Chapter Six: What Rohan Knows

Liam's POV 

I don't sleep.

I lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling and count the ways my life is about to collapse. Rohan is my best friend on this team. Has been since freshman year, since he covered for me the night I missed curfew and my dad would have driven six hours just to drag me back by the collar. Rohan knows things about me that nobody else does, but not this, never this, I made sure of it, I've been making sure of it for years.

And now he does.

My phone stays dark. He doesn't text me, which is either a good sign or the worst sign, and at three in the morning I give up trying to figure out which one it is.

I get to practice early. Rohan is already there.

He's taping his stick at the bench, not looking up when I sit down across from him, and the silence between us has a texture I don't recognize, something careful, like we're both moving around something fragile.

"Hey," I say.

"Hey."

More silence, the kind that has weight to it.

"Rohan."

"Liam." He finally looks up. His face is doing something complicated, not angry, not disgusted, something that takes me a moment to identify because I've never seen it directed at me before. He looks sad. Not for himself. For me. "How long?"

It's not a question exactly. More like a door he's opening for me in case I want to walk through it.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Okay," he says, quiet. "We can do it that way if you want. But you're going to be exhausted, man. I'm tired just watching you and I've only known for twelve hours."

Something in my chest splits open a little. I put my stick down. "A long time," I say, low. "Longer than I've admitted to myself."

He nods. Just nods, like this is information he's taking note of carefully, like it matters to him to get it right. "And Novak?"

"I don't know what Novak is." True. Painfully true. "Yesterday was the first time of anything."

"He's a good skater."

"That's what you're going with?"

"I mean it." Rohan almost smiles. "Anyone who can make you lose your head that fast must be doing something right." He goes back to taping his stick. "I'm not going to say anything, Liam. That's yours to say, not mine. But I'm going to tell you something my older brother told me once, because it applies here."

I wait.

"Secrets get heavier the longer you carry them. You think you're protecting yourself. But you're really just getting buried alive, and just going slower about it."

The rink door opens behind us, letting in a blade of cold air, and Kai walks in with his bag over his shoulder and his head down, and when he looks up and finds me already here his step falters, almost nothing, almost invisible.

Almost.

Rohan glances between us. "I'll go check the schedule," he says, and gets up without being asked, and I want to say something, want to thank him, but he's already gone.

Kai sits on the opposite bench and starts pulling on his gear and doesn't look at me.

"I've been thinking," he says, to his skate laces.

"Me too."

"I shouldn't have done that."

"Kai."

"No, listen." He looks up now, and his face is composed, careful, the same face he wore all through practice yesterday, except his eyes are giving him away, they always give him away and I don't think he knows it yet. "My scholarship has a conduct clause. Any behavior that reflects poorly on the program is grounds for immediate review, which basically means if anyone in that administration decides I'm a problem, I'm gone. I'm back home. And home for me isn't a summer in some lake house." His jaw tightens. "Home for me is a dead-end town and my dad asking me every morning why I couldn't just hold on to the one shot I ever had."

The weight of that lands on me square and heavy.

"I'm not asking you to risk that," I say.

"Then what are you asking?"

"I don't know." And that's the most honest thing I've said to anyone in months, possibly years. "I genuinely don't know. I just know that last night I felt more like myself than I have in a long time, and that terrifies me, and I can't make myself stop wanting..." I stop. Recalibrate. "I shouldn't have said that."

"No. Don't do that." His voice drops. "Don't pull it back. I'm sick of people pulling things back."

We look at each other across the empty ice and the space between us feels like something that exists in its own dimension, separate from the rest of the rink, from the rest of the school, from everything else that's going to need us to be something other than this.

My phone vibrates.

I glance down. One message, from a number I don't recognize.

"Saw something interesting last night. I knew you couldn't be so perfect. Wondering what it's worth to the right people. Let's talk." 

My blood goes cold.

I look up at Kai. He's watching my face, reading whatever he finds there with those careful dark eyes.

"What is it?" he asks.

I turn the phone so he can see the screen.

The color drains out of his face.