Page 14 of Takedown

* * *

He left when I left. Fell in beside me on the steps like a coincidence, hands in his pockets, gold light from the windows dying behind us and the cold coming up off the quad. Neither of us said anything about it, because there was nothing to say. Two teammates leaving dinner. That's the whole story.

At the gate he stopped. And he put two fingers against my elbow — barely, through the jacket, the smallest touch that can still legally be called one — and steered me half a step out of the path of a bike neither of us actually needed avoiding.

"Pemberton's harmless," he said. "The whole house is harmless. That's the problem with it."

"Why'd you do that?"

He looked at me a second too long — the second look; he kept taking it — and then he said, "Six a.m. tomorrow. You're late on your setups when you're tired. We'll fix it before practice," and walked off into the dark toward his ancient house, having answered a completely different question. Or exactly the one I'd asked. With him, I could never tell.

Here's what I can tell you.

Two fingers. Through a jacket. Four seconds, tops. Fuck me.

I walked the whole way home with my elbow burning like I'd been branded through wool, cataloguing the pressure of it, the placement, the way my arm kept replaying it on a loop it hadn't asked my permission to start. Wade Kessler had his hands all over me for three years and never once left evidence. Grayson Whitfield touched my elbow at a gate, and I carried it across a quad like something I had to get home before it melted.

* * *

The dorm showers at midnight are the one private place in a freshman's life — a locked stall, old pipes, water hot enough to argue with — and I stood under it a long time telling myself I was rinsing off a weird night.

I was not rinsing off a weird night.

I'd like to say I put up a fight. The record's honest or it's nothing, so: I put up about ninety seconds. I started out thinking about Wade, on purpose, deliberately, the way you reach for an old reliable tool — the truck, the grip, three years of muscle memory — and it worked the way a dead radio works. Nothing. Static. Because every time I built the truck bed, the hands in it corrected themselves. Longer fingers. Taped wrists. A grip on my hips moving me two inches like my whole weight was a suggestion — there — and the fantasy quit pretending and I quit fighting it, hand already moving, forehead against the tile.

The singlet, first. Gear day, the green pulling tight when he rolled his shoulders, everything itemized and him not knowing — except in the shower version he knows. In the shower version he catches me looking and doesn't go to the mat, he crosses the room. The stack: his chest pinning me folded, that extra fraction of stillness, except this time nobody moves off, this time the stillness keeps going, his breath at my ear, his weight settling instead of lifting — do it again — and the two fingers at my elbow become a whole hand, become both hands, become him walking me backward into the mat wall with that expensive voice gone low and rough saying my name, my actual name, Danny, looking at me the whole time, seeing me the whole time, the second look with hands on it —

I came so hard my knees dipped. Bit my own forearm to keep it off the hallway record. Stood there after in the steam with my heart slamming and the water going cold at the edges, eighteen years old, undone by a rich boy's imaginary hands in a shower in New Hampshire.

Filed it under nothing.

The drawer broke.

"Hate," I said out loud, to the tile, to the pipes, to nobody, testing the word like a weight-room max I already knew I'd miss. It didn't hold. It hadn't held for weeks. I turned the water off and stood dripping in the stall doing the honest math at last: whatever this was, it had a schedule now. Six a.m. He'd said six a.m.

Six a.m., he'd said.

I didn't sleep much. I was early.

Chapter 7 — GRAYSON

I got there at five forty. I want that on the record. Whatever else I lied about that fall — and the list is long — I never once pretended six a.m. meant six a.m.

The Pit before dawn is a different animal. No radiators clanking yet, no forty bodies heating the air — just cold rubber and the low hum of half the lights and a silence with texture to it, like the room sleeping with one eye open. I turned on the far bank of fluorescents only. Left the near ones dark.

I told myself that was about the electric bill. In a building my family paid for. That's the level I was operating at, that October.

I'd spent the drive over rehearsing the session like a lesson plan. His setups — genuinely late when he was tired; I hadn't invented the flaw, which mattered to me more than it should have. A wrestler's setup is the small honest work before the shot: the hand-fight, the misdirection, the half-step that tips a man's weight where you want it. Danny's problem was simple. When he got tired, he stopped setting up and started announcing. Pure Pennsylvania — done being polite, coming straight ahead, hit me back if you can. It won him state titles against boys who flinched.

I don't flinch. Which is why I could fix it. That was the whole logic. Teammate helps teammate. Iron, iron, etcetera.

Then the side door scraped at five to six and he came in with his hood up and his breath still smoking from the cold, duffel on the same shoulder as always, and my lesson plan lost about thirty IQ points on the spot.

"You're early," he said.

"You're earlier."

"Couldn't sleep." He said it flat, dropped the duffel by the wall — his spot now, third mat seam, a man of exactly one habit per category — and pulled the hoodie off, and the shirt underneath rode up with it. One line of stomach in the half-light, hip bone to ribs, gone as fast as it came.