Chapter 12
Carter
Ifind out the plot of my own life the way the rest of the building does: thirdhand, from Earl, who heard it from the media coordinator, who heard it from a stylist holding a curling iron.
“Word is the big couple deal’s already done,” Earl says, not looking up from the bibs. “Signed before anybody asked the couple.”
So that’s how I learn that the terms Sloane and I sat on the phone building until midnight were a thing Priya sold to the sponsor two days before we started building them. I put down the coffee. I go find her.
***
Priya’s in the media suite, tablet up, three plans deep into a future I haven’t agreed to.
“You pitched the partnership before you showed it to us,” I say.
“I was being proactive.” She doesn’t look up. “The sponsor window was closing. Being proactive is literally my job, Carter. I anticipated your objections and I solved for them before they cost us the deal.”
“You make it sound like I went rogue. I closed a seven-figure partnership that makes both clubs look like geniuses for greenlighting this.” She finally glances up. “It’s not a lie, Carter. It’s a narrative. There’s a difference, and the difference is my whole profession.”
“The narrative has two people in it. You signed for both of them.”
“I optioned for both of them. There’s a—”
“If you say difference one more time I’m taking the curling iron.”
Something human crosses her face and is gone, recompiled into a dashboard. “Your engagement numbers are the best I’ve seen in four years in this league,” she says, as though that ends it, because to her it does.
“You anticipated us. So you decided for us. After the fact. Again.”
“I delivered a win. That’s the whole — proactive, again, sorry, I keep using the word, but it’s the right word.”
I don’t make it a joke. That’s the thing she notices, I can see her notice it, the absence of the grin where the grin always goes. “Do you have a single plan,” I ask, quiet, “that doesn’t involve telling two people what they’ve decided after you’ve decided it for them?”
She keeps her eyes on mine for a second. Then she goes back to the tablet, because she’s not a villain, she’s a true believer, and a true believer can’t hear you over the sound of being right. “It’s a great deal,” she says. “You’ll see.”
***
I go to Earl’s room because it’s the only room in the building where nobody’s three steps ahead of me.
I don’t have the notebook today. I leave it in the bag on purpose, some mornings, to prove I can. Earl folds the day’s kit and hums something low and I sit on the overturned crate and let the not-performing happen.
“A man can be part of a plan,” Earl says, eventually, to the towels, “and still keep his own mind about it. Those aren’t the same surrender.”
“Feels like the same surrender from in here.”
He hums a few bars. Then he pours coffee into the captain’s mug — not a regular mug, the captain’s mug, which he only does when he’s decided you’re carrying something — and sets it by my elbow without a word, and hums a little louder, which is Earl building a wall around a man so the man can fall apart in private if he needs to.
I don’t fall apart. But I sit there longer than I meant to, and the coffee’s exactly right, and that’s its own kind of being known.
“You ever going to tell me who she’s to you,” Earl says, still to the towels, “or are we both going to keep pretending I asked about the coffee?”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Mm.” He folds a shirt with corners sharp enough to lodge a complaint.
“I’ve worked this room forty years, son.
I know the difference between a man who’s tired and a man who’s hoping.
You came in here hoping.” He sets another bib on the stack.
“Just don’t let the plan decide what the hoping’s allowed to be. The plan doesn’t know. Plans never do.”
***
Sloane lands at the facility at noon for a content day, and I get to her at the entrance before Priya’s crew can.
“Priya pre-sold the partnership,” I tell her, fast, before hello, before anyone with a lanyard reaches us. “The terms we built last night — she’d already pitched them. Two days ago. I didn’t want you hearing it from a stylist the way I did.”
She goes still. Not hurt-still — deciding-still, the look she gets when she’s running something serious behind a face that gives nothing.
I’ve learned the difference. Learning the difference is most of what I do now.
“Thankyou for telling me first,” she says.
Five words. That’s all. And they land somewhere in my chest I haven’t had open in two years, because I have spent my whole life being the guy who makes everyone feel good and almost no time being the guy somebody trusts to tell them the true thing first, and she just handed me the second one like it was small.
I reach into my bag and my hand finds the gum before the tape again. Flat-white spearmint, the pack I bought two streets out of my way and have been carrying like evidence. I hold it out.
She looks at it. Looks at me. Takes a piece without a word, and something at the corner of her mouth does a thing she kills before it finishes.
Three-one, I think, and then remember I stopped counting, and then realize I just started again, for her, because apparently that’s a thing I do now.
***
The content day is a circus with better lighting.
They’ve got us doing “spontaneous” b-roll — laughing at a phone neither of us is looking at, walking and not-quite-holding-hands down a corridor on the ninth take, pretending to share a smoothie a PA bought from a vending machine forty seconds ago.
Mateo passes the open door once with his gear bag, takes in the smoothie, the lights, the woman in Sentinels colors laughing on cue beside me, and says nothing at all, which from Mateo is a paragraph.
Between setups Sloane stands just off the marks with her tablet, feeding the crew adjustments they didn’t ask for and badly need, and the crew has stopped resenting it and started just doing what she says, because she’s right and being right turns out to be contagious.
I catch myself liking how she runs a room that isn’t hers — liking it far too much — and I file the liking with the rest of the things I’m not filing.
Priya’s crew sets up a “candid” in the players’ lounge, and I walk in to find my composition notebook sitting on the bench in full sightline of a camera that’s about to be live.
I get there first. I always get there first; it’s the one speed I can still trust. I lift it — careful, deliberate, the way you move a thing that can’t be dropped or seen — and slide it into my kit bag before the light goes on.
Sloane’s two steps behind me. She sees the whole thing: the speed, the care, the specific way a man handles the one object he’d run into traffic for.
She doesn’t ask.
That’s the part that takes the air out of me.
Anyone else grabs at it, or jokes about it, or says what’s that.
She just watches me hide it, files it somewhere with no label, and lets me keep it.
That kind of silence is louder than any question could be, and it makes me want to put the notebook in her hands more than a year of asking ever could.
I don’t. The notebook stays in the bag. Some doors I’m not ready to stand near, even with her.
***
The crew’s packing up when Trenton Voss fills the doorway.
He doesn’t come in. He looks at me.
He looks at Sloane, once, the full read in a single pass. He looks back at me, and his phone is already face-down in his hand, which is the tell that whatever he knows is about me.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he says.
Four words. Flat.
Correct. He’s gone before I can decide whether he means the campaign, or her, or the notebook, or the fact that I’m standing in a room I was supposed to be performing in and not performing at all.
Knowing Trenton, he means all of it.