Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 117363 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 469(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117363 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 469(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
“So I heard,” Cat said, and he guessed she meant Lucas. “But you’re not a Raven anymore, right? You should try and reconnect.”
The thought that maybe he could was at once baffling and nonsensical. She’d been ten when he left home, just ten when he’d stopped protecting her from their mother’s temper and father’s violent business. Did she know he hadn’t gone by choice? Did she blame him or forgive him? Jean wasn’t sure he wanted to know what time had done to her. So long as she existed as fractured memories, she was safe and small and sheltered.
“Maybe,” he said, because he had the feeling Cat would argue with an outright rejection.
Like Jeremy, she was easily wooed by that false sense of progress, and she ate the rest of her dinner in satisfied silence. As soon as she settled the check they headed back to the bike.
They made one last stop up the road at Point Dume, a bluff that overlooked sandy trails and a rocky coastline. Cat spread her arms as she leaned into the gusting wind. Jean gazed out at the endless horizon, feeling small and infinite from one moment to the next.
He tapped his gloved fingers together. A cool evening breeze. Rainbows. Open roads.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jean
Since neither Jean nor Lucas wanted to be benched for the next four months, they decided by unspoken agreement to simply ignore each other the next day. Seeing how Jean was still in Xavier’s group at the gym and they played the same position on the court, it was fairly easy to pull off without dragging the rest of the team down. Lucas kept his smart mouth shut, Jean passed to him when it was the best play during scrimmages, and they changed out with at least two bodies between them in the locker room.
For better or worse, the stalemate meant the coaches could narrow their focus down to Jean: rather, their issues with how he was playing on their court. On Thursday afternoon Coach Rhemann joined his team on the court for scrimmages. He wore a helmet for protection but no other gear, and he paced the walls as he watched Jean like a hawk. Every time Jean did something Rhemann didn’t agree with—brutal hooks, back-to-back trips, and more contact than a no-touch jersey should allow, he gave a short blast on a silver whistle. He didn’t bother to stop the play, trusting Jean to interpret the noise as a need for correction.
At first it was simply annoying, but as the afternoon wore on the strikers found the constant warnings more and more amusing and Jean found it steadily less so. The cheerful “Oops!” and “You can do it!” remarks from his teammates did nothing at all to improve his mood. He was forced to second-guess every check he made, but every time he hesitated to think through what he was doing he risked falling behind and losing control of the play. It was easy to default to muscle memory, which inevitably brought another scolding tweet from Rhemann’s whistle.
Jeremy was smart enough to not make such comments, but he had the misfortune of being Jean’s fourth mark of the day. Jeremy’s startled “Ouch” was not the gleeful taunts Jean had suffered all afternoon, but enough was enough. Jean hooked his shoulder and racquet around Jeremy’s arm to throw him flat on his back. Jeremy grunted as he hit the floor hard, and the scrimmage ground to a halt as the Trojans reacted to the echoing thud. Jean knelt beside Jeremy to wait and laid his racquet on the ground in front of him.
Jeremy pushed himself up on his arms as Rhemann headed their way. Jean felt his searching look but didn’t bother to return it, instead fixing a calm stare on a safe point across the court. Rhemann crouched on the other side of Jean’s racquet and looked at Jeremy first.
“Good?” he asked. When Jeremy nodded an easy okay, the head coach turned a pensive look on Jean. “Kind of going the opposite direction than intended.”
“I’m sorry, Coach,” Jean said.
“Are you actually sorry, or are you saying it because you think I want to hear it?”
“I do not like failing, Coach.”
“It’s going to take time,” Rhemann said, and tapped the whistle hanging from his neck. “This is not an attempt to shame you; it is a means of helping you. I don’t think you can see all the places we are out of alignment with each other. Now that we both have a better idea of how much there is to work on, we can take it one infraction at a time. Too much to fix in one fell swoop, it seems. Are you good to keep going, or do you need a break to clear your head?”
“I will play as long as you let me, Coach.”