Faking It With The Hockey Captain

A single degree of pain changed everything. That’s what I’ll think about for weeks , how if my hip hadn’t been on fire that afternoon, I never would have come home early. I never would have found them.

Three blocks from the dorm, my left side decides to stop cooperating.

Not the dull background ache I’ve been cataloguing since March. Something sharper. A warning.

I run the math I always run: practice in ninety minutes. Ice now, stretch, take the anti-inflammatory from behind the textbooks. I can make it through the session without the limp showing if I move smart. I’ve been running this calculation every day for eight months. I’m very good at it.

The afternoon light has gone flat and grey, campus thinning out toward dinner. I pass two Falcons players I vaguely recognize. They don’t look at me. I don’t look at them. I just walk slightly faster than my hip wants me to, because faster means sooner, and sooner means ice.

I think about texting Ethan. He had practice this afternoon , he mentioned it this morning when he left. I should check in. I pull out my phone and then put it away again without opening it.

I’ve been doing that more lately. Not examining why.

My key. The lock. My shoulder against the door.

I smell him before I see anything. That cologne his mother sends from home , the expensive one I’ve never fully liked and never said so. It shouldn’t be here at four-fifteen on a Wednesday.

My brain takes in the room in pieces. The way it does when it’s protecting you from arriving at the conclusion too fast.

Cassie’s shoes by the bed. The white ones with the worn left heel.

Ethan’s practice jacket on my chair.

Then the rest.

I go very still in the doorway. I’m aware of the ice pack in my hand. I’m aware that my hip is screaming. I’m aware of exactly what I’m looking at, and neither of them is moving with any urgency. Like they weren’t afraid of being found.

That’s the detail that cuts deepest. The lack of urgency.

Ethan looks at me. Takes two seconds to rearrange his face into something almost regretful.

Cassie looks at the wall.

He starts talking. Calm. Almost gentle. This has been building for a while. You know things haven’t been right between us. I think somewhere you already knew.

He is not apologizing. He is explaining. Like I’m a situation that has finally been resolved.

I stand there and let him finish. I don’t interrupt. I don’t cry. I just listen to the way each sentence connects to the next , the practiced quality of it, the logic of it , and I understand, somewhere below the level of thought, that I am not surprised.

That’s the worst thing. I’m not surprised.

I look at Cassie once. Cassie, who knows my coffee order and my practice schedule and my mother’s birthday. Cassie, who I’ve lived with for two years.

She doesn’t look back.

I close the door. Quietly. The click of the latch is very loud in my chest.

I walk down three flights at a normal pace. Push through the building door. Sit down on the cold concrete step outside and look at the parking lot.

My hip is screaming. I don’t feel it.

I sit there long enough for the cold to move through my leggings. I look at the ice pack still in my hand , still cold, still exactly what I came home for. There’s something almost funny about that. I don’t laugh.

Eighty-six minutes until practice.

I need to move my things.

He took the good explanation , the one where I was never really there , and used it before I could.

My phone rings. Mila.

I stare at her name for one full ring.

I answer.

“Hey, where are you? Practice is in less than two hours and your face looks like,” She stops. “Wait. Are you outside? Why are you outside? It’s like forty degrees.”

“Ethan’s with Cassie,” I say.

The silence on her end is the first real thing that’s happened in the last ten minutes.

“Say that again,” Mila says.