3 - Something She Wasn't Telling

Ryker's POV

The tag was white, small, and clipped to the inside of her collar in a way that told me someone had been in a hurry.

I saw it from three feet away — the same reflex that made me clock exits in unfamiliar rooms and read coaches before they opened their mouths. I noticed things. Always had. Gift or affliction, depending on the day.

I reached out and plucked it off as she walked past me.

She stopped like I'd pulled a thread.

“What the…?”

"You had a tag," I said, cutting her off. I held it up between two fingers. "Just here."

She turned around slowly like she was buying time to cool off. But it didn't work, the glare in her eyes still showed how irritated she was.

Up close she was striking in a way that was almost annoying, sharp dark eyes that moved over me the way people moved over things they were deciding whether to bother with. She looked at the tag. Then at me.

Then she took it from my hand and turned to leave.

"You know, a simple 'thank you' wouldn't hurt."

"Thank you," she said, in a voice that meant anything but.

I almost smiled. "You're welcome," I said, in a voice that knew exactly what hers had meant.

She turned and kept walking.

"It's just a tag," I called after her.

"I know what it is," she said, without turning around.

I watched her go. Not the way I usually watched girls go — easy, appreciative, already thinking about something else. I watched her the way I watched a play on the ice that hadn't made sense yet.

Because it wasn't just a tag. I knew that the moment she'd gone still. Not embarrassed, something beneath embarrassed. Something that had lasted exactly one second before she'd buried it under that voice of hers.

I turned it over in my mind for the rest of the afternoon and couldn't make it fit.

___________

Practice ran long. Coach had me running the same drill until my legs filed a formal complaint, and by the time the session ended I was taking the long way back to the changing rooms purely to avoid the noise of sixteen boys who had collectively forgotten what deodorant was.

The maintenance corridor was quiet. That was the only reason I went that way.

I almost missed the door.

It wasn't fully closed, a half-inch gap, a sliver of dim light from inside. I pushed it open.

The equipment room was the kind of space schools accumulated without meaning to, old gym mats stacked against the walls, forgotten gear in corners, dust on everything that hadn't moved since some previous decade.

She was asleep in the corner.

Nova. Someone had told me her name, though nobody seemed to know much else — was curled on the nearest mat with her jacket pulled around herself, cheek resting on her own arm, dark hair spread across the dusty surface like she hadn't planned on staying but her body had overruled the plan entirely.

I stood in the doorway and didn't move.

I had grown up around girls who performed their lives — who arranged themselves in rooms, who made everything look like a photograph they were already imagining. This was not that. This was someone who had simply run out of road and gone down where she stood, and there was something so completely unguarded about it that I felt like I was seeing something I wasn't supposed to.

I looked at her jacket pulled tight around herself against the cold. Then at the sweater tied around my own waist.

I crossed the room quietly. Crouched down. Draped the sweater over her shoulders.

She didn't stir.

I straightened up and stood there longer than I meant to, looking at her the way I looked at problems I hadn't solved yet.

There was something about this girl. Had been since she'd walked through Crestwood's front doors days ago. Our eyes had met then and she had turned away from me. Deliberately.

In all my years of being Ryker Lennox, no girl had ever deliberately turned away from me. I was not proud of how interesting I found it.

Then the tag. The stillness underneath her composure. The fear that had lasted exactly one second before she buried it.

Whatever you're hiding,I thought, looking at her sleeping face, it's bigger than a forgotten price tag.

My phone buzzed.

I pulled it out.

Grandfather: Dinner is at seven. Do not be late. We have things to discuss.

I stared at the message and felt the quiet of the room become a different kind of quiet.

Things to discuss. My grandfather had been discussing things at me across dinner tables since I was old enough to sit at one — the firm, the name, the future that had been decided before I had any say in it. He had tolerated my father the way you tolerate weather: with resignation and the private certainty that eventually it would pass.

He hadn't been wrong.

My father had been a hockey player when my mother met him, charming, talented, and entirely the wrong kind of person by every metric the Lennox family had ever used. She had chosen him anyway. Funded his career, defended him at every table, picked him over her father's disapproval so many times it became its own kind of sport.

And then he had cheated. Casually. Like it was a minor administrative decision.

My mother had come home. Back to the house, back to the family and something in her had simply closed, quiet and permanent, like a door she had decided she was done opening. She never blamed hockey directly. She just stopped coming to my games, and my grandfather stepped into the space she left with a ten-year plan and zero interest in ice rinks.

That was six months ago. That was why I was here.

I put the phone back in my pocket without replying.

I looked back at Nova one last time. The sweater had stayed on her shoulders. In sleep, with nothing to manage and no one to perform for, she looked like someone carrying considerably more than any one person should.

What are you really doing here? I thought.

I pulled the door closed behind me. Quietly, so she wouldn't wake.

I was going to be late for dinner.

For the first time in a long time, I found I didn't particularly mind the consequences.