Jeremiah
Chapter playlist:
Real Wild Child (Wild One) — Iggy Pop
By my count, this hotel has four hundred rooms and not one bottle of hot sauce, and I’ve started taking it personally.
I’ve hit the buffet twice already. I check the little caddy by the bagels. Ketchup, three kinds of mustard, something called fig spread. I lift a domed silver tray, hoping. One lonely croissant looks back at me.
I head back to the omelette station waiting for my turn so I can make my plea for hot sauce. I’d give up my gold medal for some of my abuela’s roasted tomatillo salsa right now but beggars can’t be choosers. At this point, I’d settle for Cholula or Tapatio.
There’s a guy from the East team in front of me, already trying the cook’s patience with his specific request for “not too much cheese, but don’t be stingy either.”
I catch the chef’s eye when the guy finally steps off.
“You got hot sauce back there?”
“No, sir.” He doesn’t look up from the eggs.
Not even a “Maybe, let me check.” This is a man who runs a tight kitchen and none of it is going to bend for me.
“Cool. Cool.” I back off before I become somebody’s cautionary tale about persistence.
I abandon the omelet line, pile scrambled eggs onto a plate because a man has to eat something, and I’m still holding a small funeral for my hot sauce dreams when Micah Lemon appears at my elbow with a plate stacked high enough to rival the Tower of Babel.
“You good?” He eyes me over the waffles. “You’ve been standing here staring.”
“There’s no hot sauce in this entire building, Micah.”
“There’s Tabasco. I saw a little bottle by the scrambled eggs.”
“That’s not hot sauce. That’s hot sauce’s redneck cousin.”
Micah blinks at me, waffles listing dangerously to one side. “Okay, Yelp reviewer.”
Behind us, the ballroom is already a wall of noise. Two full rosters of hockey players who’ve never once used an indoor voice.
Somebody’s laughing so hard he’s wheezing. Somebody just took a dinner roll to the side of the head, and from the outrage in his voice, it had butter on it.
I find our table and sit with what’s left of my dignity and my eggs.
No distractions today. Big day. Media photos, press conference this afternoon, team bonding tonight. I need to be locked in. Present. A guy who has his life together.
A guy who is not, currently, thinking about freckles.
So much for that.
Okay. New plan. I need a win. And it’s clearly not going to be the girl. So it might as well be the hot sauce.
I catch sight of a laminated sign taped crooked to the wall by the ballroom doors. Magnolia Room, Continental Breakfast, 6:30 to 10:30.
Oh yeah, baby.
I push back from the table.
“Precio.” Levi Nyberg points his fork at me like he’s been talking a while and just noticed I checked out. “You good? You’ve got the thousand-yard stare going.”
“I’m good.” I sit back down for exactly long enough to look normal. “Just thinking.”
“About?”
“Nothing.”
I get up again before he can push it.
The Magnolia Room is a different planet. Quiet carpet, quiet light, quiet families eating quiet waffles. Nobody’s yelling about cheese ratios.
Through the swinging doors, I catch a glimpse of the kitchen.
Behind the line, there’s a cook exclaiming dramatically about what country will take home the World Cup, while another guy argues back at him good-naturedly.
Some other guy is singing off key while the prep guy yells, “No manches, vato, ya no.”
I pull my attention back to the buffet line and spot a guy behind the coffee urns, restocking a tray of pastries. He’s short, a little soft around the middle, and has cheerful rosy cheeks. This guy knows exactly where the good stuff is kept.
"Oye, primo," I say, easy, friendly, like we've known each other for years. "No tienes algo picante en la cocina?"
He looks at me for a second, probably wondering why some guy the size of a doorframe just wandered in asking for something spicy in Spanish, and then his face does this slow, apologetic wince.
"Oh, no, jefe." He shakes his head, genuinely pained on my behalf. "Tenemos nada picante."
"Nothing? Hijoles." I put a hand over my heart. "No me digas."
"Solo tenemos Tabasco."
"Tabasco." I say it the way you'd say parking ticket. "Ay, chavo. No tienes salsa o algo? Algo con más sabor?" More flavor. I lower my voice, glance back toward the ballroom, lower it further. "No me gusta la comida de los güeros, chico." Not my thing, this white-bread stuff.
That gets him. He barks out a laugh, head tipping back, and claps me on the shoulder.
"?Tú eres de los del hockey?" You one of the hockey guys? He looks me over again, more curious now than impressed.
"Uno de esos, sí."
"Ah, órale. Pues…" He's grinning now, already glancing toward the back of the kitchen. "Deja me ver."
Awesome. He says he's going to look, but I'm pretty sure he's just going to check if they have enough to share. Fair enough. That's all I can ask for.
"órale, primo," I reply, appreciative he'll at least go look.
He disappears toward the back, and I drift out before anyone notices I’ve wandered into a room I have no business being in, and head back to the ballroom with my hopes modestly raised.
Line 1’s deep into something by the time I sit back down, and I’ve clearly missed the beginning.
“All I’m saying,” Ted Powell says, gesturing with a piece of bacon. “Is that Micah’s plate is a structural hazard. That’s not breakfast, that’s a Jenga tower.”
“It’s called carb loading, Ted.” Micah doesn’t even look up from said tower. “Some of us don’t do things halfway.”
“You’re gonna do things sideways in about four minutes, when that whole thing tips into your lap.”
Jake’s a few seats down, quiet, doing a convincing impression of a guy who’s somewhere else entirely.
His oatmeal hasn’t moved in ten minutes.
I get it, man. Takes one to know one. Two days ago he stood me up at a coffee place, swore on his life it had the best matcha in DC, and never showed.
Knowing what I know now about whatever’s going on with him and this PR thing, I’d bet money he’s caught up in the arrangements.
Fine by me, honestly. I ended up buying my own matcha and getting backed into by a stranger, who spilled the whole thing down my shirt, which, in hindsight, might be the best thing that’s happened to me all month.
I almost smile, just thinking about it. I catch myself and look down at my eggs instead, very seriously, like they need my full attention.
“And that’s the thing about fake dating,” Dash DiFranco is saying. “You gotta commit to the bit. Like, full method-actor stuff. My buddy did it once for a soda commercial. Ended up actually marrying the girl.”
“That tracks,” Erik Schultz says. “That’s basically how arranged marriages used to work, if you squint.”
Dash snorts. “Don’t squint at marriage, Erik, that’s how you end up alone.”
“All that hand-holding and stuff in public sounds exhausting,” Neal Sanderson says.
Bryce Chambers leans back, the scar at his mouth doing the thing that makes his smirk look extra smug. “You’ve clearly never held hands before.”
I don’t know what comes over me. Maybe it’s the hot sauce withdrawal.
“Your mom doesn’t count.”
Dead silence, the kind where you genuinely don’t know if you just landed a joke or laid a rotten egg. And then the whole table goes off. Neal makes a strangled noise. Ted nearly chokes. Micah points at me like I just invented yo mama jokes.
I am the last person on the planet to be telling yo mama jokes.
“Sounds like a cry for help,” Micah says, delighted, and now half the table’s repeating your mom doesn’t count back at each other, and Neal’s the color of the home fries, and I sit back, pleased with myself for the first time all morning.
See. I can be present. I can be locked in. I delivered a joke. Basically the picture of focus.
Ten more minutes of escalating chaos, a heated debate about hash browns versus home fries that Stone Reilly settles by eating both off two plates, and then the ballroom’s side door opens and my guy from the Magnolia Room slides in with a tray.
He’s carrying a small white ramekin on a tray tucked behind a stack of clean cups like contraband, and a bundle wrapped in a cloth napkin beside it. He catches my eye across the room. Sets it down fast, right by my arm, like he’s planting evidence.
“Salsa de la casa,” he murmurs with a wink. “Y unas tortillas. No le digas a nadie, eh?”
Our secret.
“Eres mi héroe,” I tell him, and he laughs all the way back through the door.
I unwrap the napkin. Tortillas, still warm, a little charred at the edges. The salsa’s deep red, flecked with seeds, just like Abuela’s.
I’m not about to dip a tortilla in like some rookie.
I grab one, pile what’s left of my scrambled eggs onto it, fold it up like a taco, and pour the salsa over the top, generously, because I’m a grown man, a professional athlete, and I have never once in my life shown restraint around salsa. Then I eat it.
For one second, nothing happens.
Then it happens.
My eyes go first, full-on watering. Then my nose. Then a sound comes out of me that I’d call, charitably, a wheeze.
“Oh my goodness.” Micah’s already pointing, waffles forgotten. “Precio’s CRYING.”
“I’m not crying.” My voice comes out an octave too high. “It’s, there’s pepper. In my eye.”
“That’s not how peppers work, man.”
I grab my water and drink half of it, eyes streaming, and somehow I’m still smiling, because this is the best thing that’s happened to me all morning. This is, hands down, my win.
That doesn’t stop the guys from making fun of me for the rest of the day.