Chapter 40 Secondhand
Elias POV
I find out from Ivy.
Of course I do.
She texts me at four seventeen in the afternoon with: "did you know about the AD meeting" and I stare at those five words for long enough that the screen dims before I type back: "what meeting."
She calls immediately. I pick up.
"Okay so," she starts, which is never a good beginning. "I heard from Priya who heard from someone in the athletics admin office that Noah had a meeting today with Carlisle. The athletic director. Like a formal sit-down about the photo situation."
I am standing in the middle of the corridor outside the library when she says this. Someone walks past me and I step to the side automatically.
"When?" I ask.
"This afternoon. Like two o'clock? Maybe two thirty."
I do the math. We had coffee this morning. We talked for almost an hour. He knew about this meeting when he sat across from me and told me about Drayden and the foul and the way the locker room felt. He knew and he did not say a word about it.
"Elias?" Ivy says.
"I'm here."
"I don't know what came out of it. Priya only heard that it happened."
"Okay."
"Are you okay?"
"I don't know yet."
She does not push. One of the things I love most about Ivy is that she knows the difference between a person who needs questions and a person who needs space to think inside the answer they already have.
"Call me later?" she says.
"Yeah."
I hang up and stand in the corridor for another minute.
Here is what I tell myself, standing there.
He is allowed to manage things in his own order. He is allowed to process the meeting before he tells me about it. He is not obligated to share every institutional conversation he has in real time. We are new to this, whatever this is, and new things take time to find their shape.
All of that is true.
And I believe it, mostly.
The thing that sits underneath it is harder to name and harder to dismiss. It is not anger exactly. It is something quieter and more specific. The particular feeling of finding out important information about your own life from someone who is not the person you are supposed to be finding it out from.
Because this meeting was not just about Noah. Whatever Carlisle said to him in that room was about me too, about the photo of both of us, about us walking across the quad together. I am part of the situation being managed. And I found out it was happening through a chain of gossip that ended with Ivy calling me from wherever she was.
Not from Noah.
Not from the person I spent this morning with.
I go back to the dorm and sit at my desk and open my laptop and do not do any of the work I was supposed to do this afternoon.
I think about the question that has been forming at the edge of my mind since this morning, since I watched him on the practice field from the far side of the path, since the coffee and the camera and his hand on mine at the door.
I have been asking myself: is he protecting me.
Keeping the hard details away from me so I do not have to carry them. Managing the institutional part separately so I do not have to think about what it costs him. Processing it alone before bringing it to me so it comes packaged in something more manageable.
I used to think that would feel like care.
Sitting here, I am not sure anymore.
Because there is another version of the same question.
Is he protecting himself.
Keeping me at a distance from the harder parts of this because letting me in fully means something he is still not entirely ready for. Because sharing the meeting means sharing the word distraction, which means letting me hear how I am being talked about in administrative offices, which means making it real in a way that a photo on someone's social media is not quite.
Both of those things can be true at the same time. I know that.
But only one of them is something I can build on.
He texts at seven.
"Hey. Can we talk tomorrow? There's some stuff I should fill you in on."
I look at the message for a long time.
I type back: "Yeah. I know. Ivy told me about the meeting."
The three dots appear almost immediately. Then they disappear. Then they come back. Then: "I should have told you this morning. I'm sorry."
Short. Simple. No elaborate explanation.
I appreciate that more than I expected to.
"Tomorrow," I write back. "Tell me everything."
"I will," he says.
I put the phone down.
The question is still there. The one about protection and the one about distance and the difference between them. I do not have an answer yet.
But I notice that he apologized before I asked him to.
That is not nothing.
I hold onto it while the evening settles around me and wait to see what tomorrow brings.