Chapter 3 Opposite Games #2
The interview went on, volley for volley, each question more absurd than the last. “Biggest fear?” “Disorganization.” “Any superpower?” “Efficiency.” “Favorite condiment?” “None.” By the third question the Mario Kart table had tuned in, and even the media officer’s typing stuttered, her eyes drifting up over the screen.
Theo leaned into the persona, fully committed. He’d gotten so good at being the joke that he sometimes forgot there was supposed to be a punchline. He tossed the sugar packet at Kas, who caught it without looking. “Last one: if you weren’t playing tennis, what would you be doing right now?”
Kas set the packet aside, untouched. “Something with less uncertainty.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Kas leveled a look at him. “Then it is the right one.”
Theo’s grin threatened to collapse inward; he caught it at the last moment and reset to default. “Spoken like a true robot,” he said, making it a bit, then glancing at the peanut gallery to see whether it played. It did.
He took a longer drink, less for the caffeine than to stall. He didn’t want to stop. The performance had a gravity. Stop joking and he might fall through it.
And Kas could see it. That was the problem with the man. He watched the bit the way a line judge watches a serve: for where it actually landed.
Theo set down his coffee, hands suddenly restless. “Doesn’t it bug you?” he asked, keeping it light. “Everyone deciding you’re the cold one?”
Kas’s jaw tensed, once. “It does not matter what they think. It is only noise.”
“Come on, man, you have to care at least a little. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here, running these dumb drills, doing the press ops, letting me…” He gestured at the space between them, the litter of sugar packets. “You could just check out. Phone it in.”
“I do not phone it in,” Kas said.
“No,” Theo agreed. “You don’t. You know what’s funny?
I’ve watched you for six years. Everyone studies your serve, your return position, the robot stuff.
I used to watch the other thing.” He turned his cup a quarter rotation on the saucer, an uncharacteristic fidget, his eyes somewhere over Kas’s shoulder.
“Melbourne, two years ago. You lost the semi in five, brutal one, and there’s this clip nobody clipped, because why would they: you stopping on the way off court to move a ball kid’s chair out of the sun.
Hundred and four degrees. Down match point earlier. You probably don’t even remember it.”
“I remember the chair,” Kas said. “The placement was negligent.”
“See, that.” Theo pointed at him with the cup.
“That’s the whole scam, right there. Everyone thinks you don’t notice anything that isn’t tennis, and the actual truth is you notice everything and ration the evidence.
” He said it lightly, a bit, a riff, and underneath the lightness the observation sat there being the most accurate thing anyone on tour had ever said about him, and Kas experienced the novel sensation of having been scouted.
Theo reached to flick another packet, and his hand stopped short.
The lounge had been watching them for half an hour, in the lazy, predatory way tour people watched anything that might become a story.
The sponsor’s odd-couple experiment taking coffee together was, in the closed ecosystem of a tournament week, programming.
A French doubles veteran had relocated twice to improve his sightline.
Two physios appeared to have a wager running, though the terms were unclear.
By consensus, the room had expected a viral clip in the making: the showman performing at the iceberg, the iceberg enduring it, content practically generating itself.
What it got instead was harder to classify. Two men leaning gradually closer over a litter of sugar packets. Theo’s volume dropping by degrees. Kas talking more than anyone in the room had heard him talk in five years.
No performance arrived. No clip announced itself. Table by table, the lounge gave up and went back to itself.
At their table, the joke had stopped circulating, and neither of them had a replacement ready.
Kas said, “You always deflect when it matters.”
The words were quiet enough that Theo had no defense ready. He didn’t move. Every eye in the room had been tracking what happened next, or maybe none of them were anymore, which came to the same thing.
He thought about making a joke. None came. He looked at his hands, then up at Kas, who was just sitting there, watching, waiting.
The coffee cup was empty when he reached for it. He stared into it anyway, as if the answer might have settled at the bottom, and said, “It’s easier this way.”
Kas didn’t push. He nodded once and let the silence do the rest.
Theo’s face rearranged itself into the shape of a smile he didn’t trust to hold. So he stood, brushed imaginary crumbs from his shorts, and said, “Tomorrow, then?”
“Eleven sharp,” Kas said.
“I’ll be late,” Theo said, because he needed to reclaim one thing, even if it was only that.
Walking out, he could feel the room reset behind him: the résumés, the video games, the conversations. By the end of the corridor the moment had evaporated. The words hadn’t. They ricocheted around the space he’d spent years keeping empty.
His own face waited in the mirrored glass of the elevator. The smile was gone. He waited until the doors opened, then stepped inside and didn’t look back.
* * *
The key art shoot happened that afternoon, because the sponsor’s timeline had been built by people who scheduled chemistry the way they scheduled catering.
The studio south of the venue had a black sweep, two stools nobody would use, and a photographer named Iva with a shaved head and the unhurried authority of someone who had shot heads of state and toddlers and rated them about equal.
The concept, the intermediary explained from behind a monitor, was FIRE AND ICE, the words printed on an actual mood board. Theo in tournament red. Kas in white. Back to back, arms folded, the oldest poster in sports.
Theo did his job. He hit the marks and gave the lens the catalog of himself: the grin, the smolder, the cocked eyebrow that had sold wristwatches.
Between setups, he kept the room fed, riffing with the assistants, lobbying for a fog machine “for drama,” getting Iva to admit she had once shot a tennis calendar she refused to name.
It was easy. Rooms were always easy.
Beside him, sometimes against him, Kas stood with perfect posture and did precisely what was asked and nothing else. He photographed, Theo noted with professional irritation, magnificently. The bones did all the work the personality declined.
“Now face each other,” Iva said, an hour in. “Net post distance. You know the distance.”
They knew the distance. They took it.
The studio chatter kept running until Iva lifted the camera again.
“Look at each other. Not at the camera. At each other. You have just played a match point. You are deciding what you think of the man.”
Later, Theo would recognize that as the most dangerous sentence of the summer’s first week. Performing something and doing it were not as far apart as Theo preferred, and Iva was very good at her job.
He looked.
Kas looked back.
The strip lights buzzed faintly. Somewhere behind the sweep, an assistant’s phone buzzed and was silenced.
The gray eyes opposite him made their assessment without theater and without looking away, and Theo, who had won staring contests with stadium cameras, who had no documented inability to be looked at, felt something in him go very still.
Nerves would have been easier. Desire, when it arrived, would at least have a name. This was worse: the horrible sensation of being read accurately.
“There,” Iva said quietly, behind the shutter. “There it is.”
The frame she meant would run for two years on banners and broadcast packages. Eventually, forty thousand strangers on the internet would analyze frame 0119, the one where neither man was looking at the camera. The sponsor’s brand team selected it unanimously.
Nobody in the room said anything except Iva, who lowered the camera, glanced between them with the with the quick, professional flicker of a woman who had photographed ten thousand faces, and declared a break she did not need.