Chapter 12: The Away Game

The bus to Detroit smelled like liniment and bad decisions.

I had a window seat, which I'd claimed early, territory, same as everything else on this team. My earbuds were in. My jaw was set. I had perfected the art of being present without being available, and I deployed it now like a defensive formation: headphones up, eyes forward, body angled just enough toward the glass to make conversation inconvenient.

It almost worked.

"Scoot."

I didn't move. I didn't look up. I knew that voice the way you know a bruise, by the specific ache it left behind.

"Valdez." Jax's hand came down on the headrest above me, his presence filling my peripheral vision like a weather event. "I said scoot."

"I was here first," I said, without pulling out an earbud.

"And I'm here now." He didn't wait. He reached past me, lifted my bag from the aisle seat, dropped it in the overhead rack with a practiced efficiency that made the whole thing look completely natural, and sat down.

His thigh pressed against mine. He didn't acknowledge it.

I pulled out one earbud. "There are forty seats on this bus."

"I'm aware." He opened a folder on his lap, actual paper, play diagrams, covered in his sharp, dense handwriting. He uncapped a red marker without looking at me. "Get some sleep. Detroit's physical. Krauss is going to come at you in the first period, test your edges. He does it to every new winger. Don't take the bait."

I stared at him. He was already drawing lines on the paper, circling something near the blue line. As if this were normal. As if he hadn't just bulldozed into my seat because he could.

"Why are you sitting here?" I asked.

"Because I need you rested and I need you thinking about tomorrow, not rehearsing speeches in your head." He glanced at me sideways, and there was something in his eyes that was almost, almost amused. "You've been rehearsing speeches since you got on this bus. I can see it in your jaw."

I consciously unclenched my teeth.

"Sleep," he said again. He turned back to his diagrams.

I stared out the window. The city slid past, streetlights smearing into pale streaks. His shoulder was warm against mine. I hated that I noticed. I hated that noticing had become instinctive, the particular calibration of his body heat, the way his breathing slowed when he was focused on something, the faint clean scent of him that cut through the bus's stale recycled air like something seasonal and dangerous.

I had not slept properly in eight days.

I fell asleep somewhere outside of Toledo, my forehead nearly touching the cold glass. I didn't dream, or if I did, I didn't remember.

What I remembered was waking up.

The bus was dark, most of the team unconscious. My neck ached from the angle. And there was a weight against my right shoulder, heavy, warm, unmistakable. I turned my head slowly.

Jax was asleep.

He looked different asleep. The permanent tension across his brow was gone. His mouth was slightly open. The folder had slid closed on his lap, the red marker capped and tucked in the pocket of his jacket with the same methodical care he applied to everything. He looked younger. Less like a weapon and more like a person.

I didn't move for a long time.

I told myself it was because I didn't want to wake him. I told myself it was strategic, keep him rested, keep him effective, serve the terms of our arrangement. I told myself a lot of things, sitting in the dark of that bus with his weight against my shoulder and the Ohio flatlands rolling past outside.

None of the things I told myself were entirely true.

I was still awake when he stirred, forty minutes later. He straightened without looking at me, ran a hand over his face, and picked up his folder. He said nothing. He didn't acknowledge that it had happened.

But he didn't move back to another seat either.

We rode the rest of the way to Detroit in silence, and his shoulder stayed against mine, and I stared at the dark and thought about what a disaster I was becoming.