Page 86 of The Longest Shot
And, suddenly, I’m not in this shitty apartment anymore. I’m on the hood of my truck three years ago. The bonfire smoke stings my eyes. There's a girl beside me—beautiful, brilliant, looking at me like I might actually be worth something—whose hair catches the firelight as she asks a question.
“So…what happens when we leave here?”
That moment mattered.
Shemattered.
The silence between us mattered.
And I don’t know how to exist in that kind of meaningful quiet.
So I destroyed it.
I made jokes. I turned our connection into a punchline. I made her vulnerability into material for my desperate one-manshow. I watched her face shut down. I watched her walls slam back up. And then, worst of all, I watched her walk away.
And the connection between that moment and tonight is undeniable.
The boys are right. Tonight wasn’t about helping Morgan. It was about me. About my need to fill the silence with noise, to turn something real into something I could control with a microphone and a spotlight. I took her pain—real, private, hard-won pain—and I made it mine to give away.
The worst part? She’d started to trust me again. In that library, working on my disaster of a paper, she’d let her guard down. She’d laughed at my stupid hockey metaphors. She’d been patient with my brain that operates like a pinball machine on cocaine.
And she’d looked at me like maybe I’d changed.
The worst part?
Ihadchanged.
My captaincy had become a little more serious, and our results on the ice had started to improve. I'd started taking my studies more seriously, and felt the improvement. I'd still been me—James, Rook—but spending time with Morgan had made me better, and I'm confident time with me had helped her, too.
And, sure, she'd panicked after we'd fucked.
But maybe that could have been saved, in time, with patience and effort.
Yet instead of putting in the work, giving her time and space, I'd gone for the big play and validated her worst fears in front of three hundred people. I'd proven I'm still the kid on that hood, demolishing anything real before it can demand something real from me.
This is what Leo meant.
This is what I need to sit with.
Because this can't be solved by a frantic energy, the need to fix it, or another grand gesture. That’s all just more performance, more noise, and more of the same poison I’ve been mainlining since I was seven. The real work—if there’s any redemption possible after this nuclear meltdown—isn’t loud, and it isn’t public.
It’s quiet, it’s small, and it’s showing up every day and doing the unglamorous work of being better.Actuallybetter, not just performing better for whoever’s watching. It’s the kind of work you do when no one’s watching and when there’s no applause.
I lie back on the bed and, for the first time in my life, I don’t try to fill the silence. I let it bury me, overwhelm me, and press down on me so hard I might never get up from this bed again. Because maybe that’s what has to happen first—a complete burial of the performer, the jester, the emotional janitor who’s been running the show for twenty-one years—before anything real can grow.
So I close my eyes and let the darkness press in.
No jokes. No diversions. No audience.
Just me and the wreckage.
Alone and quiet.
thirty-two
MORGAN
I haven’t slept,and James is the reason I’m destroying my body at 6:17 a.m.
