Chapter 23
Caleb
I read her text about two hundred times before I work out the one thing I have to do, which is not text her back.
I need to be sure of what I say or do next.
I can’t just react. She sent that text because she sat frozen in a chair while I decided she was leaving me, and the only thing that fixes that isn't a text back or even a phone call.
It's me walking back into the exact room I set on fire and trying to put out the flames.
In the past, I’ve been a runner. I bail on people and situations before they can bail on me. Maybe walking back in is the only way to find out if I'm actually growing up, or if I just tell myself a nicer story about it.
So this morning, now that I trust myself to walk in as the calm version and not the other one, I head back into the building that cut me loose, and I knock on Coach Dixon's door, ignoring Wendy’s explicit instruction to wait.
“You've got a lot of nerve,” Coach says, when he sees me.
“Yes, sir. Always have. It's most of my problem.” I stay in the doorway. I keep my hands loose and my voice even, because the whole point of today is to be a man who can fight for what he wants without fists.
“I'm not here about Caroline. I want to say that clear up front. I'm not asking for it back. I lost it fair. I lost my temper in your office, that's on me and nobody else, and you were right to end it.”
He leans back. “You lost it when you encouraged my daughter to compromise her ethics and change that report.”
“I asked her not to do that.”
“But yet she did it anyway.”
He doesn't say anything else. He lets me stand there. Fine. I've earned this reaction. I continue the speech I’ve practiced.
“While I admit that I deserved to be cut based on my actions, I came here to fix the part that wasn't fair,” I say. “Which is what I left you thinking about your daughter.”
“Adams–”
“Let me get through it. Then I'll go, Sir.” I make myself hold his eyes, which is its own kind of hard, because his eyes are her eyes, and looking straight into them stings.
“I told you it was one-sided. A crush. That she didn't do anything.
That was a lie. I lied to you on purpose so you'd only have one person to be angry at, and I picked me, because I'm used to it and she's not.
The truth is she's the best thing that ever happened to me, and I'm the luckiest idiot on this campus that she even looked at me twice.”
“I know that,” he says quietly. “I worked that out earlier this morning.”
“Really? How?” I start, then stop, because it doesn't matter how. “Doesn't matter. The point is”
“The point is you're a worse liar than you think you are, but you can keep going. I can tell that you're not done.”
I keep going, because I rehearsed it, and if I stop, I'll lose it. “And the thing you said about her being fragile. Not built for it. I need you to hear this, even if you never let me near her again.”
My voice wants to climb. I don't let it.
“She’s the strongest person I’ve ever met. She froze in here yesterday because her body does that when things get to be too much. It isn't weakness, it's wiring.
She trusted me with that information, and I'm the one who failed her, not the other way around.
She didn't choose you over me. She couldn't get the words out, and I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to give her the three minutes it would have taken.
So if you want to be mad at somebody for what happened to your daughter in this office, it's me.
It's been me the whole time. Leave her out of it.”
“You think I don't know my own daughter freezes.” There's an edge to it, but it's pointed inward. “I raised her. I’ve watched her do it since she was four years old. I just always called it something easier. Shy. Difficult. Fragile. Smaller words.” He rubs a hand down his face.
“You learned it was wiring in three weeks. It took me twenty-three years and her yelling at me in my own office to even say it out loud.”
“I’m not going to even think that I understand what it was like to raise her alone, but what I will say is that there’s nothing wrong with Jasmine.
She’s not broken. She’s not fragile. She’s just…
different than some other people. And when has different ever been something that needs to be put in a box and tucked away? ”
The office is quiet a long moment.
“You done?” Coach says.
“Yeah, that's it. That's the whole thing.” I straighten up. “I'll get my stuff out of the locker by noon.”
“Sit down, Adams.”
“I'd rather”
“Sit down.” So I sit. He looks at me for a long time, and there's something working behind his face I can't read, which rarely happens to me. “Jasmine was in here a couple of hours ago,” he says. “My daughter. Your girl. First thing, before the building was even awake.”
“She showed up for work?”
“Yes and no. She threw my own conduct agreement on my desk and recited section four at me from memory,” he says.
“She told me the release won't hold. She also told me I taught her to read the rules, and now she's using them on me.
And told me that if I called Carolina to torpedo you out of spite, she'd be at the appeal, in public, with her name on it, where everybody could see whose daughter she is and who she's choosing.” He shakes his head slowly. “Twenty-three years she’s been the quietest girl in the room, but she walked in here this morning, and was the loudest person in the building. Over you.”
“She said all that?” I manage to say. “Out loud? To you?”
“Chin up the whole time. She didn't look at me once, looked at the wall behind my head, the way she does.” He says it like he's only now seeing it as a feature instead of a flaw.
“Most composed dressing-down I've taken in thirty years of hockey, and it came from the only person on this earth I love.”
And I have to put a hand on the arm of the chair, because the room tips.
She fought for me. While I was sitting in a truck feeling sorry for myself, the woman I left frozen in a chair got up and went to war for me with the one weapon her father ever gave her and never once thought she'd turn around on him.
She didn't disappear. For the first time in her whole life, she got loud, and she did it for me.
How did I get to be so dumb and so lucky all at the same time?
"So am I back on the team?” I ask, not even hoping, really. Just trying to figure out where I stand.
"You're not anything yet." He says. "She made an argument.
A good one; the kind I trained her to make.
But I haven't reversed a thing, and I'm not doing it in a hurry just because my own daughter out-lawyered me before breakfast. On paper, as of this minute, you're still cut, Adams. The release stands until I say it doesn't."
Interestingly enough, his answer doesn’t gut me. I drove back here to fix things between her and me, not to win my spot back. That spot is the smallest thing I care about right now, and I'm a little stunned to find I mean it.
“But…I didn't call Carolina,” Coach adds. “For the record, I was going to, but I didn't.” He takes a sip of something out of a steel VCU mug. “She asked me not to. It's the first thing she's asked me for in about a decade. Well, that and a raise. I’m not going to be the man who tells her no twice.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” I ask. “You could've let me walk out of here thinking I lost both of them.”
“Because she's about to do something stupid, again, for your undeserving ass. And if she's going to be brave enough to be seen, the least I can do is make sure the man she's being seen for actually shows up.” His eyes go hard. “Are you going to show up, Adams?”
“Try and stop me.”
“I wasn't planning to,” he says. “Not anymore. But if you break her, Adams, I will do more than take away Carolina, I will destroy your ass.”
That was a very real threat that I’ll keep tucked in my back pocket. Coach has a mean streak, too.
“Where is she?” I ask. My voice quivers.
“I don't know. She said she had something to do, and that it was going to be loud, and that I should stay out of her way.” For one second, something almost like a smile crosses coach's face.
“If I were a man trying to chase down a woman about to do the bravest thing of her life, I'd start with wherever the most people are.
She's done being invisible. She told me to watch.”
I'm already up. Already moving. Already out the door.
Because here's the thing I finally understand, running through a building toward a girl instead of away from one for the first time in my life.
Everybody who was ever supposed to stay taught me the same lesson: that I was a thing you got through, not a thing you held onto. I believed it so long that I started calling it the truth about me. I left first, my whole life, so nobody would ever get the chance to prove it about me.
But then I met her.
She wagered her whole carefully constructed life that I'm better than the only thing I've ever believed about myself.
Now…I’m going to spend the rest of mine proving her right.