Page 5 of Try Line Hearts
“Not bad, Byrne,” Kaine said, grin easy, voice light, as if nothing had passed between them at all.
Byrne pushed himself up too fast, the sudden movement betraying him. He brushed grass from his arms with more force than necessary, grounding himself in irritation, in anything that wasn’t the echo of sensation still humming through him.
“You telegraph your angle,” he said, clipped and controlled.
A lie.
Kaine laughed, bright and unbothered. “Sure I do.”
Their eyes met again—just for a beat—and something unspoken lingered there. Not a challenge. Not an invitation.
A promise, quietly made.
Then the whistle shrilled, bodies moved, and the moment vanished back into the violence and order of the drill.
But Byrne knew, with a certainty that settled cold and heavy in his gut:
That contact hadn’t been accidental.
And it wouldn’t be the last.
They ran drill after drill, collision after collision, each impact an unspoken problem Byrne could not solve. Kaine adapted fast—too fast—reading him with unsettling ease.
By water break, Byrne’s ribs felt like cracked stone. He straightened, forcing his breath into something steady.
Kaine jogged past and clapped him on the shoulder—casual, friendly, devastating.
“Good session, captain.”
Byrne only nodded.
The team drifted toward the locker rooms in a tide of noise and steam.
Boots thudded against concrete. Someone whooped. Someone else complained loudly about their hamstrings. The sharp edge of the morning dulled as bodies moved indoors, heat and sound rising together until the air felt thick with it.
Byrne lingered at the edge of the pitch, staring out over the grass as if the lines might rearrange themselves into answers.
They didn’t.
The field was emptying now, frost crushed to mud, the session already becoming something that would be reviewed, discussed, managed. He stayed still, hands on his hips, breathing until the sharpness in his chest eased into something bearable.
Ten breaths.
Then he followed.
The locker room hit him all at once—heat, steam, voices bouncing off tile and metal. Bodies blurred into one another in motion: jerseys peeled off, boots kicked aside, towels snapped. The air smelled like sweat and soap and liniment.
Someone dropped a bottle. It clattered and rolled.
“Jesus Christ, Darren!” Rory’s laugh boomed, echoing off the walls.
“Watch your mouth,” Darren shot back. “Or I’ll wash yours out with this shite.”
Byrne didn’t engage. He moved with purpose to the far end of the room, to the last shower stall.
The one that faced the wall.
The safe one.
