Chapter Eighteen
Cade
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My father called twice a year, on a schedule I could've set a watch to: once after the spring game, to ask about the depth chart, and once when something in the season made him think there was money coming.
He did not call to ask how I was. He had never once, in twenty-two years, called to ask how I was.
So when his name lit up the nightstand the morning after I'd said I love you out loud for the first time in my life, I knew, the way you know weather, that the universe had decided I'd had enough of the good thing and it was time to balance the books.
"Don't," Sloane said, watching my face. "You don't have to answer it."
But you do. That's the thing she didn't understand yet, the thing it took me the whole rest of this story to understand myself.
You always answer it. The hand on the neck only works because some part of you keeps leaning into it, keeps hoping that this time the cold man will be warm, that this time being useful will finally be the same as being loved, that this time he'll say the thing you've been doing twenty-two years of damage trying to earn.
I was a grown man and I'd been answering that phone my whole life looking for a different father on the other end of it, and he'd never once been there, and I kept picking up anyway, because hope is the cruelest muscle and mine had never learned to quit.
I answered it.
"Saw the game," he said. No hello. He never said hello; hello is for people you're glad to hear from.
"That hit in the fourth. That's a Sunday hit.
That's a contract hit, son, that's a man's hit.
" A pause, and I could hear him doing the math he always did, the math where I was a number that went up.
"You stay healthy, you keep your nose clean, you could go day two.
Day two's real money. Generational. Set-up-your-whole-life money, if you don't blow it.
You know what I could've done with day-two money at your age. "
"Yeah," I said. The wall was building itself without my permission, brick by brick, the way it had my whole life the second I heard that voice. Across the bed Sloane went very still, watching me shrink, watching the morning-after boy fold back up into the thing my father had made. "I know, Dad."
"You don't sound right." Sharp. Instant.
He could always hear it, the one frequency he was tuned to, the sound of his son feeling something.
"You got something going on? Because I'm hearing things.
I got a buddy knows a guy in their booster setup, says there's a reporter sniffing around.
Some girl. Says your name's getting said in rooms it shouldn't be said in.
" His voice dropped into the register I'd been afraid of since I was small, the cold one, the one that meant I'd embarrassed us both, that I'd let the side down.
"Tell me you're not being stupid over some girl with a press pass.
Tell me you didn't take twenty-two years of my work, my drives to two-a-days, my money on cleats and camps and the gas to get you seen—tell me you're not about to set a generational payday on fire because you went and got soft over a piece of—"
"Don't." It came out of me low and flat and I felt Sloane flinch beside me, not at the word, at my voice, at how fast I'd gone wherever it was I went. "Don't finish that sentence."
"There he is." My father laughed, ugly, satisfied, like he'd hooked a fish he'd been working for an hour.
"There's the temper. Good. That's the part that's worth something.
Use it Saturday. Stop using it on me." A beat, and then the part he'd really called to deliver, the lesson, the one he'd been teaching me since before I had words to refuse it.
"Listen to me, because I'm only going to say it once, and then you're going to do the smart thing, because you're my son and you're not stupid.
You are not a person who gets to have things, Cade.
You never were. Boys like us, we got one thing—we can take a hit and we can give one, and men with money pay for that, and that's the whole deal, that's the entire deal, and it's a good deal if you don't get greedy.
You start wanting the other stuff—the soft stuff, the being-loved stuff, the being-known—" he said it like a slur, like he'd reached down the phone line into my chest and read the one word I'd been letting myself feel, "—that's how they get you.
Every time. That's the soft spot, and the world is made of people looking for your soft spot.
You don't have one, you can't be moved. You let some reporter make you one, you've handed the whole world the map.
Keep your head down. Keep your mouth shut.
Make your money. Then you can be a person.
After. When you can afford it. Not now. Now you're a commodity, and commodities don't fall in love. "
"I gotta go," I said.
"You hearing me?"
"I hear you." I'd been hearing him my whole life. It was the one thing I did better than anyone. "I always hear you."
I hung up.
And I sat there on the edge of a hotel bed with my elbows on my knees and my whole body humming with the old poison, the wall fully back, every brick, and I could feel the morning-after boy getting smaller and smaller in there, getting quieter, going back to wherever he lived the other twenty-three hours a day, and I thought, with a despair so total it was almost calm: He's right.
He's always right. You don't get to have things.
You were stupid to think the sky wouldn't fall.
It always falls. You just have to not have built anything under it.
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I felt her move before she touched me.
I braced for it, honestly. Braced for her to do what my father did, what everyone did with the temper and the wall—back up, go cold, leave me to it.
That's what the wall was for. It announced that the person inside had stopped being safe to approach.
It was a sign that said KEEP OUT and I'd been hanging it on myself since I was eleven.
She climbed across the bed and wrapped herself around me from behind, arms over my chest, her cheek between my shoulder blades, right over the place where the wall was thickest, and she didn't say it's okay and she didn't say he didn't mean it and she didn't try to fix a single thing.
She just said, into my back, fierce and quiet: "Everything he just told you is a lie he needs to be true so he doesn't have to feel what he did to you."
I stopped breathing.
"He needs you to believe you can't have things," she said, "because if you can have things—if a boy like you can be loved and known and held—then he could have given you that.
He could have. It was available. And he didn't, he chose not to, he looked at his own kid and decided love was something you earn by hitting people, and that's a thing he would have to look at, every day, for the rest of his life, if it were true that you deserved better.
So he made it a law of the universe instead.
Boys like us don't get to have things. It's not a law, Cade.
It's an alibi. It's the story a man tells so he never has to be the man who looked at his son and decided he was a commodity instead of a child.
" Her arms tightened. "You're not a thing that gets sold.
You're not a hit somebody pays for. You're a person who got told, very young, by the one man who was supposed to protect him, that the realest part of him was the most dangerous thing he owned.
And then you went and proved that man wrong last night, in this exact bed, you let yourself be known and the sky didn't fall, and he could smell it on you over the phone, the proof, and it scared him so bad he had to call up at eight in the morning and rebuild the cage before you got too far out of it to put back. "
I turned around.
I don't know what my face was doing. Something it had never done in front of another human being, something with no name.
She caught it in both her hands, my jaw, the corners, the place that clenched, the place she'd spent weeks teaching to unclench, and she held my face the way you'd hold something that was trying to fly apart in your hands.
"I said it back, by the way," she whispered.
"Last night. I couldn't make it a sentence, because sentences are the thing I have to be careful with, they're the thing that can be used against both of us.
But I'm saying it now, in a bed, with no recorder, where it can't hurt anybody but me.
" Her thumbs moved on my jaw. "I love you.
Not the hit. Not the wall. Not the number, not the draft grade, not the contract hit your father wants to sell.
You. The pain in my ass who won't pick a favorite color and turns to stone when his father calls and lets a cold man rebuild a cage out of guilt and gas money.
" Her voice broke. "Don't move back into it.
Please. You just got out. I watched you get out, I watched it take you weeks and it was the bravest thing I've ever seen anybody do and it happened in a diner booth over fries.
Don't let him put you back in one phone call.
He doesn't get to. He gave up the right to build your cages the day he decided you had to earn being loved. "
And I broke. Quietly, the way I do everything quietly, my face in her neck and her hands in my hair and twenty-two years of a cold phone coming up out of me all at once, no sound, just shaking, the wall coming down a second time in as many days—it had come down before, but never twice so close, never on back-to-back days, and I hadn't known that was possible, and she held all of it, every brick, and didn't flinch, and didn't fix it, and didn't ask me to be smaller so she could hold me easier.
"I have to go talk to Theo," I said, finally, wrecked, into her skin.
"I have to do the brave thing. Today. Before my father's voice wins, because if I wait, I'll talk myself back into the silence and Theo's got two days, and I—I can't be the wall on this one.
I can't. You showed me what the wall costs.
I've been the wall my whole life and I never once added up the bill, and you handed me the bill, and I can't go back to not having seen it. "
"Then go." She pulled back and looked at me, eyes wet, fierce, the love of my life, the most dangerous girl in three counties holding the story that could end me and looking at me like I was worth ending it for.
"Go be the man, not the wall. I'll hold the story.
You hold your brother." She kissed me hard, once.
"And Cade—come back to me as the kid. Not as your father's son.
The kid's the one I'm in love with. Bring him home. "
I left the hotel that morning to go do the bravest thing I'd ever attempted: drive eleven hours home and walk into Theo Brooks's apartment and hand him the truth and let him choose what to do with it.
I want it understood, before everything goes wrong, that I left meaning to do it. That I drove the whole eleven hours rehearsing it, the kid driving, not the wall, the radio off, her voice in my head saying bring him home.
But my father was already in the car with me, the way he always was, riding shotgun the way he had my whole life, and Voss was waiting at the other end, and somewhere between the hotel and home the season caught up to all of us at once, and the brave thing I meant to do got taken out of my hands before I ever reached Theo's door.
That's not an excuse. I've stopped looking for those. It's just the order things happened in.
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