13. Dani
DANI
I woke up Friday morning at six and lay in the dark of Brynn's guest room and tried to decide whether I was the kind of woman who'd kissed a man last night. The answer was that I was. The next question was whether I was going to panic about it. The answer was that I was not.
That was the new thing.
I'd been bracing for the panic the whole drive home from the hills.
The entire forty minutes down through the desert and back into the city.
I'd waited for it on the elevator up to the penthouse, the way I'd waited for it Monday night in the parking garage.
I'd carried it up to the guest room, set it on the dresser, turned to deal with it the way a woman deals with a thing that's been making her sick.
It hadn't been there.
What was there instead was a different thing.
A small clear hard thing about the size of a marble, sitting quiet in the center of my chest. A decision, or the precursor of one.
It had the weight of something that had been forming for two and a half weeks without my noticing and had finally, on his front step in the desert cold, finished forming.
I didn't yet know the shape of the decision.
I knew the weight of it.
I lay there and watched the day come up grey through the window I'd cracked the night before, and I thought about Jett Sturgill's mouth on mine for half of half a heartbeat, and I did not panic about it.
That was the new thing. That was the only thing I had to work with at six in the morning, and it turned out to be enough.
I got up. Made coffee in Brynn's kitchen quietly so I wouldn't wake her. Took it to the guest room. Sat on the bed with my laptop open in my lap and opened a fresh document.
I wrote a sentence.
A man who has been running for nine years can be identified, with very little training, by the way he holds his shoulders in his own kitchen.
I read it back. Added a comma. Read it back.
Deleted the comma. Read it a third time.
I leaned my head against the headboard and did the thing I hadn't let myself do since I was twenty-two, held a sentence in my head and listened for whether it was the right one or the wrong one.
It was the right one. The holding of it felt like a muscle waking up after a long sleep.
Slowly. Painfully. With a small sharp pleasure.
I wrote another.
He cooked spaghetti for me because he didn't know how to ask me to stay. He let me ask my own question at the window of my own car because he didn't yet know how to ask his.
I read it back. Changed my own car to a car I had borrowed. The borrowed felt important. It told a reader, without telling them anything they didn't need to know, that the car was someone else's. That the woman in it hadn't yet figured out which car was hers.
I wrote for forty minutes.
It was the most sustained writing I'd done in four years.
None of it was for the article. The article was a long-form feature about the championship season of the Vegas Vipers and what it took to build a team.
What I was writing in Brynn's guest room at six-fifteen was not that.
It was about a man whose name I hadn't yet typed, in a kitchen whose details I hadn't yet named, doing things I hadn't yet let mean anything.
It was about the silence between us in the doorway.
The small dry kiss neither of us had stopped.
The thing his face had done when I said don't say my name like that, which I now realized my own face had done right back, and which neither of us had named, and which was the actual reason both of us had been forced to lie about what happened.
I wrote two thousand words.
I closed the document without naming the file.
I closed the laptop.
I drank what was left of my coffee and sat with the marble in my chest and understood what the decision was that I'd been forming all night.
I was going to ask Victoria the question I'd asked Jett.
Not because she'd done anything wrong. Not because I suspected her of anything.
Because the question, asked of her, was the only honest version I could ask.
Why am I writing this article. Why me. Why a woman whose only published byline in four years is six hundred words about a grandmother.
Why a woman who hasn't been to Vegas in eight months for reasons her own best friend doesn't know.
Why this particular outsider, dropped into the inside of a man I've arranged my whole life around not coming close to, to tell his story to a million strangers.
It might not mean anything.
It almost certainly didn't. Victoria would have a clean answer about the essay, about Brynn's word, about my editing track record, and the clean answer would be the true answer, and that would be that.
But I needed to hear the clean answer. I needed to have asked.
I called her office at seven thirty, which I had a working theory Victoria would consider the earliest civilized hour to call her office, and asked her assistant if she had ten minutes today. The assistant came back inside of three minutes and said Mrs. Caldwell could see me at ten.
I showered. Dressed in the dark blue dress I'd brought for moments I hadn't been sure I'd need.
Put on the earrings my grandmother left me.
Drank a second cup of coffee at Brynn's island, and Brynn came in around eight in her robe and looked at me with one raised eyebrow and said, "You look like a woman with a meeting. "
"Your mom," I said.
"About the piece?"
"What else."
She made her own coffee and stood at the counter and watched me over the rim of her cup. The gentle perceptive Brynn watching that didn't push and didn't look away.
"You came in late," she said.
"Session ran long."
"Mm."
I let the mm sit. Brynn let it sit too. We were excellent at it now, the two of us, at letting things sit. She'd been right at the island Friday night. She loved me. She loved him. She was going to wait for one of us to bring it to her, and she'd committed to that out loud, and she meant it.
"Tell my mother she's a good egg," she said.
"She knows she's a good egg."
"She likes hearing it."
I left.
I drove down through the city in Brynn's SUV with the morning still grey on the dashboard and the marble sitting quiet between my ribs.
The cabin smelled like Brynn. Her coffee.
The faint pine of whatever she'd hung from the mirror last month and forgotten about.
The not-smelling-like-him of it was a thing I noticed for the entire drive without meaning to.
I'd spent ninety minutes in his kitchen the night before and the night before that.
The leather of his stool was still a thing I could feel against my back.
The smell of olive oil and garlic and his soap had attached itself to some part of my brain I hadn't figured out how to detach it from, and I drove through Vegas at nine-thirty in a car that didn't smell like him and I missed the smell of him with a specific physical sensation in my chest the size of a small fist.
I'd known the man for nineteen days.
I'd kissed him for half of half a heartbeat at his front door the night before.
I was driving to ask his boss's mother why I'd been chosen to write a story about him.
The whole shape of my life had been rearranged in nineteen days by a man whose mouth I hadn't so much as touched twice.
I parked four blocks from the building, because the garage rates downtown were criminal and I'd been raised by a woman who counted nickels.
I walked the four blocks in heels not made for it and let the morning desert sun hit my face and made myself remember I was a working journalist on assignment going to talk to her source's owner, and the small fist in my chest eased about an eighth of a turn.
By the time I got to the elevator I had my professional face on.
By the time I got to the forty-fourth floor I had it all the way on.
It would hold, I told myself, for the duration of the meeting.
Victoria's office was on the forty-fourth floor of a building two blocks off the Strip, in a glass tower that didn't have her name on it because she didn't need it on there.
The assistant walked me down a long hallway with no art and one window that looked out at the entire valley laid open, the way Brynn's penthouse view did, the way Jett's house did, the way Caldwell Arena did from the inside.
Every space connected to this family had been built to look at the valley from above.
I hadn't noticed until that morning that the four people I'd spent the most time with in this city all lived in rooms that looked down.
Victoria was at her desk. Two screens. Coffee.
Reading glasses pushed up on her head. She looked up when the assistant let me in and her whole face warmed by some small fixed increment, the same unhurried softening it had done in Brynn's living room three weeks ago.
The look of a woman who'd decided to like me and would not be undeciding it.
She came around the desk and gestured to the seating area, two chairs and a small table by the window. I sat in one and she sat in the other, and the assistant brought a pot of coffee and two cups and disappeared.
"You look like a woman with a question," Victoria said.
"Same eyebrow Brynn used about an hour ago."
"She got it from me. What can I do for you, Dani."
I sat a second with the coffee warming the cup against my hands. I'd rehearsed the question in the car. The rehearsal hadn't stuck. I had to just say it.
"Why did you pick me to write this piece."
She looked at me.
"Has someone told you something that made you ask that."
"No. I'm asking because I've been working on this for two and a half weeks and I haven't yet asked you, and I think I'm someone who'd rather ask it than not."