JEREMIAH
Chapter playlist:
American Woman — Lenny Kravitz
Idon’t look back as I leave the park.
My hand curls into a fist at my side, then opens again. Like that’ll get rid of the feel of her pulse against my palm.
It doesn’t.
She’d been cool. The kind of effortless punk rock cool without actually being a punk rocker.
She was also, clearly, a pickpocket.
Why is she in my head?
I genuinely don’t know.
“Tsk, tsk,” I’d said, as if her very proximity turned me into a smooth talker. “Sticky fingers.”
She’d looked down at her own hand like it belonged to someone else.
Looked back up at me. She had freckles. A scatter of them across the bridge of her nose, like someone had flicked a paintbrush and walked away satisfied.
I don’t know why I’m cataloguing that. Brown hair.
Big brown eyes. And a slight scar across her eyebrow, so faint, I almost missed it.
I don’t banter with strangers on sidewalks. I definitely don’t banter with strangers who were, thirty seconds prior, actively robbing me. And yet there I was.
I’d leaned in close enough that my mouth was level with her ear.
“Crime doesn’t pay,” I’d told her. Close enough to catch the coconut in her shampoo.
My voice had dropped low. Slow, unhurried, because for reasons I still can’t explain, I wanted to watch her shiver.
I’d never used my voice like that before.
I definitely hadn’t planned on trying it out on a woman who’d just tried to rob me.
Her breath had caught, and I’d felt it more than heard it.
“Maybe I just wanted your number,” she’d said, voice not quite steady, and mine hadn’t been much steadier when I answered.
I don’t know what happened, but I felt an odd sense of vertigo but in a good way. Like when you go over the crest of a roller coaster.
I’m not the kind of guy who gets taken in by a pretty face.
Trust me, there are plenty of girls who come to all the games and get really friendly in the warm-up tunnel.
But as the son of a TV producer, I’ve learned the art of extricating myself from those types of situations with ease.
Furthermore, I don’t have time to date. Hockey is my life. I breathe it. Dream it. Become it.
So why did that little pickpocket make my heart stop for two seconds? I’ll chalk it up to lack of proper sleep. I didn’t get my nap today.
I had six hours of cameras today, and not one second of it was anything new. Big smile, Jeremiah. Hold it. Again.
But four minutes with a stranger who tried to steal my watch, and my pulse still hasn’t leveled out.
I used to be good at this. I’ve had more media training than the average person would know what to do with. But somewhere between the last photo this afternoon and my walk to the waterfront, I forgot how to just play it cool with a beautiful woman.
She had no idea who I was. Nothing about her was a performance. Not the watch, not the college, not whatever expression I make when I think I’m being smooth. She’d looked at me like she already had me pegged, and was mildly entertained anyway.
Funny thing is, the watch isn’t even worth much.
Half the time, it doesn’t work at all. But it was a gift from my old teammates in the Jr. Kings program back in Mexico City.
A few of my buddies picked it up at the fayuca when I got into University of Michigan.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them it’s a knock-off.
By the time the water’s out of sight, Georgetown’s turned into cobblestones and brick storefronts. Tourists photograph rowhouses. A guy in a Nationals cap argues with a parking meter.
My legs are tired. A whole day of media will do that. One more take, big smile, fifty-three takes, thanks to a PA who couldn’t count to three. Tyson stood through all of it with his arms crossed, waiting on the rest of us like he had nowhere else to be.
I check my phone. The Corpus Christi team chat (AKA CC Boyz) has ten million messages and every single one of them is about Cinco de Mayo. I had put my phone on do not disturb earlier for some peace, and now that it’s on again, there’s a deluge of messages.
CC Boyz
Fletcher: cinco de mayo on a TACO TUESDAY
Mitchell: this is what we’ve been training for, boyz
Fletcher: the stars have aligned
Hartley: we are doing shots tonight in honor of your people, jeremiah
Me: cinco de mayo isn’t Mexico’s independence day
Fletcher: …what
Me: not really celebrated in Mexico. more of an American margarita holiday at this point
Fletcher: …wait. When IS Mexico’s independence day
Me: september 16
Mitchell: we’ve been doing this WRONG
Hartley: ok BUT the shots are still happening
Mitchell: the shots are ABSOLUTELY still happening
Fletcher: CC gonna miss you, traitor
Hartley: leaving us after three years man
Mitchell: THREE YEARS hockey stick emoji crying emoji
Me: I’m not dying, I’ll see you guys in a few days. Geeze
Fletcher: yeah mitchell’s getting hitched boi
Hartley: Are you amped for skydiving or what?
Our first-line defenseman is getting married. Hartley’s his best man. And apparently, before any of that, the four of us are throwing ourselves out of a perfectly good airplane, for reasons still unclear to me beyond the fact Hartley watches too many extreme sports clips.
I lift my eyes off my phone to see two guys peel off from a knot of tourists near a shop window, moving with that stiff, trying-not-to-run energy. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, and the forward-leaning walk you only get from years on skates.
“Are you… dude. Are you Jeremiah Precio?” The taller one already has his phone out.
“Yeah. That’s me.”
They saw the tournament info on some hockey account this morning, talking over each other to explain it. They play for their high school, left wing and center, and they have opinions about my slap shot that are, honestly, mostly correct.
“Do you release off your back foot? Because Coach says…”
“Front foot, mostly. Weight transfer does the work, not the arm.” I show him with an imaginary stick, right there on the sidewalk, because some things you can’t half-explain. He nods like I’ve handed him the keys to the hockey kingdom.
We do the selfie. I ask their names. Julian, and a kid who just says “Bear,” and tell them good luck this season.
Julian says they’re coming to a game this summer if they can swing tickets.
I tell him I’ll see what I can do, and I mean it, and for about ninety seconds nothing in my life is complicated at all.
My phone buzzes before they're even out of sight. It’s my agent:
Mike: Announcement’s locked in. Media week in Irvine starts the week before the DC tournament. I’ll send the full schedule once I have it.
Mike: Did you see the piece in The Athletic?
Mike: Jeremiah.
Mike: Call me.
I run the next few weeks in my head while I walk.
Texas first just to hang with the guys, then I’ll pack up my house before putting it on the market.
My cousin Nate’s already sending me listings for something on the coast, since he’s twenty minutes from Newport Beach and has apparently appointed himself my local liaison whether I asked or not.
He owns an insurance agency in Laguna Beach, so he knows where not to buy a house unless I want to spend ten grand a month just for fire insurance.
Make an offer sometime in the next month. Then the wedding. Then California for the Irvine team press tour and the announcement. Then straight from the coast to DC with no gap in between. Which is fine. Breathing is overrated.
One more text lands.
Mike: One more thing. There’s a gala after the tournament you’re required to attend. Organizers want faces in the room. Bring a plus-one if you’ve got one. Or find one. Fans eat that up.
I imagine Sticky Fingers in a fancy dress… pocketing the silverware.
I don’t know where that came from.
Me: noted. calling you from the car.
I don’t have a plus-one. I don’t have time for a plus-one.
I order an Uber in the app. My flight’s not for a few hours yet, but the first-class lounge has sashimi and I’ve decided I’m starved. I’m running at approximately fourteen percent battery and my body is aware of this and my brain refuses to cooperate with the shutdown.
The photoshoot had been tedious but necessary. My jaw still hurts from smiling the whole time.
It’s fine.
The Irvine announcement is seven weeks out and it’s fine.
The pickpocket somehow short-circuited my higher functions for thirty-seven seconds, and that is, categorically… fine. I guess.
I’d expected her to wiggle out of my loose grip and run.
She hadn’t run.
She’d squared up at me with those freckles and that devil-may-care expression and told me it was a nice day. Something so pedestrian and mundane.
Such moxie.
Okay. I think I understand why she’s in my head.
She isn’t anything, I tell myself. She’s a stranger.
I will not think about her freckles. I will not think about those brown eyes.
Or that cute little scar on her eyebrow.
I will definitely not spend any more time thinking about a girl who tried to steal a watch that doesn’t even work.
A girl I’ve, for some reason, named Sticky Fingers that I will never see again.