Chapter Five
Sloane
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It wasn't empty.
You're looking in the right place from the wrong door.
Stop asking what happened to Reyes. Start asking what he signed before he left.
Then ask why everybody signs it in the same office, and why the door's always closed, and why nobody ever talks about the afternoons they spend in there.
Be careful. Some of us are watching to make sure you don't stop.
Some of us are watching for the other reason.
I read it eleven times.
I was alone in the Review office, which at midnight is a specific kind of alone—the long room with its rows of dead monitors, the one overhead light I left on because the full bank flickered, the city humming faint through the single-pane windows, the smell of old carpet and newer coffee.
Mara had gone home at ten with her four-color planner and a warning to lock up.
The work-study kids were asleep in their own beds like reasonable people.
It was just me and a glowing rectangle telling me that somebody on the inside had decided I was worth the risk of a message, and that somebody else had decided I was worth watching.
I want to be a person who tells you she immediately got to work.
The truth is I sat there for a full minute first with my heart going, doing the thing you're not supposed to do in this job, which is feel the weight of it personally.
Some of us are watching for the other reason.
Not a threat, exactly. Worse than a threat.
An accounting. Somebody was keeping a ledger, and I'd just been told I was in it, on a page I couldn't see, in a column that wasn't friendly.
Then I did what I do when a feeling gets too big to file. I worked.
What he signed, I wrote on the whiteboard, in the corner where Mara wouldn't see it first thing and ask questions I wasn't ready to answer. The office. The closed door. The afternoons.
Because here's what the tip had done, and it was elegant, and I'd come to suspect it had been written by someone who understood exactly how I think: it had turned my story inside out.
I'd been chasing a missing man. Men leave town.
Men have reasons—grades, money, a girlfriend in Ohio—and a missing man is, legally, journalistically, nothing.
But a missing document is a different animal entirely.
A settlement has an NDA. A medical-hardship waiver has a signature.
A program that makes its problems disappear makes those problems sign their own disappearance, and a man can vanish into thin air but a document leaves fingerprints.
You can deny a person. You cannot un-sign a page.
Reyes hadn't just left. Reyes had been processed. And processing leaves paper.
I built a timeline. I started a new file, Documents, empty for now, a coffin I intended to fill.
I pulled what little I had—the box score, the banquet photo, the work-study kid's word memory-holed—and I laid it all against the tip and felt the shape of the thing get bigger and worse and more real, the way a story does right before it either makes you or buries you.
I should have been thinking about Reyes.
I was thinking, mostly, about a thumb on my jaw and a phone going off and a man answering it like a dog that had been kicked into loving the hand.
Handled. I'd watched his face decide to call me that, to Voss, on the phone, while I was still close enough to feel the heat come off him.
Handled. As if I were a leak. As if the almost of it hadn't rearranged something in both of us, as if I hadn't gone home and lain awake replaying the half-second his thumb touched my jaw like a clip I was trying to verify.
I'd spent two days being furious about it and one night admitting, to the ceiling, at three a.m., that the fury was just the shape disappointment takes when you've decided not to want something and then wanted it anyway.
So I worked. Four tabs, a half-built timeline, a granola bar I'd been gnawing like a feral animal.
And I was just typing who has signature authority on athletic scholarships into a search bar when the door at the end of the long room opened, and the cold from the stairwell came in, and I knew before I turned around.
The room got smaller. The weather changed.
"You know it's midnight," I said to my screen.
"You know there's no one here," Cade said.
"There's me."
"That's what I mean." The door clicked shut behind him.
I heard him cross half the room and stop, like there was a line in the carpet he didn't trust himself past. "You shouldn't be in an empty building alone at midnight.
Not now. Not with somebody paying your scariest guy to find out what you know. "
I turned around.
He looked terrible. I mean that as the highest compliment I'm capable of.
He looked like a man who'd lost an argument with himself in the car and had come up here to lose it again in person.
Hoodie this time, not the hostage blazer, hood down, hair a mess, and the bruise on his jaw had healed into a faint yellow ghost. He looked younger without the helmet, without the pads, without the costume of being feared—just a too-big twenty-two-year-old standing in a newspaper office at midnight because he couldn't think of anywhere else to put what he was carrying.
"How'd you even get in," I said.
"Your front door's broken. The latch doesn't catch." He almost smiled. Almost. "You're investigating an entire athletic department out of a building that doesn't lock. That should worry you more than it does."
"Adds to my charm." I leaned back against my desk and crossed my arms, which was armor, and which he clocked, because he clocked everything, which was the whole problem.
"Why are you here, Cade. And don't say to warn me, because you could've texted that, except you'd never text me anything, would you, because texts are evidence and you don't leave evidence. "
His eyes went to the whiteboard.
What he signed. The office. The closed door. The afternoons.
I watched it land. I watched the words hit somewhere in him that already knew them, watched his jaw do the thing, and this time I didn't tease him about it, because the thing his jaw was doing wasn't anger.
It was fear. The real kind. The kind that's been load-bearing so long the person's forgotten it's there, the kind you only see when somebody writes it on a whiteboard in handwriting that isn't yours.
"You're closer than you think," he said quietly. "That's why I'm here. To tell you to stop. Because that's the script. Because if I tell you to stop and you don't, then I told you, and that's—" He stopped. Breathed. "That's the version where I get to keep believing I tried."
"And the other version?"
"The other version is I drove over here at midnight," he said, "and walked into a building that doesn't lock, because I've thought about that field every hour since Friday, and I'm so tired, Sloane.
I'm so tired of being handled and doing the handling.
You said—" His voice caught on it, snagged, came loose.
"You said to find out who I am when there's a witness. "
The room was very quiet. The single overhead light buzzed. Somewhere outside a car went by playing something with too much bass, and then it was gone, and it was just us, and the dead monitors, and the whiteboard full of his secrets.
"So who are you?" I asked. Softer than I meant. "When there's a witness."
He crossed the line in the carpet.
I want to get this right, because it mattered, because it was the first true thing either of us did instead of said.
He didn't grab me. A man built like that, you brace for grab; you brace for the weather coming down out of the sky the way it did to receivers on Saturdays.
He didn't. He stopped in front of me and raised one hand and pushed a piece of hair off my face with a carefulness that didn't make any sense for hands that size, hands that did what they did to people on a field, and the carefulness was the thing that undid me—the choice in it, the deliberate gentling of something built to break.
"I don't know," he said. Honest. Wrecked. "I've never had one."
And then he kissed me.
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It was not the kiss I'd been bracing for.
I'd built it up in my head as something that would happen to me, the way the rest of him happened to people—fast, overwhelming, a current I'd be swept along by and could blame for everything later.
It wasn't that. He kissed me like he was asking a question he was terrified of the answer to.
Slow. His hand came up to the side of my face, that same place, his thumb at the corner of my jaw, and his mouth found mine like he had all the time in the world and none of it, like he'd been told his whole life he wasn't allowed and had decided, tonight, in this dead building, to find out what he'd been missing.
I'd kissed people. I'd never been kissed like I was a thing somebody had decided, against every instinct they'd been trained into, to be gentle with on purpose.
My hands went to the front of his hoodie and I pulled, the way I'd pulled at his shirt on the field, and he made a low sound into my mouth like the pull undid a knot in him, and then the slow broke.
We both broke it. His arm came around my back and I was up against the edge of the desk and his mouth opened over mine and the careful turned into something with heat under it, something that had been waiting a long time, and I knocked my own coffee over reaching for more of him and neither of us cared, the dark spreading across my half-built timeline, ruining two days of work, and it was the least I'd ever cared about my work in my life.
He kissed down to my jaw, to the spot under my ear, and I heard myself say his name in a voice I didn't recognize, and he stopped with his forehead against my temple, both of us breathing like we'd run, his heart going under my palm where it was flattened against his chest, fast, fast, the iron-control gone out of him entirely.
"This is a terrible idea," he said into my hair.
"The worst," I agreed. I was holding fistfuls of his hoodie. I made no move to let go. "Catastrophic. You should leave immediately."
Neither of us moved.
"Sloane." He pulled back just enough to look at me, and his eyes were dark and wide open in a way I'd never seen on him, all that careful nothing burned clean off his face, and what was underneath was so unguarded it hurt to look at, like staring at a thing that had spent its whole life in a box and just had the lid lifted.
"If anyone finds out—a reporter and a player, in the middle of you investigating my team—it ends you.
Your credibility. The whole story. They'll say you slept your way to it.
They will never let you have anything you earn again, they'll move you down the page forever.
" His thumb moved on my cheek, and I felt the byline he didn't know I knew he knew about, sitting there between us, unspoken.
"And me, I lose the scholarship, the draft, the only thing I've ever—" He shut his eyes. "We can't. You know we can't."
"I know." I did know. I knew it the way you know the stove is hot and put your hand near it anyway. "We absolutely cannot."
"So we won't."
"Definitely not."
He kissed me again.
We were such liars. Both of us. We lied for a living, in our ways—he with his silence and I with my smile—and we stood in a room dedicated entirely to the truth and lied to each other and ourselves with our mouths, and it was the most honest I'd felt in years.
When he finally left—and he did leave, eventually, after we'd untangled and re-tangled twice and I'd said something that made him do the thing that was almost a laugh—he stopped at the broken door and looked back at me across the long dark room, across the dead monitors and the coffee-ruined timeline and the whiteboard full of the secrets I was about to ruin his coach over, and he said:
"Fix your latch."
And then, lower, like it cost him: "And be careful. The tip's right. Somebody's watching. I just don't know yet which kind."
The door clicked shut. The cold from the stairwell faded. The room got big again, and empty, and I stood there with my mouth still warm and my heart still going and the slow, sinking, exhilarating understanding settling over me like the dark spreading across my notes:
I had just kissed the wall they'd built to keep me out.
And the wall had kissed me back like it wanted, more than anything in the world, to fall.
I righted my coffee cup. I looked at the ruined timeline, the smeared ink, two days of work gone soft and gray, and I felt none of the thing I should have felt about it.
I just touched my own mouth, once, like a person confirming a story before they run it.
Then I looked back at the whiteboard. What he signed. The office. The closed door. The afternoons.
And under it, in the corner, small, where I could pretend I hadn't, I wrote: Don't fall for the wall, Pierce.
I was already falling. I just hadn't filed it yet.
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