8. Nick
Nick
“Rule one,” she says, before her seatbelt clicks, “and I want to say up front that I’ve prepared a document.”
Of course she has. She climbs into my truck outside her building at seven on a Wednesday night with a notebook, the green pen clipped to the cover, and a tote bag that hits the console like she packed for every possible scenario.
Gwen wanted this meeting in a conference room with a facilitator.
I said no. If I have to build a fake life with the person who published my real one, we’re doing it without a sentiment graph in the room.
Which is how I end up driving nowhere in particular with J.M. Sinclair riding shotgun, because a truck is the one place in Denver with no cameras, no staff, and doors I control.
“Rule one,” she reads. “Public appearances per the schedule, no additions without twenty-four hours’ notice. I have a job. The job is invisible and involves a bathrobe, but it has deadlines.”
“Fine.”
“Rule two. Nobody scripts what we say about the book. Already in the contract, I know, but I want it between us, not just between lawyers.” She looks over. “The book stays fiction. Whatever you think of me, that door only opens if you open it.”
“Fine.”
“You’re just going to say fine in different tones for an hour, aren’t you?”
“Depends on the rules.”
Her mouth twitches, and she hates that it twitches, I watch her hate it, and something in my chest that should know better does a little loop around the top of the boards. Grip the wheel. Eyes on the road. Containment is a thing I’m good at; ask anybody who’s ever tried to split my defensive zone.
“Rule three.” Her voice changes, gets careful, and I know what’s coming because I’ve been deciding all day whether I’d say it first. “No real touching off-camera.”
The truck is quiet except for the tires.
“Agreed,” I say.
“Great,” she says.
“Good,” I say.
Neither of us says anything for a mile and a half, and the word touching rides along between us anyway, unticketed, in the seat that doesn’t exist between bucket seats.
Here’s what I know that she doesn’t: I set that rule for me, not her.
Because there was a night when my hand landed on hers without asking my permission first, and I’ve spent eighteen months telling myself it was turbulence, and a man in recovery knows the difference between something casual and something he craves.
Nothing about that hand was casual. Rule three is a fence, and fences are for things that move.
“Rule four,” she says. “End date honored. Day after your season ends, we release a statement, amicable, mutual, we keep it classy, and I go back to my booth and you go back to your, I assume, gorgeous monastic compound.”
“It has a nice kitchen.”
“I bet it has a gym.”
“Rule five,” I say, because I have exactly one and I’ve been carrying it all day.
She clicks Sharon into ready position, delighted that I’m participating.
“At the events. If it goes bad, either of us, you say the word and we’re gone.
No explaining, no finishing the conversation. One word and I get the coats.”
She goes quiet a second, recalibrating me. “What’s the word?”
“Kansas.”
The laugh comes out of her sideways, surprised, the real one, the whole-face one, first one since the bookstore, and it does more damage to my containment strategy than anything else in this truck. “Kansas,” she says. “Like the plane. Scared, not desperate.”
“You remember.”
“I remember everything, that’s the whole problem with me,” she says, and writes KANSAS in green block letters and underlines it twice.
The warmth in this truck is a problem. I feel it happening, the way you feel a game tilting, and I pull it back the only way I know.
“Frankie.” She looks up from the notebook.
I keep my eyes on the road. “Don’t make this easy.
Two days ago I told you I’d never forgive you.
That hasn’t changed because you underlined a safe word.
I’ll do the appearances. I’ll learn your coffee order.
I’ll sell the fairy tale. But you’re not going to banter me into forgetting what’s in chapter nineteen, and I need you to know the difference between how this looks and where we are. ”
The notebook closes, quietly. “I know where we are,” she says, no third person anywhere, her voice stripped bare.
“You think I don’t wake up there every morning?
” And we drive a mile with the radio off and the truth riding in the truck, and it’s terrible, and it’s the most honest sixty seconds of the entire arrangement so far.
We do logistics for a while, and then she flips to a fresh page and says we should quiz each other, because, quote, couples know things, and the internet will check.
Her middle name is Marguerite, after a grandmother who smoked cigarillos.
Her coffee order she makes me guess, smug about it, because there’s no way I’d know.
“Latte. Oat. Extra shot. Cinnamon on top.”
The smugness dies. Her whole face does the thing it did at the signing table, the stop, and I watch her work it through and arrive at the only possible answer, which is the answer that sits between us in everything now.
“That’s June’s order,” she says, quiet.
“It’s yours.”
“I gave it to June because—” Thumbnail to teeth. There it is. She catches herself, puts the hand flat on the notebook, and I add the whole sequence to the list.
The list. Let’s talk about the list, since nobody else ever gets to hear about it.
It started on a plane, one entry, bites her thumbnail when she lies, no name to keep it under, and I told myself a list with one entry isn’t a list. It has several entries now.
Laughs a half beat early when she’s covering.
Talks with her hands at a volume that matches how scared she is.
Goes third-person in the exact proportion the world goes wrong.
Touches the green pen before she says anything true, like it’s a railing.
I hate this list. I hate that I keep it, I hate how good the entries are, I hate that reading her book added nine of them in one night, and I hate the word for what the list means, so I don’t use the word.
A scout would say I’m building a book on her.
A scout would be right, and the book already exists, but she wrote it about me first.
“Okay, your turn,” she says. “Coffee.”
“Black.”
“Obviously. Middle name.”
“Réjean.”
She writes it, then stops halfway, pen hovering.
She knows whose name that is, everybody in this city knows whose name that is now, and I watch her decide, in real time, not to make it a moment.
She just writes it, small and green, and moves on to my birthday, and I could kiss her for that, which is exactly the thought rule three exists to contain.
A pickup cuts across two lanes on Speer and I brake, hard, arm coming across her chest on instinct, old habit from a life of driving teammates, and her hand grabs my forearm and holds on.
The truck stops. Traffic flows around us, honking. Neither of us moves.
Her hand on my arm, my arm across her collarbone, both of us staring straight ahead at the intersection like it’s about to say something, and the last time gravity misbehaved with this woman I was at thirty thousand feet learning what her fear sounds like and putting my hand where it wasn’t supposed to be.
Nobody names it. Naming it is against the rules we just wrote.
She takes her hand back first, one finger at a time, and I put mine back on the wheel at ten and two like a driving instructor is watching, and the light changes, and we drive.
“So,” she says, three blocks later, voice pitched for comedy and landing a half beat early. “Good talk. Very structured.”
“Very structured,” I agree.
I drop her at her curb. There’s a cat in her front window, backlit, three-legged, glaring at my truck, entitled and furious, a creature who has clearly read the tabloids. She gathers the tote and the notebook and Sharon and her own spiraling and pauses with the door open.
“For the record,” she says, not looking at me, “I know this is fake. I signed the same contract you did.” The thumbnail starts to rise; she arrests it mid-flight and grips the door instead.
“I just think one of us should say it out loud, at the start: we both lie for a living, you on the ice, me on the page. We could fool each other without even trying. So let’s be careful. That’s rule six.”
She’s out and up the steps before I can answer, which is a mercy, because my answer was going to be true.
Containment, I remind the empty truck.
The cat watches me until I pull away. I drive home with the radio off, being honest with myself about why: rule three was mine, the no-touching was mine, and I still checked the mirror four times before her building was out of sight.
It’s Wednesday.
I used to let myself think about her only on Sundays. It’s Wednesday, I’ve thought about her all day, and I go to bed a man whose rules are failing.