Page 2 of The Rest of the Story
“Brody—” I said.
Brody whirled, spinning out of Lawson’s hold so fast Lawson went stumbling. Logan and Josh caught him, steadied him, as Brody rushed me.
“Shea?” Anchorless terror soared like a meteor through Brody’s consciousness. “Shea, what happened is he all right? Where is he why are you here?” He was speaking faster than he could think, his sentences ramming into each other like, well, car crashes. His wild eyes ran over me, zoomed up to meet mine, blew wide. “You wouldn’t be here if you’d be with him why aren’t you with him what happened whathappenedto Shea—”
“Brody.” My voice was steel. “Shea is okay. He was—” My voice cracked. “Lucky. He was very lucky. The way the car hit the concession stand, the way the left side hit first…” I shook my head. It all could have been so, so different. “Shea’s right leg was pinned, and it’s broken, in a lot of places, but he’s going to be okay.”
Brody lunged. His fingers were claws, and they dug into my hoodie and gouged my chest. “He’s—” Brody was still a million miles away, shipwrecked from reality. His eyes were red and swollen, rimmed with desperation. The dressing room was frozen, overheated and too still. The air was too thick, too hot, too cold. Something was working its way out of Brody, sliver by sliver. Desolation. Grief. Heartbreak.
“He takes everything.” Brody’s voice was hollow. “He takes everything, and he’s going to keep taking everything.”
“Who?”
“Youknowwho.Him.” The venom in his voice. “He’ll come back, I know he will. He’s hurt Shea, and he’s going to hurt you. He won’t stop, he won’t fucking stop, he neverstops—”
Brody was gaining steam again, moving from a shaky whisper to a panicked shout in the space of a breath. “Brody—” I tried to speak over him, raising my own voice to match his, beat his. “Brody, Shea is going to be fine. He’sokay—”
“I’m not okay!” Brody roared, louder, sharper, clearer than anything he’d said before. “I’m not okay!He tried tokillme! Right there!” He flung out his hand, pointed to the wall next to Lawson’s goalie stall, a little five-foot turn that blocked the dressing room from the hallway, made a little private corner if you wanted no one to see what you were doing. “He had his hands around my neck and he squeezed and I couldn’t fuckingbreathe—” Brody gulped in a huge lungful of air, as if Coates’ fingers were digging into his throat that very second. “I blacked out, and when I came back, he’d flipped me around. He had one hand on the back of my head, digging my face into the wall, and the other was—”
His voice died, completely died, there one second and then gone. He stared at me, into me, and a river of tears built and rose over his eyelashes, came cascading down his cheeks in waterfalls.
No one moved. No one breathed. Lawson was staring at the corner by his stall like he was going to hurl. Gavin had his hands in his hair and was ghost white, whiter than he’d been the day he told me everything. Logan had his face hidden in both of his palms, his shoulders shaking. A moment later, he dropped to his knees and curled, forehead to the floor.
Scorching red crawled up both sides of Brody’s neck. His tear-soaked face was tender and valiant simultaneously. “I fought him off, but he said he wasn’t finished with me. He kept pushing. Healwayskept pushing. Shea figured out something was going on, so he stuck by me, but henever stopped pushing.”
Brody gasped for oxygen, gasped for words. He was lost, marooned in the hellscape of the past, in those weeks over summer when he’d started out overjoyed and on the edge of his dream come true—an NHL team wanted him—but the reality of Coates had slammed in hard. The mind fuckery, the abuse, Coates’ relentless, dogged pursuit of Brody, and Coates’ need to break him. I saw it, and I’d only been there for twenty hours before I put Coates down.
Brody had been there for six weeks, and his heart and soul had come untethered, whipping away and unraveling string by string by string.
“He kept saying he’d come back and finish what he started. He kept saying I was his. Everything was going so wrong, and—” His voice went high and thin, airless, breathless, and his eyes were huge, pleading with me. Begging me, I realized, tounderstand.
“I had it all worked out,” Brody whispered. “I knew exactly what to do. And theonlyreason—” His voice cracked, snapped in half, and he fought for each word, pushing syllable by syllable through clenched teeth. “Theonlyreason I didn’t kill myself was because Shea wouldn’t leave me alone long enough to get it done. And thenyoushowed up.” He made it sound like an accusation, complete with a finger pushed into my chest. “You. You fucking saved me. You both fucking saved me. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Shea and you. And that fucker, he swore he’d come back, that he wasn’t done with me, and now heisback, he’s fucking back, and he’s going to hurt you both—”
I hauled Brody into my chest, wrapped my arms around him as tight as they could go, and buried my face against the side of his soaked cheek.
I’ll remember that dressing room forever. It will always be there, in the dark, spiderwebbed corners of my mind, where I shove all the worst shit I never want to remember, like my father and that hallway and the sound of my mother’s shrieking. The rank, roasted stench of fear oozing out of us, the smell of nineteen panicked men lost in nineteen separate nightmares. The vividness of our team colors parading around the room, a caustic counterpoint to the sickened, slack faces. Our nameplates, our numbers, our jerseys still hanging up, cleaned and pressed and ready to be worn with pride. Gabe with a hitch to his breaths that kept speeding up, Ridley flat on his ass like he’d taken a knockout punch. Lawson, gasping, with his face up and his eyes bloodshot.
Brody, clinging to me like I was the one and only solid thing in his life, like he was adrift with nowhere to go and nowhere to turn. He looked up at me with shards of his broken heart lodged in his bright eyes, lost between the boy that had gotten off a bus in Boulder at the start of summer and the man he was today, holding his hands frantically over a bleed in his soul that kept trying to open up and swallow him.
“It’s my fault.” Brody’s voice had shifted down, into that mournful, keening, only-half-there wail, low and thin. “It’s my fault this happened. Hesworehe’d be back. He said he wasn’t done with me, that he’d never be done with me. He said he was going to takeeverything— I didn’t think that meantyou—”
A rasping, wet hitch, his throat closing around his words, and then his legs gave way and he buried his face in my chest. He unleashed a scream from the center of his soul that reverberated in my breastbone and the inside of my heart like a gong had been blown clean off its frame.
That room, Brody, and those faces will be stamped inside me forever.
“It’snotyour fault.” My voice was vicious, almost savage, as I spoke into his ear. “This isnot your fault, Brody. And no one is taking us away from you. No one is ever taking anything away from you. I swear to you, on my life, on Shea’s life: I will never let him near you again. I swear, I swear to fucking God, Brody, you’re safe from him. You’re safe.”
Brody curled tighter. “Morgan…” He said my name softer than he breathed, so fragile I could have cupped his voice in my two hands.
Failure slammed into me, the same as it had when I was fucking worthless out there on the Pizza Hut counter, nothing I could do but hold Shea’s hand as he whimpered. As he may have been dying, for all the fuck I knew, bleeding out beneath the engine block and Coates’ shredded fender.
IknewCoates was the kind of asshole who didn’t quit, and I knew he’d unleashed his inner, unchecked rage on the world, destroying himself and anyone unlucky to be around him. Those girls he’d put in the hospital in Sioux Falls weren’t the first. That was only when he had been caught.
Like my dad, Coates’ addiction wasn’t just booze or coke or whatever was in that needle. It was power. Domination. Mind fuck games and breaking other people because he could, because he enjoyed doing it. Turning Brody into a shell of himself and pushing him so far into the negative space of his mind that the only way Brody saw to fix his world was to take himself out of it.
Brody had been carrying this formonths. When I went barreling down the ice to put Coates down, Brody had already made his plan. That morning, the day before, and at Coates’ culty dinner, Brody had looked like a man with nothing to live for because he’d already given up.Shea wouldn’t leave me alone long enough to get it done.
Shea’s forearm against his at the dinner table that night, holding him up; no, keeping himalive—
