Chapter 3 #2
Next card: the charity. I brace for the line every athlete keeps loaded — the wing they funded, the photo, the number. He gives a kid’s first name instead, and a ward, and the specific thing the kid said to him on a bad day, and for a sentence and a half he forgets to make any of it about himself.
I redirect before the feed can turn a sick kid into content. He lets me. He also clocks that I did it to protect the boy and not the optics, and something in him settles, and I call it performance, because the alternative is a feeling I’m not equipped to hold.
I reach into my clutch for the pack of spearmint gum I keep for reasons I have stopped examining, take one, and offer the pack across the table out of a manners reflex I will be auditing later.
Carter looks at the pack like it’s evidence. “Flat-white spearmint.”
“It’s gum, not a personality.”
“No, it’s—” He takes a piece. Turns the wrapper over. “This is a specific gum. Nobody picks this on purpose. You have a brand.” He says it like he’s found a door in a wall everyone told him was solid. “Filing that away.”
“Don’t file me.”
“Too late. New column.”
“Technical reset,” the headphone man calls. “Two minutes, folks, batteries.”
The light drops. And so does Carter.
It’s the fastest register change I have ever watched on a human being. The grin doesn’t vanish so much as get set down, gently, like a tool he doesn’t need for the next thing. He leans in, elbows on the table, and asks me a real question.
“Clause six. The forty-eight-hour advance notice.” He’s quiet, fast, none of it for an audience that’s no longer watching. “That’s not standard. You built that. Why?”
“You read all nine.”
“I read all nine twice. Why?”
I open my mouth to give him the approved language and instead the truth walks out. “Because spontaneity is how people get hurt on camera. You take away the surprise, you take away most of the damage.”
“Who got surprised?”
“That’s not in the framework.”
“No.” He doesn’t push. He lets it sit, the way you let a true thing sit when you’ve decided not to win the point — and I have spent my entire career reading the half-second before an answer, and his isn’t a man calculating the most useful version.
It’s a man putting something away to keep me from having to.
“It’s a good clause,” he says. “Most people would’ve fought you on it because it’s inconvenient.
They’d be wrong. You’re protecting people who don’t know they need it yet. ”
Nobody says that to me. People say meticulous in the tone they’d use for difficult. They say thorough and mean exhausting. They do not look at the thing I’m actually good at and call it what it is, out loud, with the cameras off and nothing to gain.
I want to be wanted for my mind. I cut that want out of myself with a scalpel three years ago and here’s a man on the wrong badge handing it back across a breadbasket like it’s nothing, like it’s obvious, and my whole body files it under a heading I don’t have.
“There’s a second clause,” I hear myself say. “On joint statements. You’d hate it.”
“Tell me.”
And I do. I answer a second question I’d promised myself I wouldn’t, and a third, and the headphone man says “back in thirty” before I notice the break is ending, and the worst part is how easy it was, how clean, how unlike anything that’s supposed to be happening here.
“Thirty seconds,” I say, and pick the grin back up for him, a courtesy. “Resume your charm offensive.”
“You first.” He’s still looking at me, not the camera, one degree off true. “You’re better at it than you think.”
“I’m better at everything than I think. It’s the only sustainable amount of confidence.”
The light comes back up. We finish the dinner. Priya’s text lands in my clutch like a small grenade: a screenshot of the feed, a single word, ELECTRIC, and seventeen heart emojis I didn’t ask anyone to feel.
At the door, Carter offers his hand. Cameras on us, the manufactured close of a manufactured night. I take it.
He holds it one beat longer than the script requires. Not pressing. Not performing. Just there, warm and steady, present in a way that has nothing to do with the lenses — and I pull back, clean, on the count I decide, because I am the one who decides counts.
“Goodnight, Reinhardt.”
“Two-one,” he says, soft, just for me. “I got one back.”
He did. The off-camera question, the thing he said about the clause. He scored and he knows it and he’s not going to be tacky enough to explain why.
I walk to my car with the talking-points card still in my clutch, unused, a fortress I forgot to defend. I get in. I put my key in the ignition.
I sit there for four minutes before I start the engine, and I tell myself it’s the heat.
My phone lights on the passenger seat. Priya again.
Revised timeline attached! Next step: joint weekend at ATL Forge training facility. 2 days, shared media schedule. You’re already on the credential list — sent your name over this morning. SO glad we locked this in before tonight even happened!! ??
Before tonight even happened. She put my name on the list this morning.
Decided, filed, sent — a whole weekend in the enemy’s building, two days of shared air with a man who reads clauses like they’re poetry, and nobody asked me, again, because nobody is going to ask me at any point in this entire campaign.
I look at the gum pack in my clutch. One piece short.
Two-one.
I start the car. I do not tell him the part where I’ve started counting too.
And I do not let myself think about the coffee order until I’m on the interstate back to the hotel, and then I think about nothing else for the whole nine miles.