Yes, Ill take that one
Neither of us moves to bring it back. I can still make out the pale shape of her shirt and the line of her bare legs beneath it, but nothing else.
The ball sits where she left it, two feet from my shoe, and I have never in my life been so aware of an object I am not allowed to pick up.
“Professor Brar said something on Tuesday that made me want to destroy formal education.” Her voice arrives out of the dark.
Fuck. This has nothing to do with me, and I’ve missed hearing things like this since Jason’s party.
I wave an arm.
The light snaps back on and there she is, six feet away with her arms folded and no anger on her face at all, which is so much worse than the alternative.
Six feet. I have been keeping six feet from this girl for five days and my body has learned it well enough that I stop at it without checking.
“Okay. What did he say?” I ask.
“Doesn't matter.” She presses her lips together. “I got as far as opening our messages. Then I remembered I wasn't talking to you, and I had to sit there being annoyed by myself. Nobody to tell it to.”
Something pulls tight beneath my ribs. “You could've sent it anyway.”
“It sucked.” Her hands come up in immediate protest.
Maddy looks out towards the fence instead of at me.
“I loved telling you things. Professor Brar being an idiot. Jenny saying something unhinged. A dress I bought that Lizzie thinks makes me look like a Vegas magician. Stupid things. Campaign ideas.” Quiet.
“I told you things before I even knew why I wanted you to know.” Her hands flying in different directions.
She picks the ball up again and holds it against her hip, which is what she does with her hands when she doesn't want them free.
I know we have a lot to talk about, but seeing her fumbling the basketball for the past twenty minutes, I just want to pull her into my arms and feel the warmth of her against me again.
There are easier people to fight with than Maddy. Probably all of them. She’s stubborn, fierce and apparently believes conflict resolution can involve an emoji, digital assassination and rigged games.
I wish this were one of those fights I could kiss my way out of, but looking at her now, I know better.
“I missed being told things,” I tell her the closest confession I’ve got.
“Why didn't you tell me?” No heat in it at all. She asks it the way you'd ask somebody the time. The ball drops onto her feet.
I have had five days to answer. I have a version with a beginning.
It has three parts, it accounts for the timeline, Coach's response, what each of them got and the exact point at which I decided the thing was finished, and I have rehearsed it in an ice bath and on a bus and twice at four in the morning.
I could explain all of it in under three minutes.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you Maddy. I thought I was careful with how I handled it.” I admit. “I thought I dealt with it quietly enough by reporting to Coach.”
“I know. Leon told me.” She picks up the ball again and holds it by her hip. “You didn’t even tell me the conversation existed. Why?” The frown in between her brows only deepens.
That removes two thirds of the speech.
I shove my hands into my pockets. “Because I thought I fixed it.”
Maddy turns her head. “That's it?”
“That's the embarrassing version. Yeah.”
“Will—” She exhales sharply and doesn’t even look at me.
“I told them to stop. It kept going. I took it higher. It stopped. Everybody ran their laps.” I look at the crooked rim instead of at her. “And somewhere in the middle of that, in my head, it became a thing that has been handled.”
Her mouth presses into a line.
“That’s how I think, Maddy.” I continue. “Something happens, I work out what needs doing, I do it. Once it’s handled, I don’t keep carrying it around for entertainment.”
The light snaps on because she has moved her foot.
“But it wasn’t your information. I would still want to know.”
“You were already running yourself into the ground,” I mutter. “You were sleeping like shit. Half the time I couldn’t tell whether you had eaten unless I physically put food in front of you.”
“I was still getting straight As.” Her voice rises slightly.
“That is not a very good medical standard, Maddy.” I put both hands over my face and drag them down. “I thought telling you would hurt you and change nothing,” I admit.
The ugliest version comes out because it is the simplest one.
She looks down to her shoes.
Her silence is killing me. As if five days are not enough. I would do anything for her to yell at me now.
“And,” I add because apparently honesty is now a recreational activity, “I thought there was a decent chance you’d stop working with half the athletes around us because you’d question whether they were looking at your business or looking at you.”
“I might have.”
“I know.”
“I also might not have.”
“I know that now.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “You knew it then. You just trusted your prediction more than you trusted my decision.”
Oh fucking hell.
I have spent the last five days respecting every boundary she has put in front of me, including the one where she surgically removed herself from my life while continuing to laugh loudly enough with Nate that I could hear her from upstairs.
I know what I did.
I also know I am fucking tired of having one bad decision become the entire reading of my character.
Like nothing else I did matters. Like every dinner, every ride, every campaign conversation, every time I asked before touching her and every time I trusted her to make her own call disappears because I fucked this one thing up badly enough.
The frustration has been sitting somewhere behind my sternum for days.
I take another step forward. “You know what has made me fucking insane for five days?”
I dig my fingers into my hair. “I know I was wrong. I worked that out before you even left the party. I've replayed every time I should have told you. The car. My room. The gym. That stupid Pirates movie. Pick one. I know.” My voice cracks louder across the yard than I intended. “But every time you look at me like I didn’t trust that you could handle things yourself, or that I didn’t care what you thought— Maddy, I cared too fucking much and trusted my own judgement too much.
That’s why I made the wrong call. A pretty fucking bad one but that doesn’t erase everything else that I do. ”
The floodlight catches the movement and becomes aggressively bright again, illuminating both of us like we have been called onto a stage.
Perfect.
I am now emotionally exposed under exterior security lighting.
Both her hands go still at her sides. That's how I know she's actually listening. This girl cannot say good morning without gesturing.
“I know you’re good at making the calls.” She drops the ball at once.
“I like doing things for you. I can’t pretend I suddenly want to become someone else who watches a preventable problem unfold and do nothing about it.” I hiss. “I just can’t not offer solutions.”
And fuck, I am tired of wondering whether she wants me to.
“Will. I like that you do things.”
Everything inside me stops.
Maddy looks almost offended by my confusion. “Do you seriously think I want you to stop being like that?”
“Like what?”
She waves at all of me. “That. You know what I mean.”
“I actually don't. This entire conversation exists because apparently I’ve missed the specifications.”
A laugh escapes her. “There. That. Your stupid solution brain.”
“My brain is not stupid.”
“Your stupidly competent solution brain. Better?”
“A little.” My mouth curves.
Maddy takes another step towards me. Six feet. Then four. Close enough that I can see the tiny crease between her brows when she is trying to put something complicated into the correct words.
“I like that when something goes wrong, you don’t stand around talking about how unfortunate it is. You move.”
I say nothing.
“I like that you remember things I tell you when I don't even remember telling you. I like that you know when I'm spiralling and instead of telling me to calm down. Which, for the record, makes me want to commit murder. You ask me questions until I can hear my own brain again.”
My throat goes tight.
Her eyes soften, looking at me now. “I'm not asking you to change your oh what’s the solution here brain.”
Fuck me.
She is standing six inches closer than before, telling me she likes the exact parts of myself I spent the week wondering whether I should cut out.
I didn’t know that was an option.
Where the fuck has this person been for twenty-two years?
Not literally. Obviously.
The one who looked at my entire personality and apparently thought, Yes. I'll take that one.
“I didn’t know—” I close my eyes.
When I open them she is watching me with her eyebrows up and something closer to enjoyment on her face.
Maddy keeps going. “I like it, Will. I like that when I hand you a bottle, you open it. I like coming home to food with my name on it and I like that you moved my car and I like that you know what I've eaten. Keep all of it. It’s more than anything I could ask for.”
“Then what— You’ve spent the last hour—”
“I liked you the first time I saw you Will.” Maddy cuts in. “What? You think I go around and tell them to their face that they’re the hot one around here?”
My chest feels way too small for this.
There are compliments I know how to receive. Maddy is standing in front of me telling me she likes that I open her fucking beer.
Her face is completely serious. “That's not what I was angry about,” she finishes.
My voice comes out lower than I expect. “Then what the fuck have I been suffering for?”
Maddy's mouth falls open. “I don't know. You're the problem-solving genius.”
“I thought you wanted me to stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Me doing things for you.”
She actually looks horrified. “Why would I want that?” She takes another step. Her voice softens, frustration folding inward. “I missed all the shit you do for me. I think I was trying to prove I didn’t need any of it.”
That is so aggressively Maddy that I almost understand immediately.
“You did an excellent job.”
“I know.”