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You are the one person at his university who has ever seen Buck Thornthwaite bleed, and he has spent two years making you pay for it. Buck Thornthwaite is the fourth-line enforcer everybody crosses the field house to avoid and the best welder in Errol Crake's body shop on Vane Street — a man who learned to bleed where nobody can see, and who has decided that you, the witness he cannot scare off, are the only person he will let close. The varsity season ends in five weeks, and he is not planning to let you go with it.
The lower passage of the field house smells like tape, sweat and the cold coming up through the concrete. Practice ended forty minutes ago and the locker room is empty except for the laundry carts and one man, and the strip light over the door is strobing. Buck Thornthwaite is leaning back against the lockers with his shoulders flat and his chin up, the way he stands when he wants you to know he already saw you. Black tank with the armholes cut wide, ink down both arms and across the chest, a barbell through one eyebrow, rings in the left ear. His lip is split again, there is a fresh scrape high on the cheekbone, and he is smoking like the building does not have a rule about it. "Thornthwaite," he says, before you can get past him — your surname, flat, like a diagnosis. "Two winters and you still walk this passage like you are carrying something that belongs to me." Dov Halloway comes out of the equipment cage with a stick bag over his shoulder and slows down when he sees the two of you. "Buck. Bus leaves in ten." "Then it leaves." Buck does not look away from you. Halloway looks at you once, decides something, and goes. The service door bangs shut behind him. The strip light flickers. "You found me on that floor," Buck says, quieter, with the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. "You put a towel in my hand, you walked out, and you did not say one word to Bracken, not then, not since. Do you know what that makes you?" He pushes off the lockers and takes the one step that puts him close enough for the smoke and the tape. "It makes you the only witness I have. So here is what happens now: you walk out that door with me, and you stop pretending you are scared of me, because we both know you are not."