Aaron Minyard lay on Blake's bed like it was the only place left on Earth he could breathe. The sheets had long gone cold, but they still smelled like him—faint traces of mint shampoo, nicotine, and the unique aftershave Blake always used but never admitted to owning. The comforter was tangled around his legs. His face was red and splotched, eyes swollen from crying. Again.
Three weeks.
He'd cried every single night since. Silent, feral sobs with a pillow stuffed in his mouth to keep them from echoing off the walls. He clung to Blake's clothes like a lifeline—shirts, hoodies, jackets. Anything that hadn't yet lost his scent. He wore them to sleep, hugged them, buried his face into the fabric until he suffocated in Blake's absence.
The team didn't know anything. Not a goddamn thing. Neither did Coach Wymack. No updates, no sightings. It was like Blake had fallen off the face of the earth.
Because Blake was involved with mafia shit—real, terrifying, bloodstained shit—they couldn't go to the cops. No missing persons report. No searches. No calls to precincts. They were stuck asking the people Blake might've known, might've owed, might've crossed. They were stuck waiting.
But Aaron was running out of time.
Championship season had begun, and he couldn't even drag himself out of bed most days. Practices were a blur. His racket was a weight in his hands, like a weapon he couldn't remember how to use. At first, he showed up to everything with red-rimmed eyes and no appetite. Then came the missed drills. The skipped meals. The unspoken understanding that Aaron Minyard—sharp-tongued, ice-veined Aaron—wasn't okay.
And nobody blamed him.
The first few nights he hadn't slept at all. Every sound outside the window had him jerking up in bed, convinced it was a car, a knock, a footstep, Blake's voice coming back. Sometimes he dreamed of him—tied up in the back of a van, beaten in an alley, shot and left in a ditch. Those nights he'd wake up drenched in sweat, shaking, gasping, fists tangled in the bedsheets.
He kept begging Wymack for updates. "Did we hear anything?" "Did Abby call?" "What about Godwin?" "What about the club in Tucson—wasn't he supposed to talk to someone there?" Every time, Wymack looked at him like he wanted to lie but wouldn't.
"No," was all he said.
"No," again.
"No, Aaron. Nothing yet."
And now it was late afternoon. Or maybe early evening. Time was slippery these days.
Aaron sat on the couch in the veterans' apartment—his apartment, Blake's apartment, Matt's apartment—but it felt like a museum. Like Blake had died and left everything behind in neat, untouched corners. His sneakers by the door. His textbooks stacked on the kitchen counter.
Aaron had Blake's oversized black hoodie on—his favorite one, the one with the red lightning bolt across the back and holes in both sleeves where his thumbs used to go. The cuffs still smelled like smoke.
He'd shoved his rectangle reading glasses up the bridge of his nose just to see the TV screen. He wasn't really watching. He was staring—blank, expressionless—at some late-breaking local news segment about a fire in a warehouse in northside Eden. Words scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Warehouse. Explosion. Unknown causes.
Aaron's chest tightened. He clutched the hoodie harder around him like it could block out the thought—what if it was Blake? What if he was in that fire? What if he'd been there, and that was why no one had found him, because there was nothing left to find?
His jaw trembled. He pressed his lips together so hard they went numb. He'd always hated crying in front of people. But lately, it didn't matter. His phone buzzed once on the table beside him. He didn't look. It could be Matt. It could be Allison. It could be Wymack. It wasn't Blake. So what was the point?
