Chapter 19 THE WATER BREAK
POV: ELIJAH
The water break lasted eight minutes.
Elijah knew that because he had timed it, not really on purpose, but just because his mind always kept count of things like that. Other people remembered faces or names. Elijah tracked seconds and minutes and the quiet rhythm of things.
He stood at the edge of the field with his water bottle, watching James Blake walk away from him.
That was twice in the last twenty minutes that James had stepped away from Elijah, and he noticed it because that was not how things usually went. Most people at Thornfield found reasons to hang around him. That was just his reality, no matter what he wanted. It came with his last name and his spot on the team and the invisible weight he carried everywhere at this school.
James Blake did not try to stay close. He walked away, not rude or defensive, just completely intentional. The kind of exit you made when you were handling a situation, not running from it.
Elijah looked down at his hand. He had touched James’s hand to fix his grip on the water bottle. That was just a coaching thing, something Myers did all the time. Nothing more behind it.
But James had pulled back like the touch was not just uncomfortable, but actually risky.
Not unwanted. Risky.
Elijah kept thinking about that.
There were other things that did not fit. In the locker room, when Elijah had tossed the water bottle, James had caught it left-handed, fast and sure. Too good for someone who claimed to be self-taught. That kind of reaction came from practice, and not the kind of practice you pick up by yourself in empty lots.
So maybe James was lying about being self-taught. Or maybe that was just one piece of a much bigger story.
Elijah was good at spotting patterns and finding the empty spaces in a story. He had learned long ago that what people showed you was never the whole truth. His sister Emma had taught him that, before she had left Thornfield and gone silent in the way people sometimes did at this school. The school called it transferring. Elijah called it something else, but he never said that out loud, because saying it out loud would mean acting on it, and he did not know how to do that yet.
He pushed thoughts of Emma away. Not because she did not matter, but because thinking about her in the middle of a practice was how you missed things. And he did not want to miss anything right now.
He looked across the field at James and Teddy Phillips, both of them standing close but not quite talking. It was the kind of closeness that meant something had already been decided, even if nobody had put it into words.
Teddy was interesting too, but in a different way. He was easier to read. Teddy was trying to fit in, working hard at being seen. James was doing the opposite. James was working just as hard at not being seen at all.
That was the biggest thing Elijah had figured out in the last forty minutes. James Blake moved and spoke and acted like someone who was trained to be invisible. He took up just enough space, never more. That was not just shyness, and it was not new kid nerves. It was something deeper, something learned.
Coach Myers blew the whistle, sharp and clear.
Elijah capped his water bottle and headed back toward the field.
He was not going to do anything about it yet. He did not have enough information. Jumping to conclusions was how you made mistakes, and something about this felt like a mistake would cost more than usual, even if he could not say why.
But he was going to pay attention. He was going to watch James Blake very closely.
Not because he thought something was wrong.
Because something here did not add up, and Elijah had learned that the things that did not add up were always the most important.
He jogged back into position.
James was already ready, balanced, eyes tracking the play.
Left-handed. Trained reflexes. Always slipping away from every interaction like it cost him something.
Elijah filed it all away.
Pay attention, he told himself.
The whistle blew.
Author's Note: Elijah Cole, things just got more complicated. Bet Teddy won't like this one! and that is exactly the problem. If this water break hit different from his side, let me know. Save this one. — J