Chapter Text
The change in weather had arrived by the time Cove rolled out of his family’s driveway. Dark clouds obscured the setting sun and fat drops of rain drummed the roof of his father’s sedan as he navigated through the neighborhood to the main road. He was relieved that despite the downpour, there was no sign of lighting, and very little wind. It was wet and gray, but otherwise calm, and he felt his confidence grow with each house he passed.
In the passenger seat next to him was a turquoise beach towel he’d grabbed from the hallway closet before leaving his house. He intended it partially for Riley’s comfort, but also for preventing damage to his father’s well-looked after interior. On top of the towel was his cellphone.
Earlier, when he’d been trying – and failing – to focus on his schoolwork, it had occurred to him that he wasn’t sure where the wrestling team met up for their practices. Their high school had a main gym, where matches were held, but their was also a weight room with mats in a separate building by the track. He’d texted Riley to inquire about where he should go to pick her up, but so far she hadn’t answered. The delay wasn’t alarming to him. According to the time, she was still technically in practice, and it was entirely possible her phone was stashed away in her locker.
Cove could remember the day Riley had come home from class and presented her mothers with the waiver to join the wrestling team. It was obvious neither were thrilled with her choice, but, it soon became apparent that she was born for combat sports. Her experience in jiu jitsu made her an excellent grappler, and she had a mental fortitude that kept her getting back up even when life – or larger opponents - knocked her down. She very aware of herself and others, and constantly sought to shore up any areas where she was lacking.
To that end, Riley had changed a lot over the past summer, and not in the ways other girls at school had. Most of her curves were developing in her arms and legs rather than her chest, and while her peers appeared soft and almost fragile, she was hard and angular. Riley was getting stronger every day, and the attention she got in return was of an entirely different sort than her friends received.
Cove frowned over the steering wheel at the glare of the headlights reflecting in the rain. This was particularly true in regards to attention from boys.
While he didn’t understand it, he had none-the-less picked up on the fact that the things that made Riley different – the things he liked about her – were off-putting to many boys. Their interactions with Riley were terse, and even plainly confrontational at times. Cove had heard in the halls how they thought girls shouldn’t fight, and yet, according to Riley, she had been challenged on more than one occasion to that very thing. It was always outside of class, of course, and Riley always ignored their provocations. She was an athlete, not a bully, and as far as Cove could see, she was completely undeterred by their behavior.
It made him happy they were friends. Riley was solid as the shore, and though her shape was shifting, her nature was as it had always been. Maybe other boys found her threatening, but for Cove, she was Botticelli’s Venus, standing on a half shell in the eye of the storm that was their youth.
Cove put on his turn signal and made a right onto the thoroughfare for the high school. As he took the corner, he made out a familiar figure walking in the opposite direction outside a convenience store.
“Riley!”
He jerked and hit his brakes abruptly, earning an annoyed honk from the driver behind him. Equal parts embarrassed and concerned, he pulled to the side of the road and waved apologetically at the car that overtook him. Once it did, he re-entered traffic and made a nail-biting u-turn to catch up to where Riley’s silhouette was still visible under the overhead lighting of the gas station.
As he pulled up behind her in the parking lot, he noted the mud on her knee-high varsity socks. Why as she still in her gym clothes? Her training bag was slung across her shoulders and the hood of her oversized sweatshirt was up, but even in the rain, he could tell by her stiff posture that something was wrong.
He slowly came up next to her and shouted out his rolled-down window. “Riley!”
She started and turned her head at the sound. A pair of wires dangled out of her hood and he realized she hadn’t heard the vehicle. With an awkward gait, she pulled out her ear buds and approached the car. Her face was tight and lacking in expression.
“What are you doing out here?” Cove asked her, “Didn’t you get my text?”
Riley’s large brown eyes blinked slowly, and she absently lifted a hand holding her smart phone from the front pouch of her hoodie to her face. After what seemed like an unnaturally long pause, she looked up and spoke in a voice he couldn’t quite read.
“Where are my moms?”
Cove shook his head. “I’m not sure, my dad talked to them.”
Riley looked back to her phone without response. There was a palpable air radiating off her that was making him nervous. He glanced again at her soaking wet clothes and pinched his eyebrows.
“Get in already,” he said, with only half-joking forcefulness.
Finally, Riley’s features altered to something more normal. She glanced at the leather seats and Cove could tell she shared his concern for the care of his father’s car.
“I’m all wet...”
It struck Cove as an absurdly obvious and yet entirely Riley thing to say. He managed a smile. “And you’re gonna get more wet if you keeping standing out there.”
Her eyebrows lifted in the way they always did when she was making mental concessions. She put her phone back in her pouch pocket and walked to the passenger side. As she did so, Cove threw his own phone into the console and spread out the beach towel. He leaned across it to pop open the door and was pleased when his friend finally slid in next to him. She pulled back her dripping hood, and Cove could see the shine of the water collected on her eyelashes.
He reached into the glove box and held out a small packet of tissues. “Here.”
She took them and, after folding a single sheet into squares, began blotting her face. A few strands of her long brown hair had fallen out of her ponytail, but she seemed otherwise fine. At least physically. Cove put his hands back on the wheel and prepared to retrace his route back home. After giving Riley a few moments of peace to clean herself up, he felt the need to confirm the information he’d been given earlier.
“What happened with practice?” he asked, “I thought you guys weren’t finished until six.”
Riley was looking out the window ahead of them, one hand fidgeting with the zipper on her gym bag. “Coach Burgiss got hurt,” she said simply. “We were let out early.”
Cove’s eyes widened at the news. “Is everyone else okay? What happened?”
“Everyone’s fine,” she said in a hollow voice. She dragged her feet along the floor mats so they were closer to her seat, effectively shrinking her frame. It was something Riley did when she felt vulnerable - a hold over from her martial arts training. When she spoke again, Cove could barely hear her over the windshield wipers.
“I dropped the bar on his foot.”
Cove was privy enough to Riley’s training to understand that “the bar” referred to the seven foot long, forty-five pound barbell that the wrestlers and other student athletes used in weight-lifting exercises. It could be used alone, or loaded up with weight plates to reach hundreds of pounds of resistance. He’d seen Riley deadlift before, and could imagine how much damage something that heavy could do. A lesser part of him was tempted to inquire about the outcome of the injury, but it was obvious from Riley’s abnormal demeanor that doing so would be neither wise nor appreciated.
He opened his mouth to say something, but only a sigh escaped. Everything he thought of sounded contrived. He could say it wasn’t her fault, he knew she would argue that. Riley had a high degree of personal responsibility, and it was beginning to make sense to him why she was acting so strangely. Eventually, he settled on the only thing she couldn’t argue about.
“You should have told me, I’d have come earlier. You didn’t need to go out in the rain.”
She shrugged and wouldn’t look at him.
Cove didn’t like it, but he didn’t want to upset her any further either. The rain was picking up and it was his first priority to get them home safely. He needed to focus.
For several minutes, the car was filled with silence, save for the patter of the rain and the squeak of the wiper blades. All the usual shops and other businesses filed by, distorted by a mosaic of rain droplets. Riley was watching these, facing away from Cove, when she broke their brief truce.
“I did it on purpose.”
Cove’s head turned sharply at her words. “Wha...what? Riley-”
Before he could get out even one of the flood of questions entering his mind, Riley’s face turned to front of the car and her voice got high. Her posture was tense now, aggressive.
“Coach Burgiss is a pervert,” she spat.
Cove’s confusion with the situation only deepened at the outburst. He looked over and tried searching Riley’s face for answers, but it was covered by the stoic mask she wore when competing. A light behind her eyes was burning, but her skin was pale and taut. A heavy feeling began gathering in Cove’s stomach.
“What do you mean?” he asked shakily. His tone was bewildered, but something in his soul screamed caution.
Riley repeated herself, brows drawn low as she glared at a memory in her mind. “He’s a pervert! I heard him talking to Mel - I saw him touch her.”
Goosebumps ran over Cove’s skin, and his hands on the wheel went clammy. Mel was Riley’s teammate; a blonde girl a year ahead of them. Still unsure, but with an undeniable sinking feeling, he tried to rationalize what he was hearing.
“He’s your coach,” Cove posited, “Doesn’t he have to? To teach you form and stuff?”
Riley’s head shook wildly, her voice even sharper. “That’s not what’s happening. It’s gross! He wouldn’t leave her alone, so I got rid of him.”
Cove struggled to drive and process what he was hearing at the same time. His whole body felt wound like a top, strained with the dangerous task of choosing his words in this suddenly very serious conversation.
“You mean he touches you...like...” his throat constricted. Just as it had been only a moment before, his options for verbal expression seemed insufficient. Every phrasing felt, as Riley had put it, “gross” and he felt gross for asking, but at the same time, the emerging adult in him knew it was imperative to do so. “Like...a boyfriend?”
“A boyfriend nobody asked for,” Riley shot back, still staring forward like a machine.
She was angry, and with her revelation, Cove could write the narrative of what had happened in practice that afternoon. Riley saw her friend being taken advantage of, and being of sound morals, Riley found a way to stop it – at least temporarily. The “accident” was no accident at all, but rather, her attempt to defend someone from an appalling situation she wasn’t sure how else to handle. To Cove, however, the course of action seemed obvious, and it didn’t make sense to him why his very practical friend hadn’t taken it.
“Why didn’t you tell the other coaches?” he asked her.
Riley was quiet for a time. Her gaze dropped to the floorboards and she hugged her bag to her chest. “I don’t think they’d believe me. And I only saw it once.”
Cove considered this answer. Riley had no history as a trouble maker, and was not known to lie, but then again, she was still an adolescent. If she were to come forward, it would be the word of a student against a senior member of faculty. What’s more, her allegation wasn’t a simple one of violation of school policies, but rather, a criminal one, for which there very serious consequences. He wondered if perhaps it was fear of how a formal investigation might affect her friend that made Riley attempt her own solutions. Mel might not want it known what had been done to her.
Cove bit his lip. With a sigh, he pulled to the shoulder and put the car in park. He turned in his seat to face his friend and spoke as firmly as his crumbling spirit would allow. “Riley, where is Coach Burgiss now?”
“Hospital,” she said meekly.
“Okay...and Mel?”
Riley shrugged. “Went home, I guess.”
“Do you have her number?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said, even though he wasn’t at all assured of that. His heart was pounding a mile a minute, and his chest was so restricted he could barely talk. His mind was racing. In the past, it had been Riley who handled things when they got heavy. Now that the tables were turned, the pressure he felt was suffocating.
“You have to tell your moms, Riley,” he told her, “Coach Burgiss will be back – they’ll put a cast or crutches or whatever on him and he’ll come back. I know you like to handle things, I know you’re tough, but you can’t fight this alone, and you can’t protect everyone. What if he tries that with someone else? What if he tries it with you?”
Riley jumped like she’d been struck. Her eyes met his for the first time since getting into the car, and Cove felt his heart stop.
“Oh my god,” he whispered, an icy feeling crawling up his spine, “He has hasn’t he? This started with you didn’t it?”
A wail warring with anguish and rage tore from his throat. “Riley!”
Whatever mental reserves Riley had been running on exhausted themselves at that point. Her face fell and hot tears flooded over the edges of her eyelids. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish, with no sound, and Cove’s heart shattered. He’d never seen Riley cry before. Not when she found out her biological parents were dead, not when she stepped on a broken bottle at the beach and had to get stitches…not ever. And he hated it.
“Why didn’t you tell someone?” he demanded, more harshly than he’d intended, “Why didn’t you tell me?!”
Riley’s crying got worse, and her voice came in sobs. “I thought...if told you...you wouldn’t like me anymore. That you’d...think I was...dir-...Dir-”
Every hitch in her breath was a knife cutting in his heart. Dirty, he concluded. She thought he’d think she was dirty.
Without another word, Cove turned the key and, hands shaking, continued their journey.
“I’m taking you home,” he said defiantly. In defiance of what he wasn’t sure, but there was a fury in him he’d never experienced before, and he wanted Riley somewhere he knew was always safe for her – his place.
He head was so clouded on the final leg of the drive that the car was in the driveway before he realized it. It was the sound of silence that brought him around again. The engine had stopped, and so too, had Riley’s crying. She made no attempt to exit, her expression brittle. Every word he spoke to her was pained by a solid lump in his throat.
“Come on, Riley,” he coaxed softly.
Riley looked at him and shook her head in panic. Through their shared bond, he could pick up on what it was that was bothering her.
“To my room,” he explained, “We can deal with your moms later.”
It was inevitable that the adults in their lives would have to be called upon to rectify a situation of the current severity, but it didn’t have to be right then, when Riley was still so raw. As he helped her out of the car, he was thankful for his father’s absence. He didn’t particularly want anyone else around right then, either.
He walked Riley inside and lead her to the bathroom. It was apparent by her robotic movements and dazed expression that, this time, he was going to have fulfill the roles she had for him so many times before: the problem-solver, the comforter, the protector.
He turned on the shower and patiently waited to adjust the water to a suitable temperature before turning back to his friend.
“You’re freezing,” he said, “Get in the shower and toss your clothes outside. I’ll put them in the dryer. You can borrow some of mine ‘til they’re done, okay?”
Riley only nodded in response. He gave her hand a squeeze on his way out of the bathroom. “I’ll be right outside, okay?”
In the kitchen, he reheated the goulash his father had prepared before leaving. Though he wasn’t sure Riley would be willing to eat anything in her upset state, he made the portions large enough to filling for the both of them. As he sat a pair of bowls on his kitchen table, he caught his reflection in the glass surface and noted how spooked he looked.
“I’m an idiot,” he muttered.
He didn’t know how to cope with what was happening. Was anything he was doing helpful? Was he just making it worse? How would he convince Riley to tell her parents? With each passing minute, he was more and more sure that this is what had to happen, but he knew how painful it would be for Riley, and he was loathe to force that on her. She had already endured something awful, and he...he had been clueless it was even happening.
The thought made him choke. He and Riley shared everything. How could she keep something so terrible from him? Rationally, he knew it must have been Riley’s way of looking out for him, and not adding to his troubles, which now seemed petty in comparison, but it left a hole in his heart. He felt pathetic that Riley, whom he had turned to so many times in their childhood, didn’t feel safe enough to treat him in kind.
He covered his face with his hands and fought back a sob. That moment was gone, he told himself. What happened had happened, and all that mattered now was how he dealt with it. What mattered now was putting an end to the abuse, and he wouldn’t fail Riley in that. Not again.
He took a moment to compose himself before returning to the bathroom. The shower was still running, but the sound was even and uninterrupted. Concerned, he knocked on the door.
“Riley?”
No response.
Suddenly afraid, he opened the door without further hesitation and found Riley as he had left her, standing fully dressed in the middle of the floor. To his dismay, the minute she saw his face, she started crying again.
“I’m scared,” she said.
Cove felt a prickly sensation behind his eyes.
“There’s no one here, Riley,” he said sadly, “Just you and me.”
Unconvinced, or perhaps merely unable to be in that space, in that time, Riley stood still and mute as a statue.
At a loss for what else to do, he kicked off his shoes and crossed the bathroom to stand in the tub, the hot water turning his jeans a dark wash. He held out his hand and beckoned Riley in after him. Slowly, with tentative steps, she moved toward the shower. He held her arm, solid with muscle, as she put one foot over the edge of the tub, and then the other. When she was on both feet, he wrapped her a tight hug, and laid his cheek on the top of her head.
“I’m here,” he said softly, “I’ll always be here.”
Through the steam, he saw her face relax, bit by bit, as the water soaked her clothes and warmed her up. The jarring of her hyperventilating body subsided, and she leaned into him in return. He brushed stray hair away from her face, and rocked her gently from side to side, shifting their weight from foot to foot. He wasn’t sure if she was still crying or not, but the faint taste of salt at the edge of his lips was a sure sign that he was.