Chapter 12
Caleb
She's still here in the morning.
That's the first thing I clock, before my eyes are even all the way open.
The weight of her on the other side of the mattress.
The fact that she didn't bolt in the night.
For a guy whose whole life is people leaving before sunup, a girl still in the bed at dawn is about the closest thing to a miracle I've got.
“You're staring,” she says, without turning around.
“I'm admiring, especially that ass of yours. There's a difference.”
“From a man who claims he notices everything, why are you gawking at an ass you probably have watched a million times?”
I smile to myself. She’s right.
“You’re right, but this is different. I’m committing every part of it to memory.” I prop up on an elbow. “How long have you been awake?”
“A while.” She rolls to face me, blanket up to her chin, and there's this nervous thing she does with her lip, like she's never woken up to a half-decent guy (good).
“Your blinds do a thing around six-forty.
The light comes through in stripes. It hits the far wall for about ten minutes, and then it's gone.”
“Yeah?”
“It's the best part of the day. Nobody's ever awake to see it.”
“I'm awake,” I say. “Actually, I’m normally at the rink by this time.”
“That’s right.” She looks at me a beat too long. “You are.”
I make her eggs. Toast not touching, because that's just how I do it now. She eats every bite in my T-shirt with her hair wrecked, off one of the two matching plates I bought yesterday.
It is, hands down, the best morning of my life. A mattress on the floor, a bare apartment, a girl who likes the light in stripes. That's more than I've ever had.
“You bought plates,” she says, like she just clocked it.
“Don't make it a thing.”
“You owned one plate three weeks ago. I ate off a cutting board.”
“And now there's two. When a guy buys a second plate, Dixon, he's planning to keep somebody around. That's the math.” I steal a triangle of her toast. She lets me, which from her, is basically a marriage proposal.
For about nine minutes, it's perfect. The day is brighter now, and the sun rises right in front of the open window. It’s probably going to be a scorcher. I catch her watching me watch it, and neither of us says a word, because some things you fuck up by talking.
Then her phone goes off on the counter, face up, and the whole room changes temperature.
DAD.
I watch it happen in real time. She sets the fork down. Her spine goes straight. The girl in my shirt folds up small and gone, and the compliance officer steps into her place in the two seconds it takes her to swipe and answer.
“Hey. No, I'm up.” Flat. Even. Perfect. “Today?
I thought the Carolina people weren't back for weeks.” She goes still.
Listens. Her eyes cut to me, fast. “His apartment. You want to do it at his apartment?” A pause that lasts a year.
“No. No, that's fine. It's smart, it shows the staff he's settled, he's stable. What time?” Another pause. “Forty minutes? Okay, I’ll call him and make sure he’s ready.”
She hangs up.
I can tell that the little lie at the end of her conversation was extremely hard for her to say. Jasmine doesn’t lie.
And now the kitchen goes very quiet.
“The scout moved his trip up,” she says.
“He flew in last night. My father wants to walk him through the whole thing this morning. It’s something he’s really good at.
He’s doing the same for Neo, Shane, and Bass.
He gives the scouts a picture-perfect setup of the kid they're betting on.” She's already standing.
“They're coming here. To show off how put-together you are. In forty minutes.”
It takes my brain a second to catch all the way up, and when it does, the floor drops out, because I do the geometry the same time she does.
Her car's in the lot. Her shoes are by my door. There are two plates in the sink, two cups on the counter. There’s a girl in my shirt who is also, technically, the compliance officer assigned to keep me out of exactly this type of shit.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Forty minutes. We can–”
“Thirty-eight now.”
She moves like someone defusing a bomb. She gathers her clothes off my floor, fast and methodical, with no wasted motion.
I'm right behind her, wiping down the counter, dumping her coffee, shoving the second plate to the back of the cabinet as if a scout will even give a shit that I have a girlfriend.
“Your car,” I say, stressed. “Your dad knows your car.”
“I parked on the next street over.” She's already buttoning her clothes and smoothing her curls back into a low ponytail. “I always park on the next street over. Force of habit.”
And that shit lands wrong in my chest, that she's been planning her own disappearance from my place since the first night. That loving me already came with an exit route mapped before she ever walked in.
“Jasmine.”
“I need my left shoe, and why are you calling me Jasmine?”
“By the radiator and because that’s your name. Can you please look at me for a second?”
“I don't have a second, Dixon. I have,” she checks the phone, “thirty-five minutes and a four-minute walk, and I have to be standing in that lot looking like I came from my apartment, not yours.” She finds the shoe.
Steps into it. “If I'm late, he notices. If I'm flushed, he notices. He notices things too. It’s why he’s a good coach, and it's the one thing we have in common.”
“So what will you tell him?” I say. “When he asks why you're already here. Why is the compliance officer at the player's apartment at seven in the morning?”
She stops. Just for a second. And I watch her build it, the lie, right there in real time. Hell, maybe lying isn’t that hard for her.
“That I came early to do a conduct walkthrough before the visit,” she says.
“To make sure there was nothing in the apartment that would embarrass the program.
That it's my job, and I take it seriously.” She takes a quick breath.
“It's even true. That is my job. He'll believe it because it's the most boring possible version, and the boring version is always the one he believes about me.”
I hate that.
“It’s that easy?”
“None of it’s easy.” She gets her bag. “It's just what we have to do.”
And that's the part that takes me out. I got that one all wrong. It’s not just that she can lie to him, but that she's so good at it. I wonder what else she’s lied about? Has she lied to me yet?
“Hey.” I catch her hand at the door. “Come here. One second. I'm cashing in the rule.”
“Which rule?”
“You don't disappear on me. Not even into the work. Especially not into the work.”
She looks down at our hands. “This isn't disappearing.
This is me keeping you in the game. There's a difference, and you're going to have to learn it, because it's what we are now.” She nods at the door, the lot, the thirty minutes between me and a scout on my stairs.
“Every good morning ends with somebody walking up to take it back.”
Fuck, I hate that even more.
The phone buzzes again in her hand. She looks at it, and the blood goes out of her face. I’ve never seen such a strong reaction from her unless she’s coming for me.
“He's early,” she says. “He's in the damn lot. He's early.”
There's no walk-to-the-next-street version of this anymore. There's no clean exit. There's a coach and a Carolina scout standing in my parking lot, and the only door out of my apartment empties straight into them.
“Okay.” I'm thinking fast, which I'm good at when it's a game and useless at when it's her. “You go down. You're the compliance officer. You did the walkthrough, you're leaving, and you brief them on your way out. Boring version. You said it yourself, he always believes the boring version.”
“How did I get here so fast, Dixon?”
“People telling the truth don't explain shit. Stick to the script. You said it yourself, he’s going to believe the most boring version you give him.”
She looks at me, and for one second, I see how hard it’s going to be for her to walk down those stairs and lie to her father's face with me standing behind her. To take the realest thing she's ever done and call it work in front of the one person she's spent her whole life trying to be enough for.
“For the record,” she says, quietly, “I had a great night.”
“A fantastic night.”
“Lock the door behind me.” Already stepping back into officer mode, piece by piece. “When they come up, so it looks like I locked it on my way out.”
“It's my door.”
“Lock it anyway. Humor me. It's the kind of detail he checks.”
I watch from the window like a coward, because going down there would blow the whole thing, and there's nothing I can do but stand in the best morning of my life and watch it get cleaned up.
She comes out the front of the building into the gray light, and she's perfect.
Clipboard energy with no clipboard. She doesn't rush.
She lifts a hand to her father, all business, says something I can't hear, and I watch Coach Dixon's whole posture ease.
He nods and turns to the man in the good jacket beside him and says something that the scout likes.
The scout nods, seemingly impressed, and the three of them stand in my parking lot at seven in the morning, as if everything is exactly what it looks like.
I take a beat.
It works.
Her plan is working perfectly.
She walks in the opposite direction of the lot without explaining why, and not one of them thinks to ask, and that's when it lands on me. She did her part, and now I need to do mine.
Coach claps the scout on the back and points up at my building, and they start for the stairs, and I've got maybe forty seconds to stop being a guy who got everything he wanted last night and start being the kid with one strike left and a Carolina contract that’s mine if I act accordingly.
I look at the apartment. Two plates back to one. My bed made fast and ugly. Window cracked to lose the smell of her. The best night of my life scrubbed down to nothing in under forty minutes.
I lock the door because she asked me to. Then a few seconds later, I unlock it again, because they're knocking, and I open it up with a grin I don't feel and shake the hand of the man who's about to give me everything I ever wanted…except her.
“Coach,” I say with a faux smile. “Right on time.”
“Caleb.” He looks past me into the place, the bare, clean nothing of it, and nods like it confirms something good about me. “Looks squared away. Jasmine said you've kept it clean.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. And there it is. My first lie. Smooth as hers. “Probably, because I’m not even spending much time here. All I do is eat, sleep, and drink hockey.”
What’s crazy is I stand there shaking hands with my whole future while my whole present walks to her car alone, and I finally understand the math she's been trying to teach me since the gala.
It's not that we might get caught. It's that we won't. We're good at this, especially her, maybe too good.
A few weeks ago, I had nothing, and nothing to protect.
Now there's a contract walking through my door and a girl walking away from it, both of them real, both of them mine, and pointed dead at each other.
Somebody's going to have to choose. It'll be me. It's always me.
I just used to break the good thing on purpose. Now I’m learning, it’s way worse when the world lines up to break it for you.
“Come on in,” I tell the scout from Carolina. “Let me show you around.”