Page 34 of The Longest Shot
No joke, no deflection, no charming grin to smooth over the awkward moment.
Just silence.
And in that silence, I can see it all playing out in his eyes—confusion, then recognition, then something that might be shame. Or maybe that's wishful thinking. Maybe I want him to feel even a fraction of what I felt that night when I handed him my heart and watched him juggle it for laughs.
Maybe I want him to understand what it's like to bleed out for three years from a wound someone else doesn't even care they inflicted.
I hold his gaze for one more heartbeat, letting him see what I think of him.
Then I turn and walk away.
My footsteps echo in the narrow space, steady and measured even though my legs feel unsteady. I don't run. I don't storm off. I just walk, each step deliberate, leaving him standing there in that flickering light with the weight of his cowardice for company.
The door closes behind me with a definitive click, and I'm back in the main hallway. There are students passing by chattering about parties and papers, the distant sound of a basketball bouncing, and the real world continuing on while I've just detonated a three-year-old bomb in James Fitzgerald's face.
My hands are shaking.
I shove them deep in my pockets and keep walking. My breath wants to come in gasps, but I force it steady. The game from earlier feels like a lifetime ago, and the meeting with the administrator might as well have been a dream, because all I can think about is the look on his face when I mentioned that summer.
The look of a man who just realized the ground beneath his feet has been quicksand all along, and he's been sinking this whole time without knowing it. Good. Let him sink. Let him drown in it, like I've been drowning for three years and only just admitting it.
It's his turn.
fourteen
ROOK
The corridor wallsare crushing me, cold concrete biting through my shirt as I lean back, my lungs forgetting their only job. Morgan has gone, but her words hang in the dead air like a diagnosis—terminal cowardice, no known cure—written in neon right on my forehead.
You did it then, and you're still doing it now.
She called me a court jester for a creep.
And she's not wrong.
The words burrow deeper with each replay, past muscle and bone, straight into that soft, rotten place I've spent years pretending doesn't exist. Because it wasn't just an insult, it was a complete psychological autopsy performed while I was still breathing.
The guy who keeps things light. The captain who makes everyone laugh and doesn't enforce standards because it's too hard. The seven-year-old who learned that falling over and crying, even if faking it, could stop Mom's hand midway to Dad's face, and that a perfectly timed joke could defuse the bomb before the neighbors called the cops again.
My knees buckle. I slide down the wall until my ass hits the cold linoleum, and suddenly I'm twelve again, locked in mybedroom closet with my hands pressed over my ears, trying to muffle the sound of my mother's favorite vase exploding against the kitchen wall.
That was the night Dad moved out for three weeks, the same night I thought that if I could make them both laugh at breakfast, pretend everything was normal, maybe he'd come back. And, eventually, he did, and the cycle started all over again.
And now my chest is tighter than it's been since that night, crouched in my closet while downstairs exploded in the kind of screaming that made the dog hide under the porch. My hands are shaking, like I'm going through withdrawal from something I didn't know I was addicted to.
The something being denial, apparently.
You're having a panic attack in a hallway. How's that for leadership?
I push off the floor, using the wall like a crutch, and suddenly I feel the need to find someone—Schmidt, Cooper, literally anyone with a functioning brain stem and working vocal cords—who can tell me Morgan's wrong and that she's just being bitter about… what exactly?
About me freezing while Galloway eye-fucked her.
About my teammates treating her locker room like their personal comedy club?
About me demonstrating the emotional maturity of a goldfish?
The defensive anger lasts exactly three heartbeats before curdling into something worse. Because underneath it, her words have already metastasized, spreading through my system like truth tends to do when you've been avoiding it for two decades.
