Chapter 44
Carter
Jules finds me in the parking lot a few weeks into the after, holding his phone like it might detonate, and his face is doing something I’ve never seen it do — not the debut-night joy, something bigger and more frightened than joy, the look of a kid whose whole improbable bet just came in.
“They called me,” he says. “The federation. Nigeria. The — it’s a provisional thing, a camp, a look, it’s not the squad, it’s not anything yet, but they—” He stops. Swallows. “They called me, Carter.”
I don’t say anything clever. I’ve finally learned there are moments the wattage would only cheapen, and a nineteen-year-old standing in a parking lot holding the exact thing his mother cleaned offices for is one of them.
“Yeah they did,” I say. “Because you see the ball before it’s there, and somebody whose entire job is spotting that finally spotted you.
” I take him by the back of the neck — the same hold as the touchline, the one that’s apparently ours now — and pull his forehead to my shoulder.
“Your mom first. Before me, before the lads, before you post a single thing. You call Grace Okafor and you tell her the list can wait, because tonight her kid got called.”
“You’re crying,” he says, muffled.
“I’m allergic to parking lots. Call your mom.”
He calls her right there, switching into the language I don’t speak, and I step back to give him the moment — and I get my own phone out, because I have, lately, started taking my own advice. I text the one number that’s become the most important one I own.
Your federation friend was right. The flashcard kid got the call.
The reply comes back in seconds, from a woman who clocked him before any of us, on a rival club she has every reason not to care about.
I know. I never write the important ones down — but I never forget them either.
Tell him a traffic cone couldn’t have made that channel pass. Only him.
I tell him. He laughs into the phone mid-sentence to his mother, and the sound of it carries across an empty Atlanta parking lot, and somewhere a continent away a woman who set an alarm for ninety seconds is hearing it live, and I stand in the middle of all of it being unashamedly, allergically moved, and I think: this is the part the clock can’t take back. This is the only part.
The football ends. The people don’t. He’s going to find that out the long way, like all of us.
But not tonight. Tonight he just got called, and he called his mom, and I was there to see it — which is, it turns out, the whole entire job.
***
The sponsor invokes the clause. Six figures, payable by whichever one of us cracked, and I cracked in public with my name on it, so it’s mine.
I pay it the way you pay a bill for something you’d buy again.
Sloane finds out from the paperwork and doesn’t say a word about it for three days, which is how I know what it cost her not to.
The league fines me forty thousand dollars for falling in love on company time, and within a day the fans have turned the fine into a hashtag, and somehow I’m more popular than I’ve ever been, which is exactly the kind of cosmic joke my brother would have refused to stop laughing about for a week.
That’s the thing I notice first, in the after: I can think my brother now and finish the thought. I can let Diego be a person who’d have laughed instead of a locked room I walk past.
Saying his name out loud, twice, to the two people who’d earned it, didn’t break the thing I always thought it would break. It just set down a bag I’d forgotten wasn’t load-bearing.
She turns up at the training ground on a Thursday with a coffee she didn’t need to bring me and no tablet, which is how I know she’s been taken apart.
“They’ve moved me to brand partnerships,” she says. “Which is a promotion, technically.”
“Congratulations.”
“Don’t.” She sits on the bench beside me and looks at the pitch instead of at me. “I’ve been working out what I’d say to you for three weeks and I keep landing on the same place, which is that I still don’t think I did anything wrong.”
“I know.”
“You were in love. I said so out loud. That was the truth.” Her voice goes, very slightly, and she hates it more than the reassignment.
“I have spent my entire career being told the story I’m selling isn’t real.
The one time it was, every person in the building looked at me like I’d committed a crime. ”
And there she is. A believer standing in the wreckage of her own cathedral, genuinely unable to see the difference between a true thing and a weapon — because the difference was never in the material. It was in who ended up holding it, and what it cost the person on the other end.
“You were right about all of it,” I tell her. “That’s the part I can’t fix for you.”
She nods once, brisk. Then she picks up the coffee she brought me and drinks it herself, which is the most Priya thing that has ever happened in my presence.
“It would have been extraordinary,” she says. “The rollout.”
“It would have.”
“Okay.” She stands, straightens a jacket that doesn’t need it, and goes back to work, because going back to work is the only prayer either of us has ever had.
Priya’s manufactured romance collapsed, and the real one that crawled out of the wreckage is a better story than anything she could have built, and she knows it, and she sent me a single text — I’m still right, just for the record.
?? — which is the closest Priya comes to an apology and the closest I come to forgiving her.
***
Earl is humming again.
I notice it the morning I walk into the equipment room and the low unplaceable sound is back, threading through the folded kit like it never stopped, and I have to stand in the doorway a second because I didn’t know how much the silence of it had been sitting on me until it lifted.
It’s the same tune it always is and the same tune it never is — low, unplaceable, threaded under the smell of clean laundry and the thump of the dryer down the hall — and standing in the doorway listening to it come back is the closest thing I know to the specific relief of a fever breaking. The room sounds like the room again.
Earl decided it should. He withheld it while I had a thing to carry in alone, and he’s handing it back now that I’ve finally carried it, and he will never once say a word about either decision, because that’s how Earl loves people — in the things he does and doesn’t hum.
“You’re humming,” I say.
“Am I.” He doesn’t look up. He pours coffee into the captain’s mug and slides it over, and then — because Earl misses nothing — he pours a second one, black, into a mug I’ve never seen him use, and sets it on the bench beside mine. “She’s parking,” he says. “Saw her car. Figured.”
Sloane walks in thirty seconds later, in a Sentinels quarter-zip on Atlanta Forge’s training ground, which is the single most provocative thing a person can wear in this building, and she does it on purpose, and I love her so much I have to look at the towels for a second.
***
“You’re in enemy colors,” I say.
“I’m aware of where I am.” She takes the black coffee Earl made her like it’s hers, because it’s now. “I keep a change of clothes in the car. This is the one I packed to annoy you.”
“It’s working.”
“I know. Your face does a thing.” She sips. “You should see it. It’s very undignified for a man the fans are calling a romantic hero.”
“Forty grand, by the way. That’s what I’m worth. Cried-on-a-rooftop money.”
“Cheap,” she says, flat, and Earl makes a sound into the towels that might be a laugh, and I clock it — the way she taught me to, without ever meaning to teach me — that I’m keeping score again.
Three-two, her. I’ve been keeping it since the greenroom — never accurately, accuracy was never the point — and I never want to stop, except now it’s not a wall between us, it’s just the game we get to keep playing.
“Careful,” I say. “You’re up by one. You hate being predictable.”
“I’m not predictable. I’m correct, which feels the same from where you’re losing.”
That’s two in a row. I concede the round on purpose, because watching her win is the best thing I do all day, and I tell her so without telling her, which is a language we’ve both gotten fluent in.
***
I hear the elevator before I hear her, and I stand in the middle of my own apartment like a man who’s forgotten where he keeps his hands.
I’ve wiped my palms on my jeans twice. I have rehearsed nothing, because everything I rehearse comes out as a bit, and tonight is the one night I refuse to do the bit.
She comes back to mine that night, and I get her inside the door and don’t let go for a while — just hold her in the dark of the entryway with my face in her hair, because three weeks ago I thought I’d handed this back to the league for good, and a man who’s done that learns the exact weight of what he almost traded away.
“Still smells like your war crime of a carbonara,” she says into my chest. No bite in it. Just her, home, cataloguing.
“Leftovers in the fridge.”
“I’m not hungry for that.”
“You’re allowed to let go,” she says into my chest. “I’m here. I drove four hours. I’m extremely here.”
“Give me a second. I’m recalibrating my entire risk model.”
“That’s my line.”
“I stole it. Sue me.”
She tips her face up and kisses me, and the thing that’s been wound tight in me since the rooftop finally lets go, and the kiss stops being gentle fast. We don’t make it past the couch.
I get her out of the rival quarter-zip she wore to provoke me, and she gets my shirt over my head and my belt open, and there’s nothing careful left in either of us — this is the one with the relief in it, the almost-didn’t-get-to-keep-this one, where you keep stopping to check the person’s real and then can’t stop at all.