Chapter Eight
Cade
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I decided to end it in the shower the next morning, which is where I'd made most of the decisions that ran my life, because it was the only room nobody could get into to talk me out of them.
The logic was clean. I'm good at clean logic; it's the only inheritance my father left that I didn't have to give back.
One: if anyone found out, it ended her—the credibility, the byline she'd bled for, the whole future she was building one rock at a time.
Two: if anyone found out, it ended me, the scholarship and the draft and the only door I'd ever been shown out of the life I came from.
Three: I was, at that exact moment, the person Voss trusted to keep the lid on the thing she was trying to pry open, which made me either the worst possible person for her to be kissing or the best, depending on how you wanted to lie about it.
Four, and this was the one I kept under the others where I wouldn't have to look at it: wanting things had never once worked out for me.
Every single thing I'd ever let myself want had been taken, or had a price hung on it, or had turned out to be a leash with a nicer collar.
My father. The starting job. Voss's son.
You learn. You stop reaching for things, because reaching is just telling the world where to hit you.
So. Clean. I'd stay away from her. I'd answer her like a wall again.
I'd go back to being the thing on Saturdays and the silence the rest of the week, and the kiss would become one of those things you file under that one night, and in ten years I'd be in some city with a knee that didn't work and I'd remember a newspaper office at midnight and a girl who pulled at my hoodie like she was trying to get to the actual me, and I'd be grateful it never went further.
That was the plan.
The plan lasted until Saturday.
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We played Carrow State at home, a night game, the kind where the whole town shows up because the lights make everyone feel like the thing they came to feel.
There's no honest way to explain to someone who hasn't done it what it is to walk out of that tunnel into a full stadium under the lights.
It's the closest thing I have to church.
Seventy thousand people making one sound, and the grass, and the cold coming up off it, and for three hours nobody wants anything from me except the one thing I know how to give, which is everything—my body, thrown at other bodies, until something gives.
They cheer when I hurt people. It's the only place I've ever been loved for exactly what I am instead of in spite of it, and the sick joke of my whole life is that what I am out there is the wound, just wearing pads.
They built a stadium to watch me do to other men what was done to me, and they named it love, and I drank it, because it was the only kind on offer.
My back was bad that night. I'm telling you because I never told them.
I'd taken a shot in the Wednesday walkthrough, of all places, a nothing collision, and by Saturday the thing that lived in my lower spine had teeth.
Wes knew. Wes shot me a look in the tunnel that meant don't, and I gave him the look back that meant you saw nothing, and that's the whole machine, like I said.
I played anyway. You always play anyway.
That's the part Sloane was trying to put in a newspaper, and standing in that tunnel I half hated her for it and half wanted to find her in the crowd and make sure she'd worn a coat.
First quarter I was a god. That's not pride, it's just what the body does when you give it permission to stop protecting you.
I had two tackles for loss and a hit on their tight end that the crowd felt in their teeth, and I came off the field with the whole stadium chanting a number that used to be a kid from a town with bad lighting, and that's when I saw her.
Sloane was on the sideline. Press credential, recorder, that dark ponytail, talking to one of the equipment guys with her whole sunshine deployed, getting more out of him in ninety seconds than I'd gotten in four years. I wasn't supposed to look. I looked.
And then I saw the other man looking.
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His name was Dale Mercer and his title was Director of Football Operations, which is the title they give the guy whose actual job is the things that don't have a title.
Ops. Logistics. The hotel rooms and the flight manifests and, I was beginning to understand, the watching.
Khakis, lanyard, a headset he wasn't using, standing back by the bench with his arms crossed and his eyes on exactly one person on a sideline full of people, and that person wasn't a player.
He had his phone out. Held low. Angled at her.
I watched him take a picture of Sloane talking to the equipment guy.
Then I watched him watch who she talked to next, and write something with his thumb, and the boredom on his face was the worst part—the boredom of a man getting paid for it, a man who'd done it before, a man for whom a twenty-one-year-old reporter was just tonight's assignment in a long career of assignments.
Some of us are watching for the other reason.
The tip hadn't been a metaphor. There was a man, with a phone, building a file on a girl, in the open, on a sideline, while seventy thousand people watched a different kind of hitting and called it a game.
I went back out for the next series and I do not remember a single down of it.
I played on instinct and rage and the bad disc in my back, and at some point I put a running back on the ground hard enough that he stayed there a second, and the crowd loved me, and I felt nothing, because the whole time the only thing in my head was a khaki-colored man with a phone and the total, cold certainty that I was not, in fact, going to be able to end anything.
At halftime I sat in the locker room with my helmet still on, which you're not supposed to do, and stared at the floor between my cleats while Voss did his halftime thing at the whiteboard—adjustments, believe, a hand landing on the back of somebody's neck—and I thought about Mercer with his phone, and I thought about the fact that they were building a file on her, which meant they'd noticed her, which meant she was already in more danger than she knew, and I thought, with a clarity that scared me: the rule I keep trying to make—stay away from her—isn't going to protect her.
They're already watching her whether I'm near her or not.
The only thing staying away protects is me.
That was the first time I understood that my distance wasn't noble.
It was just safe. For me. And I sat there in a halftime locker room with sweat running into my eyes and understood that every version of this where I kept my head down and stayed out of it was a version where I was choosing my own safety and calling it her protection, the same trick my whole life had been built on—and that if I was going to be near her at all, I had to be near her useful, I had to actually stand between her and the khaki man, not stand three feet away pretending I didn't know either of them.
Miles dropped onto the bench next to me, breathing hard, and followed my stare to nothing. "You're somewhere else," he said. "You've been somewhere else since the first quarter. You good?"
"There's a guy on their sideline taking pictures of the press box," I said. It was the most I'd ever told anyone. "Not the game. The press box."
Miles was quiet a second. He's not as dumb as he performs; nobody who survives this place is. "Okay," he said carefully. "And the press box has somebody in it you don't want photographed."
I didn't answer. Which was an answer.
"Right," Miles said. He stood, clapped my helmet hard enough to ring it, the way you'd knock on a door to see if anyone's home.
"Then go play the second half, and figure out the rest after, because Voss is looking over here and your face is doing the math out loud again.
Helmet thoughts stay in the helmet, Cade.
Put 'em away. We'll get 'em back out in the parking lot.
" He paused. "And for what it's worth—whoever's in that press box, if she's got you sitting at halftime forgetting to take your helmet off, she's already past the part where staying away from her does anything.
You're just deciding now whether you're gonna be useless about it or not. "
He walked off toward the line. I sat there one more second with my helmet on, in the noise and the sweat and the believe, and I made the decision I'd keep failing to unmake for the rest of the season: that I was done being useless about her.
Whatever it cost. Even if the only thing I could do was get a creep off her in a hallway, or stand between her and a building, or break my own rule the second it mattered—I was going to be near her useful.
Then I went and played a second half I also don't remember, and afterward I found her, and the whole architecture of staying away came down in a parking lot before I'd even finished building it.
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I found her after.
Not on purpose. That's the lie I'd tell if I were a different kind of liar.
The truth is I showered fast and told Miles I'd catch up and went out the players' exit into the lot where the buses idle and the families wait behind the rope, and I went there because I'd seen which way Mercer drifted when the clock hit zero, and he'd drifted toward the media exit, toward the long dark walk to the satellite lot where the people who don't matter enough to park close leave their cars.
Toward where a student reporter with no budget would have parked.