37. Rhett
RHETT
I found Jett on the back porch at two in the morning eating cereal out of the box.
Not a bowl. The box. He had it tucked under one arm like a clutch purse and he was staring out at the Vegas skyline with the look he got when he was actually thinking hard about something and didn’t want anyone to know it. Typical Jett.
He looked over when he heard the door.
“Couldn’t sleep either,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
I dropped into the chair next to him. “What kind?”
He held up the box. Frosted Mini Wheats. I reached in and grabbed a handful and we sat there for a minute in the dark, chewing, looking out at the city.
The championship was in fourteen hours.
Neither of us said anything about it.
“You nervous?” Jett asked finally.
“No.”
“Liar.”
I looked at him sideways. He was still staring at the skyline, working through another handful of cereal, completely unbothered.
That was the thing about Jett that most people missed because they got distracted by the noise he made.
Underneath all of it, he paid attention.
He always had. He just made sure you didn’t notice.
“Not about the game,” I said.
He nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
That was it. Just yeah. No follow-up, no joke, no string of emojis brought to life in human form. He just sat with it the way he occasionally sat with things when it was late enough and quiet enough that the performance wasn’t worth the effort.
I reached into the box again. “What if it goes sideways.”
“The game?”
“No.”
He was quiet for a second. “You mean with Victoria.”
“The committee. The press. The whole thing.” I looked out at the lights. “She built that goddamn franchise from nothing. Fourteen years. And now every sports outlet in the country is running pieces about whether she’s compromised her own team because of me.”
Jett turned the cereal box over in his hands. “Is she?”
“No.”
“Then it doesn’t go sideways.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah it is.” He set the box down on the porch railing.
“Stone. I’ve watched you operate for three years.
You think I don’t know the difference between a guy who’s using somebody and a guy who’s been stupid in love since day one?
” He shook his head. “The committee knows the difference too. They just have to do the paperwork first.”
I didn’t say anything.
The city hummed below us. Somewhere in the distance a siren picked up and faded out. A plane crossed the sky with its lights blinking in slow patient intervals.
“You know what I thought the first time she walked into practice?” Jett said.
“That she was terrifying.”
“Well yeah, obviously.” He almost smiled. “But then I looked at you.” He paused. “You went completely still. You were mid-drill and you just stopped. Like someone hit pause on you.” He picked up the cereal box again. “I’d never seen you stop before. Not for anything.”
I kept my eyes on the skyline.
“I didn’t say anything because it wasn’t my business,” Jett said. “And also because watching you pretend it wasn’t happening was genuinely one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life and I didn’t want to ruin it.”
I said nothing.
“Growling at Langley for looking at her for two seconds.” He shook his head with what I can only describe as reverence. “Truly legendary behavior.”
“Are you done.”
“Genuinely not sure.” He considered it. “Yeah, I think so.”
We sat in silence for a while. The good kind. The kind that had been building for three years between two people who didn’t need to fill every space with something.
“She’s going to be fine,” Jett said. Not performing certainty.
Just stating a fact. “The committee is going to close the review and the press is going to find something else and you’re going to win this championship tomorrow and in about six months nobody is going to remember there was ever anything to write about. ”
“And if they do?”
He shrugged. “Then she handles it. And you stand next to her while she does. And the two of you are so insufferably solid about it that everyone gets bored and moves on.” He grabbed another handful of cereal. “That’s how it works, Stone. You just have to not fall apart in the meantime.”
I looked over at him.
He looked back at me with that grin, the real one, not the one he deployed for chaos but the quieter version underneath it that I’d seen maybe a dozen times in three years.
“Go to sleep,” he said. “We’ve got a game tomorrow.”
I stood up.
“Jett.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t say anything for a second. There wasn’t really anything that needed saying. He knew that. He’d always known.
“Thanks,” I said.
He reached into the cereal box. “Don’t get weird about it.”
I went back inside.
I slept for six hours straight.