Chapter 6
Advantage
"It's a monsoon," Allen said. "Clay's a swamp. There's no tennis today."
"You didn't text me not to come."
"I figured you'd have the sense to—" Allen stopped.
Looked at him. Chris was standing in the rain, fully in it, not even trying to get under the awning, soaked to the bone and grinning, and something moved across Allen's face that Chris had been waiting five weeks to see.
"You drove here. In this. For a session you knew was rained out. "
"You said showing up when it rains was the price.
" Chris wiped the water off his face; it did nothing.
"So I'm paying it. I don't care that there's no tennis.
That's not the—" His voice caught, half swallowed by the rain.
"I didn't come for the tennis, Allen. I came because it was raining and you said that's when it counts, and I wanted you to look out here at 6 a.m. in a storm and see that the ghost you keep waiting for isn't coming.
It's never coming. I'll be standing on this lot in a hurricane.
That's the thing I've been trying to prove to you for five weeks and I can't do it with words because you're too smart for words, so I'm doing it with my whole soaked body at six in the morning.
There's no ghost. There's just me. In the rain. Like an idiot. For you."
The storm came down. Allen stood under the awning with his thermos and looked at the kid standing in it, and Chris watched the wall — the one he'd had his hand on since the compound, since the bench, since the first free colada — Chris watched it come down, not all at once, but the way a thing comes down when the last support finally goes.
"Get out of the rain," Allen said. Rough. "My place is two blocks. You'll get pneumonia and then I'll have to explain to your father why his son died training for a charity tennis match."
"Is that—" Chris's heart was going. "Are you inviting me somewhere that isn't a tennis court?"
"I'm getting you a towel before you drown standing up. Come on."
***
Allen's apartment was small and clean and entirely honest, and Chris loved it on sight the way he'd loved the public courts on sight — because there was nothing in it that was performing anything.
A couch that had been chosen for comfort.
Trophies from twenty years ago on a shelf, but shoved back, not displayed, like a past he'd made peace with.
A wall of tournament draws and clippings — not his own, Chris realized, looking closer, dripping on the mat: kids.
His kids. Every clipping was some kid from the program winning something, taped up crooked and proud.
A whole wall of other people's earned things.
Of course, Chris thought. Of course that's what's on his walls.
"Bathroom's there, towels are on the—" Allen turned around with a towel in his hands and stopped, because Chris hadn't moved toward the bathroom, Chris was standing in the middle of the little honest apartment dripping on the floor, looking at the wall of other people's kids, and whatever was on his face made Allen go still.
"You put their wins on your wall," Chris said. "Not yours. Theirs."
"They earned them."
"You earned yours."
"Mine got taken." Allen said it simply, no self-pity, a man stating a score.
"Theirs can't be. That's the difference.
Nobody can take a thing a kid earned on a public court off him.
That's the whole—" He stopped, because Chris had crossed the room, dripping, and was standing very close, and the towel was hanging forgotten in Allen's hand.
"That's the whole point of the academy," Chris said quietly. "That's not a business plan. That's a place where things can't get taken."
"Chris."
"Five weeks ago you told me my game was a lie with a good forehand.
" Chris's voice had gone low, and he was so close now, close enough to see the rain still beaded on Allen's jaw, close enough that the last of his own strategy fell away, the way it kept doing around this man, the coat he'd worn his whole life just sliding off onto the floor with the rainwater.
"And you were right, and you fixed it, and along the way you turned out to be the only honest person I've ever met and the only one who's ever wanted me for something other than what I could give, and I know we said three weeks, I know, and I'm not gonna pretend I don't know all the reasons — but you're standing in your apartment with a wall of things that can't be taken, telling me you're scared of losing something to my world, and I need you to hear me.
" He put his hand flat on Allen's chest, over the locked place, the same spot as the courts.
"I'm not your world. I'm the guy standing in your rain.
And I'm not gonna take anything from you.
I want to give you the one thing nobody in my life has ever wanted from me, which is nothing.
I don't want your program or your name or your usefulness.
I just want you. That's it. That's the whole ask. "
Allen looked at him for a long moment, rain still running down the window, the storm loud on the roof.
"Say we don't wait the three weeks," Allen said, low. "Say I stop being smart about this. You understand what we're walking into. The pro-am, the exposure, the story—"
"I understand all of it. I'm choosing it anyway. With my eyes open. On purpose." Chris didn't move his hand. "The question is whether you are."
And Allen — the man who'd spent twenty years keeping a careful distance from anyone with money, who'd watched for the ghost every single morning, who'd built a whole armored life on never letting the rich world close enough to drop him — Allen dropped the towel on the floor, and reached up, and took Chris's face in both his callused hands, and closed the distance himself.
***
It was nothing like the clumsy certain kiss on the court.
That had been Chris reaching. This was Allen deciding, slow and deliberate and thorough, the way he did everything — the way he watered the clay, the way he set up a drill, the way he read a game — and Chris made a sound against his mouth that he'd been holding for five weeks and let the last of the coat go entirely, let himself be nobody's investment and nobody's disappointment and nobody's name, just a soaked idiot in a small honest apartment being kissed like he was the thing.
"You're dripping on my floor," Allen said, against his mouth.
"You brought me here. This is entirely your fault." Chris was laughing, breathless, tugging at Allen's rain-damp shirt. "You could've just given me a towel. You had a whole plan involving a towel."
"The towel plan fell apart."
"The towel plan was doomed. I want that on the record."
Allen laughed — actually laughed, low and surprised, the sound Chris had been chasing since day one — and got Chris out of the soaked shirt and pressed him back against the wall of kids' clippings, warm hands and clay-rough palms mapping him like he was learning a new player's game, and Chris, who had been handed everything his whole life and earned nothing, understood in a rush that this was the one thing that could only ever be given, never bought, never handed, the thing his father's whole empire could not purchase: to be wanted like this.
Head-on. For nothing. By a man who had every reason not to and did it anyway.
And Allen — Chris felt it happen, felt the exact moment the careful thing in Allen let go — Allen stopped keeping the distance.
All of it. For the first time in twenty years, Chris would understand later, when Allen finally told him, the man let someone from the world that had always dropped him get all the way in, without watching for the exit, without keeping one hand on the wall.
The rest of it Chris would keep in pieces he'd never say out loud to anyone: the small honest bedroom and the storm loud on the roof, Allen's hands, the specific way the man who never wasted a word went quiet and unguarded, the way Chris couldn't stop talking — "you keep making that face, the one from the court, when I land something, I want to keep that face" — and Allen telling him to stop narrating and Chris saying he couldn't, it was his main thing, and Allen kissing the narrating out of him, which worked in the same brief useless way it always would.
But the thing underneath it, the thing that was the whole chapter of both their lives cracking open in a two-block apartment in a rainstorm, was simpler than any of it.
It was Chris being chosen. Not the name. Not the check. Not the beautiful bought forehand. Just Chris, the soaked idiot who showed up in the rain, wanted for exactly that and nothing else.
And it was Allen, for once in his careful life, letting himself want a thing from that world and believing — for one storm-loud morning, with the ghost proven gone — that it wasn't going to end with him on the curb.
***
After, they lay tangled in the small bed with the rain finally easing off the roof, and Chris was tracing the old scar on Allen's knee, the one that had taken the career, gentle, the way you touch a thing that costs someone something.
"Does it still hurt?" Chris asked.
"Every day. You learn to stop asking it to be different." Allen had one arm behind his head, and the guard was all the way down, further than Chris had ever seen it, a man who'd set down twenty years of armor on the floor with a wet towel. "You played well this morning."
"There was no tennis this morning."
"You showed up in a hurricane. That's the whole game, Chris.
Everything else is just hitting balls." Allen turned his head, looked at him, and there was something in his face that Chris wanted to frame and put on a wall, the way Allen framed the kids' wins — a thing that couldn't be taken.
"You proved it. The ghost thing. Five weeks I've been waiting for the black car and the excuse and the Tuesday you don't show.
And you drove into a monsoon to stand on a flooded lot.
I don't—" His voice did something. "I haven't let anybody from your world in since I was younger than you.
I need you to know that's not nothing. That's the biggest thing I've got. "
"I know it is." Chris pressed a kiss to the old scar. "I'm gonna be careful with it. I promise."
They lay there in the easing rain, warm and undone and stupidly happy, and for a few minutes the whole thing was perfect, the way it's only ever perfect right before you remember the rest of the world exists.
Then Allen's phone buzzed on the nightstand, and he glanced at it, and Chris watched something go careful in his face — not gone, not the wall, but a shadow of it, the first cloud back over the sun.
"What," Chris said.
"Nothing. It's—" Allen set the phone down, face-down.
"The pro-am's in eighteen days. And we just—" he gestured at the tangled bed, the rain, the two of them "—we just did the exact thing I said would put a target on you.
On both of us. And your whole world's about to be standing courtside watching you play the one match you're trying to earn clean.
" He pulled Chris in, though, even saying it, arm tightening, like the saying of it and the holding of it were two different men.
"I'm not sorry. I want that on the record too.
But we're exposed now, and your father's already got a piece on the board, and I need you to know it's coming. Whatever it is. It's coming."
"Then it comes," Chris said, into his shoulder, warm and certain and eighteen days from a match he was going to earn or die trying. "We chose it. On purpose. With our eyes open. We'll handle it together."
"Yeah," Allen said, and held him, and Chris didn't see his face over his shoulder, didn't see the old careful thing already stirring behind Allen's eyes at the word father, didn't see the coach who'd spent his whole life being dropped begin, very quietly, to do the math on how much this was going to cost him.
Chris just felt the arm around him and believed, the way you believe things in the warm after a storm, that whatever came, they'd meet it standing up.
He was right that it was coming.
He was wrong about the standing up.