Thin Love (Thin Love, #1)(76)
She didn’t know who he was speaking to, but it wasn’t to her.. This was an exorcism, words and desperation and sheer fury that he seemed to need. His voice was so loud, his anger so heightened that Keira pitied him. It dulled some of her rage, but only some.
“Train and focus, f*cking focus until you feel nothing but agony, until your fingers and hands bleed from the metal of the weights, until you don’t feel like such a punk failure! This,” three hard slaps against his chest, each one harder than the last, and the skin on Kona’s chest welted up, began to redden. “This is all I am! A body, Keira. A f*cking machine. No one cares about me, not what’s in my head.” Kona’s voice broke, cracking and his eyes shone bright, glassy. “One body made to please—the team, the coach, women who don’t give a shit what I think, what I feel. There is only this body, this strength and if I don’t have this, I am nothing. It I don’t win, don’t tackle, can’t play, I have nothing.”
She could have held him then. She could have let Kona use what he needed to feel his best, to feel as if he had tried everything to excel. It would have been easy just then to cave. Kona’s face, drenched in sweat, hands and fingers still trembling like a dry leaf, it cost Keira greatly not to reach for him, not to give him even the smallest comfort. But she had heard excuses like this before. She had heard them a hundred times. “Daddy needs this, sweetie, to take away the pain.” At nine, she believed her father. Pretending to understand why he snorted white powder, why he drank from a bottle of Jack every night. He was weak and Keira grew up with that weakness; making excuses, defending him. The comfort she gave her father had not saved him and she knew it would not save Kona.
“You’re right,” she told him, two steps back, just feet from the door behind her. She would never be an enabler again. She wouldn’t have Kona’s blood on her hands too. “You don’t have anything.” Keira saw the sting of hurt in Kona’s eyes, saw how her words left him wounded, stricken. “You use that shit, you damn well don’t have me.”
“Don’t you even think about it.” Kona ignored how she held up her hands, trying to keep him away. He ignored her small yelp when grabbed her by the waist. His breath was hot, damp and on it Keira smelled that airy scent she loved so much, something primal, something that only smelled like Kona. “Don’t you walk out on me when shit gets heavy.”
She twisted away from him, but he barely let her put an inch between them. Still, she wasn’t scared. She knew that poison in his body could make him insane, could make him dangerous and she guessed, just then, that’s what he had been on the night she clocked him with the bottle at Lucy’s. Kona moved his head and Keira’s gaze flicked to his wide, desperate eyes and then down to the scar on his cheek. This time, the guilt did not come.
“I’m not going to watch you kill yourself.” She took a breath, was fueled again by rage and she pushed against his chest, stepping away from him until she was against the door. “One man I cared about chickening out on life is enough for me. I don’t want another one.”
He only stared at her, hands at his side and his face marked with hurt, confusion. She’d never told Kona much about her father. She felt that day and what she had endured was for private, for her alone, and in that locker room with Kona’s body marked red and his breath coming in short bursts, was not the time for history lessons.
Hand on the doorknob, Keira opened it. Kona’s steps were small and tentative, but she saw the threat of attack beneath his movements; in the shake of his bottom lids and the tremor moving his mouth.
“Goodbye, Kona,” she said, slipping out of the room before he could follow. She moved quickly, jogging down the corridor when she thought Kona would surely break from Luka’s hold, when she thought his loud screaming of her name would silence the roar in the stadium. Then, face wet and hot from her tears, she ran, ignoring the coaching staff and assistants as they headed toward the locker room, ignoring the loud, desperate call of her name behind her.
Kona tried to find her. After the win. After his coaches and brother pulled him out onto the field. After Fleming played when Robins had enough of Kona’s distraction, the half-hearted speed of his hustle.
Kona hadn’t even cared that the cameras followed him onto the sideline or that they caught Robins’ screaming at him. Keira was gone. After she walked away from him, Kona forgot that he was supposed to be a winner. He forgot everything but how she looked at him. She was disgusted. She was disappointed. That hurt worse than Robins screaming at him on national TV.
Later, when they’d barely managed the win, Kona sat in Robins’ office expecting more of his yells, expecting the man to tell him he could kiss his spot on the team goodbye.
“The transition from first to second year is shitty, Hale.” Robins’ voice didn’t raise. The man didn’t seem as angry as he had on the field when Kona’s efforts were half-hearted, barely managed. Robins instead sat with his elbows on his desk and his fingers together, giving Kona a stiff frown. “It’s not every player that can hack it.” Kona couldn’t even look at him. He kept his eyes down, focused on the pitchfork and horns of the blue devil in the rug under his feet. “I gotta be honest, Hale. I thought you were one that could.”
“I am,” he said, though his voice sounded too weak, unconvinced.