Page 50 of Beautiful When He Breaks

When he finally speaks, his voice is so controlled it’s almost scary. “Coach Blakely.”

I nod once.

“The basketball coach. Damien and Ryan’s coach.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck,” he says quietly. He turns away and takes three fast steps toward the wall, both hands going to the back of his neck before one slams flat against the plaster hard enough to make me flinch. “No. No fucking way.”

I sit frozen on the edge of his bed while he paces like he’s trying not to black out from rage.

“He’s in the athletics department on campus. He’s around us. Around players. Around—” He cuts himself off and spins back toward me. “Jesus Christ.”

I say nothing because right now I don’t have enough room inside my chest for both his anger and my shame.

He starts pacing again. “This changes everything.”

I look down. “Yeah, I know.”

“No, I don’t think you do.” He spins back around. “This isn’t just some abusive asshole with a big ego. This is a coach. An authority figure. Somebody with access. Somebody protected. Do you understand what that means? For you. For the school. For every other player he has access to and every goddamn kid who walks into a gym with that man and thinks he’s safe because he’s the adult in the room.”

The shame that was already coating everything in me thickens instantly. “I know.”

“Did he ever—” Luca cuts himself off, his jaw flexing. “Were you the only one?”

“I don’t know.”

Luca starts pacing again, which is somehow more unsettling than if he’d stayed still. He drags both hands through his hair and mutters, “Fucking unbelievable,” at the floor, then he stops pacing again and faces me fully. “Do you want out?”

“Yes.” The answer is so immediate it almost shocks me. “Yeah. I do.”

He nods once. “Okay,” he says. “Then we get you out.”

The certainty in his tone nearly knocks the breath from me.

I laugh softly. “You’re saying that like it’s easy.”

“I didn’t say it’s easy.” He sits down across from me in his desk chair, forearms braced on his thighs, eyes locked on mine. “I said we get you out.”

My throat works painfully around those words. His anger is still there, burning hard enough to light the room, but under it, there’s loyalty and concern. I don’t have a clean response to that, so I shoot to my feet and nod.

“Okay,” I say quietly.

“Okay,” he echoes, but his tone says he knows that okay is fragile and provisional and probably about to get ripped apart by reality.

He stands up and steps closer, then grips the back of my neck hard enough to feel grounding. “You’re not doing this alone anymore. Understand?”

I close my eyes for a second. “Yeah,” I say and laugh under my breath. “I’m going to lose my fucking mind if you start sounding like a therapist.”

Luca’s mouth twitches once. “Shame. I was about to ask you about your inner child, too.”

“Fuck off.” The laugh that leaves me then is small and wrecked and embarrassingly close to tears. I scrub a hand over my face before either of those things can turn into anything uglier.

“We do this carefully if that’s what you need,” he says. “But we do it. You hear me? And until we decide the next move, you don’t answer him.”

My stomach drops. “Luca.”

“No. Don’t fucking ‘Luca’ me.”