19. Frankie
Frankie
The ring in the window costs more than my first advance, and I’m supposed to be caught looking at it.
Cherry Creek, eleven-forty on a Saturday, sun sharp off the shop glass, and Gwen’s choreography is a single page: walk the block, pause at the jeweler’s, let him stand close, point at something, laugh, forty-five seconds, move on.
A photographer we will never officially know about is having coffee across the street.
The jeweler, who I suspect is also having the best week of his professional life, has arranged the window like a chessboard.
“The pear one,” I say, pointing, in character, projecting for the long lens. “If June were doing this, she’d want the pear one.”
“June has terrible taste,” Nick says. “It’s in the text.”
“Excuse me?”
“Chapter thirty. She picks the loud dress for the wedding. Beau overrules her.” He’s standing close per the choreography, hands in his pockets per himself, and his voice is doing the thing it does now that no camera has ever caught, the gravel going warm at the bottom.
“The oval,” he says, quieter, and he’s not pointing at the pear one, and he’s not performing, and I know it the way I know his breathing asleep. “Second row. That one.”
I look at the oval one. Simple, old-fashioned.
Forty-five seconds were scheduled; we stand there for four minutes, and the photographer across the street gets so much more than Gwen paid for, and the terrible, molten, unsayable thing is that I stop acting somewhere in minute one and so does he, and we both know it, and neither of us says it, because the truth of us has to keep living inside the fake of us like a bird nesting in a billboard.
By dinnertime the internet is planning our wedding. By Sunday morning there’s a hashtag with a ring emoji, and Marisa has texted me a dozen bridal magazines’ worth of judgment, and the fairy tale enters the playoff push exactly on schedule, whispering, just like the deck promised.
Monday, Dane Barlow sits down in my booth at the Pines.
Not asks. Sits. Slides in across from me at ten a.m. with a coffee he ordered like a regular, into Cami’s spot, into the one square yard of Colorado that has never had hockey in it, and my stomach drops through the floor.
“Frankie Delaney,” he says, pleasant as anything.
“Congratulations are premature, I take it. No comment. That’s fine.
” He stirs his coffee. He has a reporter’s trick of looking soft, rumpled jacket, kind crinkles, tips-open energy, and eyes that don’t participate in any of it.
“I’ll be quick. The love story’s charming, and I can’t beat it, and I know when I’m beat.
Everybody’s beat. That’s good crisis work.
” Stir. “So I’ve been reading your book again instead. Professionally. Chapter nineteen.”
The diner keeps clattering. Somewhere behind me the waitress laughs at something. I put my hands in my lap, where they can talk to each other.
“It’s a novel,” I say.
“It’s a novel,” he agrees, pleasantly. “Full of invented things. The sport’s invented, the team’s invented, the brother-in-law’s invented.
” He leans in exactly one inch. “Here’s my thing, though.
Fiction writers invent up. Bigger, shinier, more dramatic.
Chapter nineteen invents down. It’s boring, procedurally.
Sixty days. A press release about injuries.
Visiting hours. That’s not imagination, Ms. Delaney, that’s redaction, and after twenty years I know the difference on sight.
” He puts a card on the Formica, face up, and stands, and drops the last of it from a polite distance, gently: “I’ve got calls out to three facilities in Arizona.
Whenever you want to get ahead of something, I answer on the first ring. ”
Then he’s gone, and I sit in my booth, in my office, in the middle of my ruined square yard, and I don’t shake until I’m sure he can’t see the door, and then I shake, hard, both hands, the coffee going everywhere, and the waitress comes over thinking I’m sick and I let her think it, because sick is close enough to the truth.
I don’t narrate. That’s how bad it is. Third person doesn’t answer.
I call the one person who has ever made me feel safe in the air, and when he picks up, first ring, road-trip noise behind him, what I say instead of hello is:
“Kansas.”
“Where are you.” No question mark. Already moving, I can hear it, a door, keys, his voice gone flat and operational, and something in my chest unclenches one notch just at the sound of a man changing direction.
“The Pines. I’m fine, nothing happened, nobody—it’s not an emergency, I shouldn’t have—”
“Frankie. Sit by the register where Donna can see you. Twenty minutes.”
He knows the waitress’s name. Somewhere in the last month, without me noticing, he learned my diner’s staffing.
I sit by the register where Donna can see me, and in nineteen minutes his truck fills the front window, and he comes through the door of my hockey-free sanctuary in a ball cap, all six-two of him, and the whole diner pretends not to stare.
I tell him in the truck. Barlow, the booth, the card, chapter nineteen, invents down, the calls to Arizona.
I say it fast and flat, like ripping off a bandage, and I watch the stillness spreading over his face, and when I finish, he’s quiet for one block, two, and then he says the thing I don’t expect.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“He’s guessing. Facilities don’t talk, that’s the entire point of a place in a desert.
” A muscle in his jaw, working. “And he came at you instead of me, in your place, at your table, because he wanted you rattled and reporting back. Which you’re doing.
So he got his money’s worth.” His hand comes off the wheel and finds mine, and his thumb crosses my knuckles once.
“But you called Kansas. That’s the only part of today I’m going to think about later. ”
He doesn’t drive me home. He drives us to the arena, badge-swipes us through a service door at four p.m. on an off day, and walks me down a tunnel and out onto the bench, and then, while I’m still asking what we’re doing, he steps over the boards onto the ice in his street shoes like it’s a sidewalk he owns, and holds out one hand.
“I can’t skate,” I say.
“You’re not going to skate. You’re going to stand on it.”
So I stand on it. NHL ice, empty building, eighteen thousand seats holding their breath in the dark, and the cold comes up through my boots.
He holds both my hands and walks backward, effortless, pulling me in a slow glide down the middle of everything, and the only light is the security rig high up, and the only sound is the hiss of me sliding, held.
“This is what it sounded like at five in the morning in Trois-Rivières,” he says, quiet, the building making his voice bigger and softer at once.
“Before anybody. My father ran the flood at the rink some winters, extra money, and he’d let me on at five with the lights half up.
Best hour of my life, most of my life.” He pulls me another slow yard through the dark.
“Everybody thinks I came back for the Cup. The Cup was never the point. I came back for this. The quiet ice at five in the morning. The best hour I’ve ever known. ”
And there it is, the stolen moment, the thing no lens will ever get: not the kiss, although he kisses me at center ice with both my hands folded against his chest and my whole body forgetting Barlow.
The moment is that he brought me here. To the five a.m. ice, to the oldest and happiest part of him.
One more room unlocked, handed over without ceremony, and I stand on the frozen middle of his whole life and understand with terrible clarity exactly what we are protecting, and exactly how much of it I am carrying, and exactly what it would cost to drop.
We come off the ice laughing at my dismount, which involves the boards and none of my dignity, and the laughing is doing something underneath, burning the fear off both of us. In the tunnel his hand finds mine and neither of us lets go.
“There are exactly two rooms in this building with no cameras,” he says, conversational, not slowing down. “The equipment cage and the therapy room.”
“Why are you telling me—” He pushes open a door. “Oh.”
The therapy room. Padded table, folded towels, the stim machine with its leads coiled, off duty. The door clicks shut behind us, and locks, and then my back is against it and his mouth is on mine and there is nothing careful anywhere in him.
This is new. Eighteen months of him slow, him deliberate, him patient on principle, and it turns out that underneath all of it lives this: a man kissing me like the building is on fire and I am the thing he’s carrying out.
“Today,” he says, against my jaw, working my coat off my shoulders, “when you said Kansas.” His hands, still cold from the ice, slide up under my sweater, and I gasp and he swallows it. “I drove twenty over. I don’t drive twenty over.”
“Nick—”
“I need—” He stops, forehead to mine, breathing hard, his hands flexing at my waist, and the sentence he won’t finish is the most honest thing in the building. So I finish it.
“Yes. Right now. Yes.”
We don’t undress so much as negotiate emergency exceptions.
My boots are a two-person job we accomplish badly, one of us swearing in French.
The jeans come off one leg, which is apparently sufficient.
His zipper, his hand checking me first, quick and sure, and the sound he makes at what he finds there, because terror and wanting have been sharing a room in me all day too.
He lifts me onto the padded table like I weigh nothing, steps between my legs, and stops. One beat. The question in his eyes, even now, even here.
“Still yes,” I say, and he pulls me to the edge of the table and pushes into me in one long stroke, and we both make a sound the empty arena is generous enough to keep.
“God. Frankie.” He goes still for a second, forehead against mine, feeling it, and I feel his whole body register what we’re doing. “You are going to end my career.”
“Skate faster,” I say, and bite his ear, and he laughs, actually laughs, buried inside me, and then he moves.
It’s fast and it isn’t gentle and neither of us wants it to be.
He holds my hips at the table’s edge and drives into me, deep and greedy, the table complaining, a stack of towels avalanching somewhere behind him.
My hands drag under his shirt and over his back.
The sounds we make would embarrass us in front of witnesses.
There are no witnesses. That’s the whole gift.
“Look at me.” It comes out of me in his own cadence, stolen, and his eyes snap up, surprised, then burning, and he watches me the whole rest of the way, saying my name once in the middle of it like an oath he’s taking.
“Touch yourself,” he says, rough, watching me do it, and his eyes go darker, and it takes almost no time at all. I come hard around him, heels locked behind his thighs, his hand splayed warm between my shoulder blades, holding me up through it.
He follows seconds later, pressed as deep as he can get, my name buried against my throat, his hands shaking where they grip me, and for a long moment we stay exactly there. Half dressed. Wholly ruined. His heart slamming against mine through two shirts we never managed to remove.
Then he starts to laugh. Quietly at first, then not, his face in my neck, his shoulders shaking, and I have never once heard him laugh like this. Unguarded. Younger by a decade.
“What?” I demand. “What is funny?”
“Twenty years.” He gestures, loosely, at the room, the table, us.
“Twenty years of tables like this one. I hated these rooms. Ice packs. Electrodes. A man saying does this hurt in a bored voice.” He kisses me once, hard, joy all over his face where anyone could see it, if anyone were here.
“It’s my favorite room in the building now. ”
We reassemble ourselves badly, giggling at the towel damage, and present ourselves to the empty hallway like professionals.
In the truck my hand lives in his on the console, my hair is a confession, and I think: this.
This is what we’re protecting. Not a brand.
Not a contract. A man laughing in a room that used to hurt.
***
Becca calls Thursday. I’m as ready for her as anyone ever is, which is not at all.
“Marion’s people saw the ring pictures,” she says, skipping hello, her voice already racing.
“Frankie, the auction package is ready. The proposal, sample pages, everything I need to start the bidding war for book two. All I need is a yes and the market does the rest, and the market right now, with the playoffs coming and a possible wedding, kid, this is the top. Windows like this don’t reopen. ”
“After the season,” I say.
A pause. “That’s June.”
“The book’s set in a season. It should end with one.
It’s structural.” I say it smooth, warm, professional, my hands perfectly still, thumbnail nowhere, every tell suppressed by force, and the horror of it is how good I am at this, how easily every tell I own can be switched off when I need to lie, and lying to Becca Kaplan, who taught me half of what I know, is a thing I will regret for the rest of my life. “June, Becca. Get me to June.”
“June,” she says, slow, and I can hear her writing it, and I can hear the thing underneath, a tiny pause: twelve years of representing me, and she can hear something is off, even if she can’t name it.
“Okay, kid. June. But Frankie, hear me on this: windows close. That’s not a threat. It’s just how markets work.”
Everyone keeps pointing at June. Every clock in my life is set to it.
That night I sit on my floor with Fabio and the calendar and do the thing I do, structure, because it’s the only religion I’ve got: the season ends in June, best case.
The contract ends the day after the season, in writing, signed, term concludes.
The option meeting is June. The auction window closes in June.
Barlow is dialing Arizona numbers right now.
Somewhere a man is carrying a plan he thinks has until June.
I haven’t told him my secret, and he hasn’t told me his, two people in love, lying by omission in opposite directions.
I have written enough third acts to know what it means when every thread in a story is tied to the same date.
Convergence. It’s called convergence, and it’s the thing you build deliberately so the reader can’t put the book down, and God, the craft of it, the tidy dread: I’d admire it if I weren’t living inside it.
The woman looks at the calendar, Fabio’s chin heavy on my ankle. The woman is a professional. The woman knows that when everything converges, something breaks open, and it is always, always, in every draft, the thing carried by the person who waited.