Chapter Twelve
Cade
?
For two weeks we were good at it.
That's the thing nobody tells you about a secret—it's fun, at first, before it starts eating.
We were excellent liars and now we had a project to be excellent at together.
At practice she was press and I was a wall and we gave each other nothing, not a look, not a flicker, and I got so good at not looking at Sloane Pierce that the not-looking became its own way of looking, a discipline, a held breath I carried around all day like a coal in my mouth.
Then at night a door would close somewhere—her place, mine, once the back booth of a diner forty minutes out of town where nobody knew either of us—and the wall would come down and I'd get to be the other thing. The thing with a witness.
The diner was the one I think about most.
It was hers. She'd found it the way she found everything, by being curious in a place nobody expected curiosity.
A chrome box off a county road, open till two, a waitress named Donna who called everybody hon and had given up being surprised by anyone decades ago.
We'd drive out separately and meet in the back booth, and for the length of a plate of bad fries and a milkshake we'd split because Sloane refused to order her own, we got to be a thing that existed in the world.
"Okay," she said, the first time, stealing a fry off my plate even though she'd lost the coin toss for the basket. "Twenty questions. Real ones. The kind they don't put in the media guide. I'll start easy. Favorite color."
"I don't have one."
"Everyone has one."
"I have a number." I stole the fry back. "Twenty-seven was taken when I got here. By a senior. He graduated and I took it and now it's mine and I don't know what I am without it, which is probably a thing a therapist would have opinions about."
She'd gone still, the way she did when I accidentally said a true thing, the reporter in her sitting up even off the record. "That's not an answer to favorite color."
"It's a better answer."
"It really is." She tilted her head. "Blue, by the way. Yours. You wear it whenever you get to pick, which is almost never, which means when you do, it means something. Navy hoodie. Blue laces. The one shirt that isn't team-issued." She popped the fry. "I notice things. It's a sickness."
I'd looked at her across a chrome table under bad fluorescent light, this girl who'd clocked my favorite color off my shoelaces while I was still insisting I didn't have one, and I'd felt the specific terror of being seen turn, slowly, into something I didn't have a word for, something warm and unbearable, like standing too close to a fire after a lifetime of cold.
"Green," I said.
"What?"
"Your turn. Favorite color. And don't say you don't have one, I'll know you're lying, you've got a green dress you wore to the booster thing and you stood up straighter in it."
She'd laughed, surprised, caught, the sunshine cracking to show the real thing under it, and Donna had drifted over with the check and said, you two are cute, flat, certain, the way only a woman who's seen everything can say a thing, and we'd both gone quiet, because you two was a sentence that wasn't allowed to be true anywhere with better lighting, and out here, for an hour, it was.
That's what the secret was, underneath. People think a thing like that is about the sex, and it gets there, it absolutely gets there.
But underneath it was just that for one hour a day I got to set the whole apparatus down—the number, the file Voss kept, the hand on my neck, my father's voice—and be a twenty-two-year-old in a diner booth getting his favorite color guessed off his shoelaces by a girl who made fun of him until he laughed and then kissed the laugh off his face like it was hers to collect.
I'd have done anything to protect that.
I did, eventually. We'll get there. It cost more than I had.
?
The discipline of the daylight was its own thing.
You don't understand how loud a held breath gets until you have to hold it for fourteen hours.
She'd come to practice in her credential and I'd be on the field being the wall, and there'd be a whole stadium of distance between us and it would feel like none, like the air itself had gotten thinner in a line drawn straight from her to me.
Once she laughed at something an equipment guy said—her real laugh, the one with the floor under it—and it carried across the field, and I missed a read on a route I'd run a thousand times because for half a second I was a person who'd heard the girl he loved laugh, instead of a defensive back, and the coordinator screamed my number and I welcomed it, the screaming, because it put me back inside the lines.
Miles knew. Of course Miles knew; Miles had eyes and a copy editor named Priya and the survival instinct of a golden retriever.
He never said it out loud. He just started doing this thing where he'd cover for me—Cade's getting treatment, Cade's lifting, Cade left already—a hundred small lies in my direction, the way you cover for a teammate without being asked, and one night he sat on our counter eating cereal at midnight while I came in from her place trying to look like I'd been at the library, and he said, not looking up, "I'm not gonna say anything.
You know that, right? Whatever this is. I'd take it to the grave.
" And then, "But if she's the reason you've smiled twice this month, which is twice more than the previous calendar year, then I like her, and I'm on her side, and if you screw it up I'm gonna be real disappointed in you, is all. "
I hadn't known what to say to that. So I said nothing, which is what I say to most things, and he'd thrown a piece of cereal at my head and gone to bed, and that was Miles telling me he loved me, in the only language either of us spoke.
?
She found the back on a Thursday.
We were on her couch—Brielle had a key and a habit of texting first, which was the only reason any of this was survivable—and it had gotten to the place it kept getting to, the place where the careful burned off and my whole body forgot it was supposed to be a controlled thing.
She was in my lap and my shirt was somewhere across the room and her hands were learning me, and they'd been avoiding the lower-left of my back without me telling them to, the way you'd skirt a bruise on instinct, except this time her palm pressed flat over it and I made a sound that wasn't the good kind.
She went still instantly.
"That's not me being—" she started, and pulled back to look at my face, and read it, because she read everything.
"Cade. That's the thing from the wall. The thing you hissed at.
" She was already climbing off me, all the heat draining out into something fiercer and more frightening, which was her full attention. "How bad."
"It's nothing."
"You sound like Theo." Quiet. It landed like a slap, because she meant it to, because she'd watched me crouch in front of Theo and hate that exact word, nothing, in his mouth. "You sound exactly like Theo. How bad, Cade."
And here is where I should have lied. I'd lied about it to Wes, to the team doctor, to the disc itself most mornings. I had a whole life built on the load-bearing silence. My father's voice was right there, easy, automatic, nobody pays you to talk, Cade.
Instead I turned around and let her see it.
I don't know why. Maybe because the room was warm and the door was closed and she'd already seen the worse, more naked thing weeks ago in a tunnel.
Maybe because I was tired the way Theo was tired, the bone-deep kind, the kind no ice fixes.
I turned my bare back to a girl who was writing a story about exactly this and let her look at the place where I was actually breaking.
She didn't gasp. She didn't make it a thing. She just put two fingers on it, light, the way Wes did, except Wes was paid to and she wasn't, and she said, very evenly, "Tell me what it does."
"Lower disc. It—" The words were hard, not because of the rule, because they were words I'd never said out loud to anyone.
"Some mornings the left leg's slow to wake up.
There's a—pins and needles, down to the ankle, on the bad days.
I take a hit wrong and it's lightning, all the way down, like somebody ran a wire from my spine to my heel and plugged it in.
I've been managing it since September." I stared at her wall, at the picture frame still crooked from the night I'd put her against it.
"If I tell the medical staff, they flag me.
If they flag me, Voss benches me. If he benches me, the scouts stop coming, and if the scouts stop coming, the draft goes away, and the draft is the only door out of the life I'm from.
So I don't tell them. I take a shot before games.
Toradol. It turns the lightning down to a hum.
I play on a back that a doctor who wasn't owned would shut down for the year. "
Her fingers were very still on my spine.
"So you're Theo," she said softly. "You're the story you're trying to help me tell. You're Reyes, three years from now, in some hardware store, except you'll have done it to yourself and called it discipline."
"I know what I am."