Chapter 21
Caleb
I make it to my truck before my hands start shaking, and then I sit in the lot and don't drive anywhere, because there's nowhere to drive.
I know this part. I'm an expert at this part.
This is where the old me finds a bar, or finds a guy with a smart ass mouth, or finds a warm pussy to sink into.
Years of muscle memory are all pulling in the same direction, all of it whispering the same thing: You already lost everything. Might as well go out with a bang.
There's a list of hockey players across a few states, including this one, who'd be glad to give me the fight I'm hunting for. I bet I could find one in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes and a split knuckle, and the whole thing stops hurting inside and only on the outside.
There's a bottle of Vodka in the glovebox, too.
I put it there back in September, for exactly this kind of night, the kind I was always sure was coming because one always is.
I look at it a long time. I don't open it.
I don't know what that makes me. Somebody she'd be proud of, maybe, which is a stupid thing to think about a girl who couldn’t pick me.
I sit in my truck and consider the next thing on my list: pussy. Not to be conceited or anything, but it would be so easy to walk across campus and find a girl willing to spend the night with me. I don’t make the rules, but girls love athletes.
Of course, that’s a stupid idea because I don’t want any woman underneath me but Jasmine. How the hell am I ever going to get over her?
My cell buzzes in my pocket. I should have shut it off back in the hallway, but I never did. It’s been ringing for the last fifteen minutes, and I’ve ignored it, but something tells me to take a look.
It’s Christian.
I almost let it ring out. I can't think of one thing on this earth harder than answering it, because twelve hours ago I promised him I wouldn’t do exactly what I did today.
Implode.
He told me to call him after the meeting, which he probably assumes is over by now. I didn't. So he's calling me.
I have to pick up.
“You didn't call.”
“No,” is all I respond with.
“I've been sitting by the phone since you texted me this morning, you were going in. So how bad was it?”
“Christian.”
He hears it. He's my brother. We both read tone like a second language because we learned it under the same roof for the same reasons.
“Tell me.”
The old me would protect him. I’d tell him it fell through, that the scout passed, and there’s nothing I could do. It would keep him from finding out his big brother torched the whole thing on purpose. But I don’t do that.
“I did it,” I say instead. “The thing you told me not to do. You made me say it out loud twice, Chris, and I walked into that office and did it anyway. The contract's gone. I lost it in about ninety seconds, and it's on me, all of it, every bit.”
The line goes quiet. I can hear the TV going behind him, faint, and one of the girls laughing at something, and it makes me feel even shittier, the sound of the lives I was trying to protect with this contract.
“Okay,” he says finally. “Start at the beginning. What actually happened in the room?”
So I tell him. Her dad pulling her off the assignment, calling her fucking names to her face, shrinking her down small while she stood there and took it.
Me not being able to sit still for it. Me telling him (and probably anyone within earshot) that I'm in love with her.
Her dad cutting me where I stood. And then her dad turning to her and asking, is it true, and her going real quiet.
“She froze,” I say. And saying it out loud, to him, is the first time I actually hear it.
“She didn't pick him, Christian. She froze.
She does that. When something's too big, when she gets looked at, sometimes she just shuts down. It’s easy to misread, but I know that about her.
I'm the one person on this planet who taught himself to read it, who knows it isn't a no, who's sat across from it a dozen times and waited her out and watched her come back.”
“And this morning?”
“This morning I looked at the one face on earth I can read, and I let my own insecurities get in the way instead. I walked out.” My voice drops. “She was sitting there screaming yes somewhere deep inside, and I couldn't give her the extra time she needed to come back to me.”
Fuck!
“I left the one person who was actually trying to stay.”
Christian's quiet for a second, then he speaks.
“You blow up over the stuff that matters,” he says.
“And then you run before anybody can see it mattered.
But you didn't drink today, right? You're sitting in that truck right now stone sober, calling me back when you could've done a lot of things to numb yourself. That’s not the brother who left Chicago.
So you're not all the way him. Not yet. There's still time to not turn into him.”
“Are the girls okay?” I ask, because this role-reversal of Christian counseling me is still hard to absorb.
“Watching their show. Bean’s been telling the whole school bus you’re going to Carolina.” He says it gently, not to twist the knife, but just because it's true.
“Let me tell her once I figure out how to tell a ten-year-old I choked.”
“You didn't choke. Choking's freezing up and not doing the thing.” A pause.
“You did too much of the thing. That's the opposite.
They aren't the same, and don't you go letting yourself pretend they are. And quit worrying about the money. We've been broke our whole lives, Caleb. We're good at broke. We just want you to be happy. In all of this, I hope you’re playing hockey because you love it and not just because it’s a paycheck.”
“I do love it,” I tell him. “But I love other things too.”
“Uh huh.”
“Let me go,” I say. “I think I got something really wrong today, and I gotta go look at it.”
“Then go look.” Like it's easy. Like it's a thing you just decide. He learned that from somebody. Probably me. “And call me when you figure it out. You’re not alone, remember?”
“Yeah.” My throat's shot. “Yeah, I remember.”
I hang up, take the phone, and turn the brightness of the screen all the way up for the first time since the hallway. There are a million notifications, but only one I care about.
Missed call. Missed call. Missed call. And under them, one message, from her.
Adams: It wasn't a no. I froze. It was never a no. Please.
I read it again. And again.
And the words gut me.
Because I didn't lose everything tonight.
I threw away the one thing that was trying to stay.