Page 82 of The Overtime Persuasive

I tilt my head to one side, genuinely interested. “What words did he use?”

“Mostly loud ones.”

Despite everything, I get another flicker of a smile.

“And, I assume Tripp was there and had something to say?”

“That he’d do it again.” And the same expression I saw on the news moves over Liam’s face.

“You know, Tripp can challenge you without trying to take anything away,” I say. “I feel like you have a hard time letting people get close without turning it into another way to measure yourself. He can be your competition and your teammate.”

Liam stares at me.

“I know that,” he says. But he doesn’t yet. Not in the way that matters.

“He was the first one there,” I say gently.

“I didn’t ask him to be.”

That may be what has shaken him most. Liam wants to be the person everyone else relies on, whether it’s on the ice or off. He wants to be perceived as the steady one. Thought of as the man his teammates come to when something goes wrong, only last night something went really wrong for Liam. Before he could handle it himself, Tripp was there.

“He made his own choice,” I say.

Liam looks toward the floor. “He could miss games.”

“He could, but it’s not your problem. Not right now.”

“Coach is furious with both of us.”

“Understandable. If I was in charge of the two of you, I would be too.”

Liam looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “He has terrible timing and can’t keep a beat.”

I bite back a laugh. “The worst.”

That earns me a real smile, small but familiar.

Every instinct I have tells me to do something with the hurt I can still see behind it. Ask the right question. Make the right joke. Find the loose thread and tug until whatever is knotted inside him comes free. But I don’t know which question to ask, and this isn’t mine to untangle.

I hate that all I can offer him is somewhere he doesn’t have to carry it alone.

I take his hand, cradling it in mine as I look into his eyes. The customers in the book room move toward the counter, their arms filled with purchases. Liam sees them coming and begins to pull away, but I won’t let him. I hold on for one extra second…because he came here.

To me.

Maybe he told himself he wanted to check my schedule. Maybe he thought he needed a job to do, boxes to pack, or a problem he could solve with his hands. But he came to me restless, worried, unsettled, and unsure. He let me be the place where he landed today, and I take that kind of trust quite seriously.

Liam may not understand what shifted inside him last night, but I’m beginning to think I do.

For the first time since Tripp arrived, Liam isn’t trying to figure out how to beat him. He’s trying to understand what it means that Tripp had his back.

But Tripp isn’t the part that lodges beneath my ribs.

Liam walked out of Coach’s office this morning with no idea what to do or where to go next. He could have gone to his dad. He could have called Lucy or turned to any one of the teammates who have become family to him.

Instead, he came here. To me.

He’s been so determined to prove he can be the person I come to that I don’t think either of us considered what it might mean when that trust began moving in the other direction.