Chapter 10 #2
Fantastic. Sixteen again. This woman is going to think the league’s most eligible bachelor five years running peaked in middle school, and standing there, ears hot, I finally diagnose the clumsiness: I care.
That’s the variable. A woman in a bar turning me down means nothing, I will turn around and there will be three more waiting.
That system ran frictionless for a decade because none of it weighed anything.
I never cared about any of them. This isn’t that.
This is the first thing in longer than I can count that makes me feel less empty, and my hands don’t know the weight of it yet.
“Yes,” she says.
I don’t make her say it twice. I close the distance, cup her face, the same face that held mine together over a nosebleed, and kiss her.
It starts the way the shed kiss would have gone: soft, careful, a question.
Then her mouth opens under mine and something old and unmanaged takes the wheel, and I have her against the hallway wall, one hand splayed at the small of her back, tasting her, and the sound she makes low in her throat rewires me on the spot.
Addicted. Immediately, comprehensively addicted.
I force myself to stop, physically peel myself back, because the kiss is beginning to affect considerably more than my mental state, and I am not staying the night ten feet from her kids’ bedrooms on day one. There’s a version of me that would have. I find I don’t want to be him in this house.
“Seven-thirty tomorrow,” I manage, and my sweatpants are doing me no favors whatsoever as I aim myself at the door.
Leaving is close to physically painful.
I’m so fucked.
#
Callie
I barely slept. I thought a run might clear my head; the run declined the assignment. So it’s five-thirty in the morning and I’m at my kitchen table with the laptop open on my draft, the same draft I was practically celebrating a few days ago. My comeback. Proof I could still do the real thing.
It’s wrong again. Differently wrong, which I suppose is progress.
Because since the shed, since Nate stood in the dark and handed me the why, the fear of the kid on the bench, everyone’s fear, not just his, the story has changed shape under my hands again.
It’s not an exposé anymore. It’s not even really about the Outlaws, or athletes.
It’s a human story about what people do for the thing they love, how total investment quietly bends the moral compass, one degree at a time, until good men are standing silent around a pharmacy and calling it loyalty.
Marty will never run it. It isn’t sensational.
Nobody gets dragged, nobody gets canonized, and the audience pays for one or the other.
It’s not even the Danny Alvarez redemption arc, because it isn’t about what Danny’s doing today.
And that’s the other half of the problem: Danny.
I can’t ask Nate about him now. It was always going to be an asshole move; now it’s unthinkable.
Not after the shed. Not after last night.
The man was vulnerable with me, against, I’d guess, every instinct he owns, given what my work did to the people he loves.
And underneath all of it, the actual headline, the one I can’t file: I like him.
I had Nate Rivers fully solved, party boy, womanizer, no substance, complicit three years ago through indifference at best. The partying was real enough.
Everything else, I got wrong. And the truth I found instead of the story I expected is a man I am, there’s no journalistic term for it, falling for.
I groan and close the laptop and rest my forehead against the lid, which is where a sound editorial process happens.
“Mom? You okay?” Eli, dressed, backpack already on one shoulder, because my firstborn wakes up prepared for inspection.
“Yes, buddy.” I lift my head and smile. “I’m writing something that’s actively fighting back. That’s all.” Not even a lie.
“Is Dad driving us today?” He asks it neutral, too neutral, the fine-print voice, and I watch his face as I answer.
“No. Nate is.”
Surprise. Then, I watch it settle, acceptance. Easy, uncomplicated acceptance, and it tells me everything about where each man’s stock is trading.
Here’s the thing about Travis and mornings, since we’re on the topic: Travis runs on Travis’s schedule, which means he hates early, and does early only under protest with all-day complaints.
And Travis cannot function without his coffee, fair, neither can I, but Travis requires thirty uninterrupted minutes with his fine Italian roast, a small daily sabbatical no one is permitted to disturb.
I drink mine while making breakfast, answering email, finding shoes, and signing forms. I have never once in eight years had thirty minutes to enjoy anything.
Which is why last night, the second ‘I’ll call my ex’ left my mouth, the doubt was already pooling: he’d probably have come.
Thirty minutes after school starts, with both boys late.
Because their lateness wouldn’t be his problem; not finishing his coffee would.
Finn materializes at the table; eggs land in front of both of them; I dress and pack while they eat. At seven-thirty exactly, to the minute, my phone buzzes.
Nate Rivers: I’m outside.
Me: Out in a minute.
And we are. Ten minutes later than a minute, which for this household is a personal record, and the boys pile into his back seat like this is a thing that happens.
The school drop-off line nearly breaks him, a man who reads exotic defensive fronts for a living, undone by a middle school traffic pattern, muttering this makes no sense approximately every second sentence while a volunteer in a vest waves him forward eight feet at a time.
“Do you like tacos?” he asks, pulling away from the school and pointing us toward the Ledger after the boys are out of the car and in the school.
“Do I like tacos?” I look at him. “Who doesn’t like tacos?”
“Just confirming. Don’t want to be accused of poisoning you.” And before I’ve decoded that, he’s swinging into the parking lot of one of those unmarked hole-in-the-wall taquerias that Texans guard like state secrets. “Five minutes.”
He’s back in four, with a takeout bag the size of a toddler.
“Okay, so I didn’t know what you like, so I got two of each.” He hands it over like this is normal.
“Nate.” I look in the bag. Steam. Abundance. “I’m aware you’re a large boy, but I physically cannot eat more than two of these. Are you planning to eat twelve tacos?”
“I could.” Dead serious. Then, with visible regret: “But today is not the day I throw up at practice. New plan. We eat what we can, and the survivors go to Grant, because I would pay real money to watch him throw up at practice.”
“I thought you two were friends.” I’m laughing around my first bite, which is, damn it, perfect.
“Oh, I love the guy.” He takes down a taco in two bites. “He needs to be humbled.”
Six tacos and ten minutes later, we’re at the curb in front of the Ledger.
“Listen, if the car thing isn’t sorted by tonight, call me.
Okay?” Unprompted. I hadn’t even gotten to worrying about tonight yet, and he’s already standing in the gap.
Which, as of yesterday, is officially the most attractive thing about Nate Rivers, he does things without being asked.
Fine: second most attractive. There’s a face and everything attached to it, and I’m a journalist; I report facts.
“My insurance covers a rental once the car’s towed, so I should be okay.” I smile at him. “But thank you. Really.”
And then I do the thing I did not have planned.
I lean across the console and kiss him, brief, because I have a job and a lobby full of colleagues forty feet away, nothing like the wall situation last night, but square on the mouth, and his lips are so warm that leaving the car briefly loses the vote.
When I pull back, his tongue touches his lower lip like he’s saving it for later.
“See you Thursday, then,” he says. I’m stepping out when he leans over the console. “Callie. I’ll text you later.”
He does not, in fact, wait until later.
#
Nate
During film review I am, historically, a monk. Locked in. First one asking for a rewind. Today I am approximately forty percent watching coverage rotations and sixty percent texting Callie Carter under the desk, because that’s who I am now, apparently, and the scariest part is how little I mind.
Me: Tacos tomorrow morning? I can swing by the Ledger before practice.