Chapter 8
Caleb
Three weeks in and I’ve got a routine, which should scare me more than it does.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she comes over once the building clears out. I cook. She takes the stool with the wall behind it and tells me about her day in the flat little voice that means she’s relaxed. We watch her show. She calls who’s going home before the roses even come out. We laugh.
Last night, she pointed her fork at some guy on the screen. “He’s gone. Tonight.”
“He got a one-on-one,” I said.
“He got a pity one-on-one. Watch his hands. He keeps touching his own face. He already knows he’s losing.” She took a bite. “Gone by the second commercial.”
He was gone by the second commercial.
“How do you do that?” I said.
“People are easier on a screen. They slow down. Out here, everybody moves too fast and says the opposite of what they mean.” She shrugged. “On the show, somebody edits it, or scripts it, so it makes sense. I like things that make sense.”
“I don’t make sense.”
“No.” She looked at me a beat too long, and it took everything in me not to shove my tongue down her sexy ass throat. “You really don’t. It’s extremely inconvenient.”
That’s the closest she comes to saying it out loud. I take every inch she gives me, because I think I know exactly how hard it is for her to do it.
Then she fell asleep. Sitting up, halfway through the next episode, like she still didn’t trust lying down all the way in a place that wasn’t hers.
I didn’t move for an hour. Arm dead, foot gone numb, didn’t move.
A guy who can’t sit still through a TV timeout sat still for an hour so she could sleep.
That’s where I’m at.
That’s how bad it is.
And the math hasn’t changed one inch. One strike and I’m out on my ass. I should have been paranoid. I wasn’t.
But Coach has just called me into his office.
And now?
I’m paranoid as fuck.
“Sit,” he says, and I do, because there’s something in his face I haven’t seen before.
“There’s a recruiter coming to the Saturday game. He’s from Carolina’s development staff.” He lets it land. “He isn’t coming for the team. He’s coming for you.”
The room goes real quiet, the way it does when a thing you stopped letting yourself dream about walks up and knocks.
“How is that possible? I just got here.”
“I made some calls,” he says. “I see you trying, and you’ve definitely got the talent.
What you’ve never had is a clean year. A man like this doesn’t fill a roster spot with a kid who might put somebody in the hospital come February.
” He leans back. “This is the door, Adams. It doesn’t open twice. Play your ass off Saturday.”
I keep my face flat, but inside I’m already gone.
Carolina won the Stanley Cup last season.
They are the gold standard. This could mean one hell of a contract.
And a contract means real money coming in, so that my brother stops working doubles and my sisters grow up thinking the world’s a safe place.
A contract with Carolina is the one thing my old man swore I’d never have the discipline to get.
And now the shit is so close I can taste it.
“Keep your nose clean,” Coach says. “And this could be life-changing for you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One more thing.” He shuffles a folder, not looking at me, which is how I know it matters to him. “I know you’ve been keeping all your appointments with my daughter.”
Everything in me goes very still.
“Yes, sir, I have.”
“She’s new to this one-on-one thing I have her doing with you, but she doesn’t do well with people getting too familiar.
She’s particular. Fragile, if we’re being honest, though she’d take my head off for the word.
” He finally looks at me. “So you keep things real business-like, okay? Don’t get friendly with her.
She can’t handle friendly, and I can’t have her rattled. You understand me?”
My whole future is in this man’s hands, but I just had to listen to him call Jasmine fragile, call her a thing to be managed, when I’ve watched her walk into the loudest building on this campus on purpose.
What the fuck is he talking about? She’s the least fragile person I have ever met. Damn, her own father has been in the same house as her for twenty-three years, and he doesn’t know her at all.
I want to tell him that.
The want is so big it has a heartbeat.
“Understood,” I say.
“Good.” He nods, satisfied, like he just protected something.
“She’s lucky,” I say, before I can stop myself. “To have somebody looking out for her.”
“She’s my daughter. That’s not luck, that’s the job.” He says it like the two things are the same. They’re not. “She doesn’t make it easy. Never has. But she’s mine to worry about.”
“Yes, sir.”
And walking out, I think he’s got it exactly backwards. She makes it easy. So easy, I’d hand over the only future I’ve got just to keep doing it. He’s the one who made loving her hard, and he doesn’t even know he did it.
I make it to the parking lot before my hand finds the side of my truck. I stand there breathing, because the want to go back in and defend her is the exact want that would end my career before it even started, and I know it.
So I hold it, but holding it feels like swallowing glass.
I need to distract myself, so I call my brother.
“Hey.”
“Hey, C., what’s up?
“Just checking on you.”
“Aww, ain’t that sweet. Same shit, different day,” he sighs. “Just tired as all hell. How’s Vegas?”
“It’s cool.”
“Don’t get your ass kicked out again. I need you to make it big so we can all get out of this hellhole.”
I feel that one in my chest.
“I won’t fuck it up.”
On Saturday, we win.
I play the cleanest sixty minutes of my life with that Carolina guy a weight at the back of my neck the whole time. No after-the-whistle. No extra shove. Every ugly instinct I have, I locked somewhere deep in my gut.
Afterwards, I come off the ice and Jasmine’s at the tunnel, doing her job, but Coach is right there beside her. So I do the thing we agreed on. I go cold. I look through her like she’s furniture, because that’s rule one, and because her father is standing eighteen inches away.
“Good discipline tonight, Adams,” Coach says.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Jasmine logged it. Clean game, no incidents.” He claps me on the shoulder and says, to her, not to me, “See? Told you he’d come around once somebody held him accountable.” He speaks to her like she’s a stranger and like the win is all his doing.
Jasmine just nods and goes smaller.
She says, “Noted,” in a flat staff voice, writes something down, and doesn’t look at me, and I don’t look at her. We are so good at this, so practiced at disappearing in plain sight, that her own father doesn’t feel the thing crackling in the air between us.
That’s the part that fucks with me. Not that we have to hide it, but that we’re so good at it.
She catches my eye for half a second when he turns away. Just a half. And I see the toll of what it means to stand next to her father and pretend the best thing in her life isn’t dripping in sweat three feet away from her.
Later, when the tunnel clears, she finds me for thirty seconds by the equipment room.
“You were good tonight,” she says, fast and low. “Not the hockey. After. When he said that thing about holding you accountable, like he did it. You didn’t correct him. I know that was for me.”
“It was for both of us.”
“I know.” She picks at the cuff of her sleeve. “I hated that you couldn’t be yourself. Say what you wanted to say.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But you know who I am. That’s all that matters.”
She nods once, smiles, and then she’s gone, back to being staff, and I stand there in the cold with my chest aching like a bruise.
I’m the one doing that to her.
That’s the thought that won’t leave me all night. Not that her dad might catch us, but that being with me means she spends her life going even smaller than she already was next to the one person whose approval she’s built her whole self around.
The shit doesn’t sit well with my spirit.
She texts me on Sunday. Our kind of texts. No words that mean anything if somebody looks.
Paperclip: You up?
And for the first time in three weeks, I look at her name, and I don’t answer right away.
I tell myself it’s for her. That a girl like that deserves a guy who will stand up for her no matter the cost, and that the kindest thing I can do is distance myself before this costs both of us everything.
I tell myself we haven’t crossed a line yet, not the kind of line there’s no returning from. I’ve been very careful about that.
Cold showers.
Private evening jerk off sessions with myself.
A little online porn.
I tell myself it’s discipline. The one thing my sperm donor swore I’d never have.
But I know the difference. Discipline builds something. What I’m doing is just putting a wall between me and the one person who ever made me consider unpacking my boxes.
And it sucks.