Chapter Three #2
"You're new," Graham Weller said, when I'd gotten close enough to read his badge.
LEAD BENEFACTOR—which is a phrase you have to pay to have written about you.
He had a way of looking at you that made you feel briefly like the most interesting object in an auction.
"Press, by the lanyard. Student press, by the shoes.
" He smiled to take the sting off—a thing men like him do, hand you the insult and the apology in the same motion so you don't know which to hold.
"What does a student reporter find interesting about a donor party? "
"The food, honestly." All sunshine, lifting a crab cake in evidence. "And the architecture. I've never been up here. You can see the whole field."
"You can." He looked out at it. Fond. Proprietary.
A man surveying a thing he owned. "Beautiful, isn't it.
I've put a lot into making it beautiful.
" A beat. "People think the money's about winning.
It's not. It's about stability. You build something this size, you can't have it wobbling every time some twenty-year-old has a bad week.
You need it to hold. You need everyone rowing the same direction.
" He turned the expensive smile back on me.
"You'll learn that, in your line. The story that helps is the one that makes things hold.
The story that just makes noise—" He shrugged, gentle, dismissive, a man flicking away a fly he could afford to ignore. "Well. Nobody remembers the noise."
"I'll keep that in mind," I said, beaming, while every alarm I owned went off behind my smile.
I'd learn by Monday that Graham Weller had given the program more money in five years than the library had seen in fifty—and that lead benefactors who give like that aren't donating to a team.
They're buying one. But I already knew, standing there with a crab cake, that I'd just been politely told to stop by the smoothest, most dangerous person in the room, before I'd asked a single question.
You don't warn off the noise.
You warn off the thing you're afraid is a signal.
And then I clocked the nervous person I'd actually come for.
?
Theo Brooks stood by the glass with a club soda he wasn't drinking, smiling at a donor with the specific exhaustion of a man whose whole job for the night was to be fine.
And he was standing wrong. Weight off the left leg, hip cocked to fake casual—the exact posture of someone managing a body that's lying to a room about how much it hurts.
I started toward him.
I got four feet.
"You're going to want to turn around," said a low voice at my shoulder, "and go look very interested in the crab cakes."
Cade Lawson. In a charcoal blazer that did not fit the way department-store blazers fit—that fit the way a thing fits when somebody large has had it tailored and still hates wearing it.
Clean-shaven over the fading bruise. Hair pushed back.
He looked like a photograph of himself, which is to say he looked miserable, which is to say I had the immediate, deranged urge to make it worse.
"Lawson." I beamed. "You clean up like a hostage."
"And you walk into a room like you're casing it."
"I'm covering it. It's a job. We have those now, women." I let my eyes go past him to the glass, to Theo, just for a second. Just long enough. "Your friend doesn't look great."
His jaw did the thing. The tick. I was developing a relationship with that muscle.
"Theo's fine," he said.
"Everybody keeps telling me how fine everybody is.
It's the fine-est football team I've ever seen.
You'd think nobody on it had ever been hurt in their lives.
" I took a sip of the wine I wasn't drinking either—we were all holding props tonight—and watched him over the rim.
"You know what I notice, at parties like this?
Who the players look at before they answer a question.
There's always somebody in the room they check with first." I tilted my glass an inch toward the current of Voss.
"Yours all check with him. Except—" I tilted it the other way, toward Weller.
"Half of them check with him second. Which is interesting, because he's not on the staff.
He's just the man who pays for the building. "
For a second Cade didn't say anything. The string lights caught the gray of his eyes, and I watched him decide, very deliberately, not to look across the room at either of them.
Which told me more than looking would have.
"You think you're the first reporter to come in here and feel clever," he said quietly.
"You're not. They come every year. Stay a couple weeks.
Then they figure out it's a lot of work for a story that won't run, because the people who'd kill it are the people who fund the building it'd run in.
" He leaned down, just slightly. Close enough that I caught whatever soap he used under the borrowed cologne.
Close enough that the back of my neck did something I chose to ignore.
"And then they go cover the gymnastics team, and get a nice clip, and leave.
That's the smart version of you. You should be her. "
"Wow." I put a hand to my chest. "You came over here to career-counsel me. At a party. In a hostage blazer."
"I came over here," he said, "because you were about to ruin a kid's night by reminding him he can't stand right. In front of the men who decide whether he gets paid."
And that—
That landed.
Because it was true. And because it wasn't the answer of a man covering up a scandal.
It was the answer of a man covering up a person.
There's a difference, and I was good enough at my job to feel it, and dumb enough at everything else to find it the single most attractive thing he could possibly have said.
I lowered the glass.
"Okay," I said. And I meant it, and I watched the meaning of it surprise him.
"Not tonight. Not in front of them." I held his eyes.
"But you should know something, because I think you might actually be a halfway decent person under all the—" I gestured at the entirety of him.
"—this. Not talking about it isn't protecting Theo.
It's protecting whoever did it to him. Those aren't the same.
Even though they let you sleep the same. "
His face didn't change. But something behind it did—the same recalibration as the tunnel. The small internal collision of a man hearing a sentence he'd been arguing with himself for years.
"Goodnight, Sloane," he said.
"Goodnight, twenty-seven."
I walked away first this time, because I'd learned a long time ago that the person who leaves the conversation owns it.
But I felt him watch me the whole way to the elevator.
And at the elevator I let myself look back, just once, and he was still looking—blazer and bruise and all that careful nothing on his face—and somewhere under my ribs a very stupid thing turned over and stretched and got comfortable, like it planned to stay.
?
I texted Theo Brooks that night. I'd gotten his number the way I get most things: by being underestimated near someone with a clipboard.
This is Sloane Pierce from the Review. Off the record, no names, no story unless you want one. I just think somebody should ask how you're actually doing. Coffee? My treat. I'm very nonthreatening, ask anyone.
Three dots. Gone. Three dots again.
Then, an hour later: tomorrow. the place off campus. not the one on the quad.
I didn't sleep much.
I told myself it was the story.
Across the apartment, Brielle's light was still on, and I almost knocked—almost told her the thing turning over under my ribs had a name and a number and a hostage blazer.
I didn't. I kept it.
I was getting good at keeping it, which should have scared me more than it did.
?