Chapter 6 #2
“Heard we ran a little short on snacks,” he announces to the sideline at large, media smile at full wattage, and sets everything out on the folding table like a catering professional. Then he looks directly at me, one beat, two, and jogs back to the field without a word.
I sit down. I pull out my phone. I text Priya.
Me: I will end Nate Rivers.
Priya: She found her inspiration!! What did he do
Me: He brought snacks to practice.
Priya: …the monster
Me: It was MY week. I forgot. I think Eli told him. And he just PRODUCED protein bars and Gatorade out of his car like a magician. In front of everyone.
Priya: So let me make sure I have the facts. The man covered for you, fed twenty children, and this is the evidence you needed that he’s a drug-addicted scumbag
Me: I hate you.
Priya: I’m just trying to help.
I put the phone face-down in my lap and watch practice in a state of high-quality fury.
I don’t need Nate Rivers to save me. I have been saving myself, solo, without a bye week, for eight years, I do not require rescue by a man with an endorsement trunk.
I watch the drills, arms crossed, jaw set, and somewhere around the second water break the fury does an inconvenient thing: it changes address.
Because I’m not actually angry at Nate. I’m embarrassed in front of Nate, which is different, and I’m angry at myself, for the calendar, for the assumption, for being, apparently, this suspicious of a human being carrying protein bars.
When practice ends, Eli comes over and starts breaking down his gear.
“Watch your brother for a second.”
I walk onto the field, straight at Rivers, who’s collecting cones. “What’s with the snacks?”
“One of the kids asked. Eli mentioned you forgot. I had the boxes in the SUV from an endorsement thing.” He shrugs, unbothered, stacking cones. “It’s not a takedown piece, Carter. Relax.”
There are so many things I could say, thank you being the obvious one, the one an adult would select, and I stand there holding all of them and choose none, and turn to go.
“I’m not trying to out-mom you, sugar.”
I turn back around, and catch something I wasn’t supposed to see.
Surprise. On his face, at his own sentence, like the words cleared the pocket before the play was called.
And then he smiles, and it is not the media smile.
I’ve become an unwilling expert on the media smile over the last week of reading every profile ever written about this man; I could pick it out of a lineup.
This one is different. It reaches the eyes.
It’s crooked and boyish and it has no press-release attached, and it is, objectively, a problem.
“It’s not personal,” he says. “Well. Maybe a little personal. You hate my guts because of the team I play for, one-upping you feels great.”
“I don’t hate you for playing for the Outlaws.”
It comes out fast and hot, because one hour of misdirected anger finally found its outlet, and its outlet is six-foot-three and holding cones.
He's in a short-sleeve T-shirt that does absolutely nothing to contain the situation — forearms corded and veined from a decade of throwing a ball for a living, casually on display at a children's practice like that's legal.
I'm angry at him. I'm allowed to be angry at him and still notice; the two departments don't share a hallway. “I’ve cheered for the Outlaws since before I understood the rules. I grew up on that team. What makes me angry is that a building full of grown men watched their medical staff run a pharmacy and not one of you said enough. Not the stars, not the veterans, not anyone with a platform and nothing to lose. Every single one of you could have said something, and you all just, played. And then a kid died, and —”
I stop.
Because the next word was going to be about me.
About what it cost me. And Nate Rivers doesn’t get my chapter of this; he hasn’t earned it, and I don’t want his sympathy.
So I bite it off and stand there breathing, and yes, the anger is at him, at the whole roster of bystanders, and also at six photographs in my inbox that keep insisting he’s exactly who I want him to be.
“That’s what you think happened, sugar?”
His voice is quiet now, and the smile that goes with it is a different animal again, something with a limp in it.
Tortured is a big word; I’ll say taxed. He looks at me for a long second, and I can see the counterweight moving behind his eyes, the thing he’s not saying, the exact twin of the thing I’m not saying.
“You and I,” he says finally, “will agree to disagree.”
And that’s where we leave it, both of us stopped one sentence short, both of us pocketing the worst of what we know, two people standing on a kids’ football field holding folded hands of cards and calling it a conversation.
#
Nate
I walk into my house and exhale like I’ve been holding my breath since the field, which is medically untrue, I’d be dead, but that’s the sensation.
The cause is straightforward and I hate it: I’m fairly sure I flirted with Callie Carter today.
And then nearly had a real conversation with her, which is worse.
Flirting is a reflex. The conversation had content.