallows, over and over like something’s caught inside. I want to clear it away. To make whatever this is stop.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. I hope she knows how sincerely I mean it. Peyton simply shakes her head, tossing a shoulder in anattempt to be cool. But I don’t want her to be cool. I want her to be honest. “Peyton, I can only help if you tell me what’s going on.”
It’s funny. That sentence has probably been spoken to me fifty times in the past year. I always rolled my eyes at it. But now that I’m the one saying it, I realize how true it is.
Her lips part as she sucks in another wavering breath, and her eyes drop to the concrete floor.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m… I’m just panicking.”
I nod, my mind swirling helplessly. I cantellshe’s panicking. The only problem is that I don’t exactly know what to do about it.
“Okay, umh—” I glance around the barren stall, as if the answers will be engraved in the bright yellow walls. My head shakes, and I look back down at Peyton, tossing my hands out in a gesture. “What are you scared of?” I ask suddenly.
A crease slips over her brow. “What?”
“Well, you said you’re panicking—” I start, running a hand through my hair. “So what is it that you’re scared of right now?”
What Peyton and I have, it’s a give-and-go. One of us only makes the pass when we trust the other will be there to send it back. And right now, she needs to trust me.
“Okay, I’ll go first,” I say, watching the panic sink deeper. I swallow back the dry ache that’s been throbbing at the base of my throat since I got off the plane yesterday and straighten my posture. “I’m terrified to see Brenna. Like, stressed the fuck out.”
The furrow in her brow deepens. “Why?”
I hitch a shoulder. “I don’t know. I feel like if she sees me like this—” I gesture down my body, back into my loose, baggy coaching clothes, because just being here puts me in enough pain. “It’ll mean she won.”
The corner of Peyton’s lip twitches. It’s subtle, almost nonexistent, but I catch it. “Darcy, you’re coaching a D1 team. That’s huge.”
I nod. “Yeah, but she’s reffing them.”
Peyton’s brow quirks. “Because even when you were falling apart, you got drafted, and even in the prime of her health, she couldn’t.”
A soft chuckle slips out of me, and I look down at her, brushing the hair from her eyes. “Your turn.”
“It’s…” She hesitates. “A couple of things. And they’re not really all relevant right now.”
“That’s okay.”
She falls silent for a moment, her breath steadying, then finally gives in.
“I’m scared that if I screw this season up, if the Sabertooths don’t draft me this summer—if we even make it to the finals—it’ll mean I only got here because of my dad.” She pauses, her gaze dropping to her fumbling hands.
“And I’m scared that if Idomake it to the Sabertooths, it’ll be because of him too. But more than that…” She clears her throat, her shoulders shifting. Then, those amber eyes snap up, and everything else—Brenna, my flare-up, it all fades away.
“More than that, I’m scared that if I play like myself, like you said, I’ll let people down.”
“Like who?” I ask.
