He’s dead in my head
Direct confrontation has never been my strongest quality.
Combat, certainly.
If jail time is a plausible consequence, I am calm, articulate and frighteningly decisive. If feelings are a plausible consequence, I prefer glares, strategic avoidance and a five-thousand-word manifesto in my Notes app that never reaches the person who needs to read it.
And sometimes Instagram.
That is simply how I release my rage, resentment and every sentence I cannot say aloud. The world is full of smart grown-ups. They can decode a coffee, a window and one very pretty athlete from our newest shoot.
Deal with it.
Will comments on my Instagram post at 2:08. ‘Zeus is jealous of the lighting.’
I laugh out loud before I finish reading it. Because I posted at 2:04.
He barely uses Instagram. His feed consists of badly photographed basketballs, basketball courts, shoes, more courts and absolutely none of his face.
It’s horrifying.
It is also the reason Jenny and I do not present Will to clients.
And his lack of basic social media skills is probably the only reason why he thinks it’s a good idea to bring a private joke between him and me into the COMMENT section! When we’re not talking!
@xxxmadeline.ff: Zeus got struck by lightning and died
It posts before I can reconsider it.
@williammercerbb: he’s literally god of lightning
@xxxmadeline.ff: sadly he died in my head
@williammercerbb: subtle
@xxxmadeline.ff: Thank you. Communication is a skill.
I guess we’re doing this publicly, now. Fine by me. I don’t mind a performance.
A comment section is not a conversation. It is a stage with an audience and an exit button. I can talk to Will in front of two hundred people and still fail to say what I want when we are standing alone in the kitchen.
When I first met Jenny, I told her I was the crazy bitch around Princeton. I wanted her to believe me because I badly wanted to believe it too.
If I’m the crazy bitch, then everything that I do, or say, will be, by default, supporting evidence.
You enter a car by doing a backward handstand? Maddy.
You threaten a man with his own lacrosse stick? Obviously Maddy.
You disappear for three days and return with a new personality? Nobody can claim false advertising.
More importantly, nobody tries to manage a crazy bitch.
They warn each other about her. They prepare for impact. They occasionally remove glassware from the immediate area.
I just don’t expect the consistent personal branding to eventually lead to Better not tell Maddy.
Will’s reply appears less than a minute later.
@williammercerbb: Come say it to my face.
My stomach performs something unhelpful. He has identified the loophole.
@xxxmadeline.ff: I’m in Paris
I am sitting in the living room. But crazy bitch, remember?
@williammercerbb: bring croissant home
@xxxmadeline.ff: I don’t attend meetings called by dictators
@williammercerbb: Then come overthrow me
My stomach does another thing.
Then he shoots me a text.
Will: Come and call me an asshole to my face. Please.
The please is a low blow. He knows I have weaknesses.
For five days, Will has given me exactly what I asked for.
He has not knocked on my door. He has not trapped me in the hallway. He has not appeared beside me with an explanation organised into numbered sections, even though I know the numbered sections exist somewhere inside his skull.
He has kept six feet between us like distance is another rule he can follow.
Before I can answer, the public comments begin multiplying.
@jennyxoxoxx: somebody take @williammercerbb phone away
@itsnate: bro fighting for his life in the comment section
@jennyxoxoxx: somebody has excellent taste in boyfriends
@itsnate: Unforgiven but with rizz ??
@williammercerbb: is any of this support
@jennyxoxoxx: like a stress bunny. So emotional support but useless. good luck
@itsnate: sweet lil donut needs all the help he can get
I stare at Will’s text again.
Then I type.
Maddy: I’m busy working.
The typing bubble appears immediately, stops, then returns.
Will: I know.
Will: Finish it. I’ll be waiting.
Seven hours later, I send him another text.
Maddy: come to the back basketball ring. Bring a ball.
————
The back hoop has a bent rim and a net that gave up sometime before I was born. The floodlight comes on whenever anything larger than a squirrel moves in the yard, which means Will arrives in a spotlight like a man walking on stage.
He's got a ball under one arm and he has not put a jacket on, in February, at nine at night, because he is from a genetic line that does not believe in weather.
“You said bring a ball.”
I did. And this is the arena.
“You have a ball.” I point at him.
“I have four.” He stops about six feet away, which is the distance he has been maintaining like a court order. “Maddy, what is this?”
“We're going to play a game,” I tell Will.
“You don't play basketball.”
“I'm aware.” I take the ball off him. It is much heavier than it looks when the guys throw them at each other. “Free throws. Rules are as follows. If you miss, you answer one question. Honestly. Fully. No captain voice.”
He waits. Then. “That’s it?”
Fair. Eleven minutes from my text to him showing up is not exactly a lot of time to invent a game involving basketball.
“If I score, I get to ask two.”
“When you—” He stops. “Okay. And when you miss?”
“Nothing happens.”
Will's mouth opens. Closes. “Nothing,” he repeats.
“Correct.”
“And if I score?” He asks.
“Nothing happens,” I declare with a straight face.
“Maddy, I shoot eighty-six percent from that line.”
“Then there be will very little talking.” I shrug with the ball in my hand.
“This is not a game, it’s a tax.”
“I invented it. I get to.”
“Maddy.” He drags a hand down his face and I can physically watch a twenty-two-year-old captain wrestle with fair play corruption. “There has to be a consequence on both sides. That's — the entire concept of a—”
“Do you want to play or not?” I cut in.
Will looks at me for a long second and I watch a whole speech arrive behind his teeth and get swallowed.
“Yeah,” he nods. “I want to play.”
I go first because it's my game. I miss by an amount that would be embarrassing if I had any shame available to me tonight. The ball hits the rim, hits the backboard, and rolls off towards the fence like it has somewhere better to be.
Nothing happens.
Will retrieves it without comment. That is the most restrained thing he has ever done.
Then he steps to the line.
And here is the thing about watching Will Mercer shoot a free throw. There's a routine to it. Two bounces, a spin of the ball in his hands, one breath, and the whole of him goes quiet in a way I've only seen twice before. Both times he was holding me.
Then it goes in. It doesn't touch anything. It just goes in, the way water goes downhill.
He does it again.
And again.
The ball comes back to me off the dead net without a bounce, and I pass it to him.
Four in a row, and the only sounds on this court are the net, my own teeth, and the two of us doing something stupid together in the dark like nothing has happened.
The fifth one comes back to me and I hold onto it. “Are you finished?”
“No.” Will takes the ball from my hands.
He looks at the hoop for a while.
The rim on this hoop leans. I've watched him play on it since October and he corrects for it without thinking, every single time, a fraction right of where the shot should go. This is his hoop and he has known it longer than he has known me.
Then Will shoots, and he doesn't correct for the lean, and the ball goes off the front of the rim.
He turns fully toward me, chin lifting slightly. “Ask.”
My heart is doing something so loud I’m surprised I can still hear the ball hitting the floor.
“Did you kiss me because of the rumours?”
“No.” Immediate. No pause at all, which is either the truth or four years of press training.
“That's it? No?”
“No,” he says it again like the word has weight and he's putting it down carefully. “Not once. Not one time, Maddy. That's not — no.”
I look at his face for the lie.
There isn't one. There is never one. This man could not lie to me if I put money on it, which is genuinely one of the worst things about him.
Okay.
Okay.
I take a breath and it goes in wrong. “Second one.”
“You didn't score.”
“Second one, Will.”
He nods.
I bounce the ball, it goes to my foot and Will catches it.
“Was I a bet?” I ask calmly.
Will's head comes up.
“Was there something going? A game, a bet, points, whatever it is you all do.” My voice has gone somewhere very steady.
“Because there was a chat about me with a roster in it, Will, and I have never seen the whole thing, and Leon left it and everybody in that chat knows more about it than I do. So. Was I something that you won?”
And that's when Will Mercer finally gets really angry.
Not loud. Worse than loud. He puts the ball down on the concrete and it rolls away from him and he doesn't look at it.
“No.”
“Will—”
“No, you asked, so I'm answering.” His jaw works and he is not managing it.
“I have done one thing wrong here and I know exactly what it is.
But you don't get to stand there and ask me if I faked it.
I have been so — Maddy, I have been so fucking careful with you.
And I did it so badly that we're standing on a court at nine at night and you think you were a bet.”
“I know.” My voice comes out much smaller than before. “You’ve always been careful with me.”
“Ask me anything else. Ask me the worst thing you can think of. Not that one.”
Neither of us moves.
The floodlight gives us about ten more seconds and then decides nothing is happening out here and clicks off, and the whole yard goes navy. I can only see the shape of Will.
It is so much easier to be in this conversation when I cannot see his face.
Then he crouches for the ball and the light snaps back on and there he is again, lit up like a stage, looking at me.
Will steps back to the line, but then he doesn't shoot.
“My turn,” he bounces the ball.
“That's not—”
“New rule. If I make this, you answer me.”
“You can't just change—”
“You already changed it.” He looks straight at me. “If I make this, you answer one question. If I miss, you get another one free.”
“That was not the rule.”
“It is now.” He shoots without looking at the hoop, and it goes in.
He turns to me. “Where were you?”
Of all the things.
“That's your question? That's what you—” I stop. “Why.”
“Because you asked me to be honest and I already answered your questions.” He's very calm. “Five days ago you got into an Uber and I didn't know what city you were in. So. Where were you.”
And I hear myself say it before I have decided anything at all. “I didn't sleep with anybody.”
There is one reason I know of to ask a person where they were, and I know it because I used it. It almost never means the location. It means Who were you with?
If that’s one thing I’ve learned from dating in school, that’s that. Any unexplained disappearance, however short or long, immediately arrives at precisely that. Cheating.
Will's whole face stops. “What?”
“For three days. I wasn't with anybody. I was on my own the entire—”
“Maddy.” He looks at me like I've started speaking Portuguese. For a second, I want to laugh. “That’s not what I asked. That never once—why would that—no.” He shakes his head like there's water in his ear. “I didn’t ask if you slept with anyone. But— thanks.”
Oh. “You asked where I was, and I assumed—” I mumble.
“Did you eat?” He breathes out.
Oh, God.
I stand there in a floodlight in February, and something in my chest comes apart very quietly.
“Maddy.” He actually laughs, one horrified syllable of it. “Where were you? Were you somewhere you could lock the door? Did you have your charger? You always lose your charger. Did somebody know where you were? In case something happened.”
“A hotel,” I say. “I ordered room service twice and watched nine hours of a show about people renovating barns.”
“Which hotel?”
“Why?” I ask in confusion.
“Because I want to know if it was the good one.” He is entirely serious. “There's one on Nassau with terrible be—” He stops himself. Exhales. “Sorry. Not the point.”
And that.
That is the thing that always gets me with Will. His first instinct is to convert every feeling into logistics. Annoyingly practical. Relentlessly, stupidly practical.
My boyfriend has spent three days imagining me sleeping badly in a substandard hotel. Not once did he think about somebody else's hands on me. He thought about the mattress quality.
And I don't know what to do with it, yet.
“It was fine,” I tell him. “It was the good one.”
“Okay.” He breathes out. “Okay.”
I look at the ball rolling on the concrete. Neither of us picks it up.
“I don't want to play anymore,” I tell him. “I want to talk to you.”