Chapter 32
Carter
For one morning nothing in my life is on fire, and I’m dumb enough — happy enough — to think that’s a thing I get to keep.
***
Same wrap. Same order. The smell of it.
Except this morning there’s a woman asleep in the next room instead of me alone in a dark apartment with a roll of tape and a habit, and it doesn’t feel like the only prayer I’ve got left.
It feels like a thing a person does in a house with someone else in it.
I go back to bed. That’s new too.
***
I wake again before her, which almost never happens, and for a few stolen minutes I get the thing I never get: her, asleep, unguarded, the most-managed person I’ve ever met with her whole face off duty.
I don’t move. I don’t want to spend it.
She wakes the way she does everything, all at once and fully online — except this morning the armor doesn’t come with it. Her eyes open, find me already there, and instead of the dry thing, the deflection, the you’re staring —
She just looks back.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
And there’s no campaign in the room. That’s the part I can’t get used to.
No cameras, no sheet, no Marcus, no metric climbing somewhere.
Just the gray-gold light and her hand finding the back of my neck and the slow unhurried turning-toward that doesn’t need anything from either of us except more of itself.
The kiss is slow. Nobody to convince.
I take my time, because this morning there’s time and I intend to spend all of it.
I learned her on a hotel night with a storm outside and a cancelled flight, and I’ve thought about the map of her more than I’ll admit — the catch of her breath, the place at her hip that makes her stop being clever, the spot at the back of her neck that ends every argument she’s winning.
I find all of it again in the gold light like a man let back somewhere he wasn’t sure he’d be allowed twice.
I kiss my way down. The inside of her thigh. The crease of her hip.
“Carter—”
“I know.” Against her thigh. “I’ve got you. Let me have this.”
Here’s the best-kept secret in the league: Sloane Vega goes over quietly, and I’m greedy for every stage of the quiet.
The dry voice goes first.
“That’s — okay, that’s a tactic, that’s not—”
Then the clever one.
“You’re doing the thing where you—”
Then nothing that’s words at all. She fists a hand in my hair and stops being able to lie still, and the last sound she makes is the small private one that doesn’t exist in any room with a camera.
I crawl up the length of her and slide into her while she’s still shaking, and the sound we make together is the only thing in the room.
Slow. Slow is the whole point this morning. No slot, no clock, nobody timing us.
I have to stop halfway and breathe.
“Give me a second,” I tell the ceiling.
She laughs — low and helpless — and clenches around me on purpose.
“You’re a menace.”
“Noted.” She does it again.
I lose the thread entirely.
I move in her deep and unhurried, reading her the way I read a pitch — every catch of breath, every tightening hand, the exact angle that arches her up off the bed. I find it. I stay there.
“There,” she gets out. “Right there, don’t—”
“God, Sloane, I—”
And there it is. Right at the top of my throat. The whole sentence, the real one.
I swallow it and give her the truer-than-safe thing underneath instead.
“—I’m never doing this with anyone else. Ever. You’ve ruined it. You’ve ruined all of it for me.”
She tips over on that and takes me with her, my name half-finished in her mouth, and I follow a few strokes later with both arms locked around her like the light might come and take her back.
***
After, she’s got her head on my chest, over the chain she has never once asked about, one hand open on my sternum like she’s keeping something from floating off.
The notebook’s on the nightstand. It’s always on the nightstand.
I look at it for a while. Long enough that she notices, because she notices everything, and I feel her go very slightly still against me — the specific stillness of a person deciding not to move in case moving ends it.
I reach out and put two fingers on the cover.
I don’t open it.
The reflex comes up smooth and quiet, the way it has for two years, and sets the whole thing back down for me before I’ve finished deciding anything. My body will give her everything. The rest of me keeps the key.
She doesn’t ask.
She never asks. It’s the mercy we’ve been trading since the balcony, and it’s the most generous thing anybody has ever done for me — and also, I’m starting to understand, the exact thing that lets me keep getting away with it.
“Soon,” I say. Out loud. To nobody, or to the ceiling, or to her.
Her hand moves once on my sternum. Twice.
“Okay,” she says.
That’s it. That’s the whole conversation. It’s the biggest one I’ve had in two years.
***
She’s in my kitchen in a T-shirt that’s mine and reading glasses I didn’t know she owned, doing the crossword in actual pen, because of course she does the crossword in pen.
I stand in the doorway and have the exact thought you’re not supposed to have.
I could keep this.
“Six across,” she says, not looking up. “Eight letters. ‘Kept hidden.’ I have con-something and it’s bothering me.”
“Concealed.”
“That fits.” She writes it in pen, smug. “You’re useful before coffee. Noted. Filed.”
“You file me a lot.”
“I have a whole drawer.” She looks up then, over the glasses, and there’s something in her face that isn’t managed and isn’t a release, that’s just open. “It’s getting crowded. I might need a second drawer.”
I have to turn around and pretend to deal with the coffee, because the thing that just happened behind my ribs isn’t safe to do with my face.
“What’s this one,” she says. “Fourteen across. ‘Not going anywhere,’ six.”
“Is it ‘stuck.’”
“It’s six letters, Carter.”
“Is it ‘stuck-er.’”
“I’m going to put you in the drawer face-down.”
“You’d never. I’m load-bearing.” I bring the coffee over and set it by her elbow, badly made, the way I always make it, the way she drinks it anyway. “Ask me a football one. I’ll be spectacular at a football one.”
“There are no football ones. Crosswords are for adults.”
“That’s a hostile position for a woman in my shirt.”
She doesn’t look up. But the corner of her mouth goes, and she doesn’t hide it, and she doesn’t file it, and she just lets it sit there on her face where I can see it.
I am happier than I’ve been in two years.
Not performing-happy. I’ve been able to do that since the funeral — I did it at the funeral; the wattage is the one thing grief never took. I mean the real one. The before one. The one my sister drove four hours to confirm she could hear in my voice again.
***
The day fills up gently, the way good days do.
Mateo sends a photo of his daughters’ game — both of them in oversized jerseys, the little one scored on her own goal and celebrated anyway, she’s my favorite, don’t tell the other. Jules sends a macroeconomics fact and then, separately, was that annoying, sorry sir, sorry — Carter.
Earl sends nothing, because Earl doesn’t text, and I know that if I walked into the equipment room right now he’d hum at me and top up a coffee and the world would be exactly where I left it.
Dani calls for four minutes about nothing. A professor she hates. A coat she can’t afford. Then, at the end, off-hand, the way she does the ones that count:
“You sound like you.”
“I am me.”
“No, you sound like you.” A pause with a lot in it. “Okay. That’s all. Bye.”
Everybody in their right place. The found family all accounted for, the woman I love doing the crossword in my kitchen in my shirt, and me standing in a square of low gold light thinking the dumbest, happiest, most human thought there is, which is that the hard part might be behind me.
***
Sloane’s phone buzzes on the counter, face-up.
I’m not snooping. It’s just there, and I’m just standing there, and the banner slides up before either of us reaches it.
PRIYA: Got the green light on Final Phase from the league — Marcus signed off this AM. Bigger than we pitched. Call you Mon, you’re going to love the authenticity angle, it’s the best work we’ve done. ??
Sloane glances at it and thumbs it away without breaking the crossword, the way you dismiss a work thing on a Sunday you’ve decided to protect.
“Monday problem,” she says.
“Monday problem.”
I reach past her for the coffee and kiss the top of her head, and she lets me, and the light holds for another minute or two before it goes the way that light goes.
Neither of us reads it.
That’s the thing I’ll come back to, after. We had the whole shape of what was coming in our hands, on a counter, on a Sunday — Final Phase, bigger than we pitched, the best work we’ve done — and we were so happy and stupid and warm that we filed it under Monday and went back to the crossword.
You don’t get a warning that the warning was the warning.
You just get the morning, and then you don’t.