Chapter Twelve #2
"Do you, though." She came around in front of me again and got down so we were eye to eye, the way I'd done to Theo on the bench, and there's a thing that happens when somebody uses your own move on you, it pries something open.
"Because here's what I think you are, Cade Lawson.
I think somebody taught you very young that you were only worth what you could absorb.
That the love was for the hitting and the silence and never for you, and you believed them, because you were a kid, and kids believe the people holding the food.
" Her hand came up to my jaw. "And now you're a grown man who will literally let his own spine crack before he'll let anyone see he needs a single thing, because needing is the one move you were trained out of. Who was it."
"Don't."
"Who taught you needing was weakness."
The whole room was the closed door and the lamp and her. I'd never said his name to anyone who wasn't a coach or a teammate, never as a wound, only ever as a fact, the way you cite a source.
"My dad," I said.
And then, because the door was closed, because she'd seen the disc, because there's a thing that happens when you set down one stone and find you can lift the next: "He played.
Small college, blew out a knee, never made it past it, and he—he loved me most when I was useful.
When I hit somebody. When I took a shot and got back up and didn't cry.
He'd light up, this whole face I spent my childhood chasing.
And when I cried, or hurt, or wanted comfort, anything soft, he'd go cold, like I'd embarrassed us both, like I'd let the side down.
So I learned. I taught myself to feel nothing he could see, and it turned out I was good at it, I was so good at it that it made me good at football, and the better I got at football the more men there were lining up to be my dad—Voss, the boosters, the whole machine—all of them lighting up when I hit somebody and going cold if I needed anything.
I built a whole life out of the one trick.
" My voice did a thing I hated. "And the trick is you forget how to turn it off.
You forget there was a kid in there before the trick.
I forgot, Sloane. I haven't been able to find that kid in years. I'm not sure he's still in there."
She didn't say anything for a moment.
Then she climbed back into my lap, careful of the back now, and she put her arms around me—not a prelude to anything, just around me, the way I'd never once let happen, a thing with no exchange rate, no hit at the end of it, no thing I had to do to earn it—and she pressed her mouth to the corner of my eye where I had not let myself do the thing I was very close to doing, and she said, into my temple, fierce and low:
"He's still in there. I see him. He's right here, being a complete pain in my ass, refusing to pick a favorite color."
And I laughed, wet and broken and real, with my face in her neck and her hands in my hair, and the wall was all the way down, all of it, every brick, and the terrifying thing wasn't that she'd seen me.
The terrifying thing was that nothing bad happened.
I'd spent my whole life believing the wall was the only thing holding the hit off.
And here I was, walls down, completely seen, completely undefended, and the only thing that came through the gap was her, careful of my spine, calling me a pain in the ass, holding me like I was something you keep instead of something you use.
We didn't have sex that night. We got close—we always got close—but it turned into something else somewhere in there, the two of us tangled up on her couch with the lamp on and her heartbeat under my ear, talking until two in the morning about nothing, about her mother and my grandmother and the diner forty minutes out of town and whether I'd ever actually liked football or just liked being good at the only thing anyone ever clapped for.
She fell asleep mid-sentence with her hand fisted in my shirt the way she did when we kissed, like even unconscious she was pulling me toward her, and I lay there in the lamplight not sleeping, looking at her face with the sunshine off it, just the realness, the soft furious mouth, and I thought:
This is the thing they take.
Every time. This exact thing. This is what the world comes for.
And I made myself a promise in the dark that I'd spend the rest of the season keeping badly: that whatever it cost, however it ended, whatever I had to absorb—this time, the one time, I wasn't going to let them have it.
I should have known better. I'd been trained by experts.
But for one night, walls down, a girl asleep on my chest with my secret held safe behind her teeth, I let myself believe I could protect the one thing I'd never been allowed to want.
Then her phone lit up on the coffee table, face-up where I could see it without meaning to, a text from a number with no name:
they know you talked to reyes. stop now. last nice warning.
And the kid I'd just found went very quiet, and the wall came back up brick by brick, and I sat there in the lamplight with her asleep and trusting on my chest and understood that the part of my life where I got to just feel things had lasted exactly one night.
I didn't wake her. I memorized the number instead, the no-name number, and I deleted nothing and I told her nothing, and that was the first brick of the worst wall I ever built, the one I built between us while she slept, telling myself it was to keep the fear off her.
I let her have the sleep.
It was the last gentle thing I'd get to give her for a while.
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