Chapter 6
Cole
The Wolves do a community night every year, and every year I show up and shake the hands and sign the things and leave the second it's polite to leave, because I'm not built for rooms that loud.
This year is different because this year the literacy program is in it.
I agreed to that. Me. The guy who ate two years of headlines to keep it quiet. I agreed because Jenna sent me a message — not a pitch, not an interview request, just a message — that said: It's a good story. It deserves to be told. I won't tell it without your yes.
I read it about nine times. Then I said yes.
So now there's a table at community night with the kids' drawings on it, and the hand-lettered sign with the giant P, and the girl in the red cardigan is there with her mom, and she finds me in a room of two thousand people and tugs my sleeve and informs me, gravely, that she finished the dragon book.
"And?" I ask, crouching down.
"He was good the whole time," she says, deeply betrayed. "The barn DID start it."
"I told you."
"You said you didn't know."
"I said we'd find out. I had a feeling."
"You CHEATED."
"That's not cheating, that's literacy."
She narrows her eyes at me, decides she'll allow it, and runs off to tell her mom that the dragon was framed.
And across the room, watching this, is Jenna.
She's working. She's got her recorder and her notebook and she's talking to a parent, and she's good at it — she's so good at it that I don't think she knows she's good at it, the way she makes people feel like the most interesting person in a loud room, the way she leans in a half-degree when somebody says something true.
I've spent six weeks being studied by her.
It's strange and good to stand in a corner and study her back.
To watch her do the thing she does, the noticing, turned toward people who deserve to be noticed.
Something in me that's been held tight for two years lets go.
I don't have a better word for it. It's not a decision. It's a release, the specific feeling of a muscle you didn't know was clenched finally putting itself down.
The event winds down. The crowd thins. There's a small wrap-up for staff and a couple of players up in the press box, drinks and leftover catering and the post-event exhale, and by eleven-thirty it's down to me and Jenna and a building going quiet.
The others trickle out. Nobody plans it. It just happens, the way the important things do — a goodnight, a goodnight, a door, and then it's the two of us in the press box and the rink below us lit only by the safety lights, the ice a faint, ghostly blue through the glass.
She's closing her notebook. I'm still in my event clothes, the good shirt, the collar I want to undo and haven't.
"I want to write the real story," she says.
"What does that mean."
She sets the notebook down. "It means the person I've been watching for six weeks is not the person I wrote about two years ago.
And I don't know what to do about that. Professionally I know what to do — I write the better, truer piece, that's the job.
But there's a version of this where I just—" She stops.
"I keep getting the facts right and the picture wrong.
I did it to you once. I'm trying very hard not to do it again. "
"What do you want to do about it?" I ask.
And she looks at me.
There's a particular kind of quiet that isn't the absence of sound.
The vacuum's gone. The building's gone. The ice glows blue below us and the press box is narrow, it's always been narrow, we've been sharing this narrow space for weeks, and there is suddenly nowhere to put the distance, no professional reason to keep it, nothing left to pretend it's anything other than something we've both been choosing.
"Cole," she says, and it's the first time she's used my first name, in six weeks, and it lands like a hand on the back of my neck.
"Yeah."
"I'm not asking you a question for the piece right now."
"I know."
"I just want to be clear about that. This isn't—" She gestures vaguely at her recorder, which is off, which I watch her reach over and, very deliberately, move to the far end of the desk. Out of reach. A small ceremony. "Off the record. All the way off."
"Off the record," I agree.
"I've been wanting to do something for about three weeks and I've been telling myself a lot of very good reasons not to."
"Tell me one."
"You're the subject of a story."
"You said that was the only one that mattered."
"It was. It's not anymore. The story's almost done." She's closer now, or I am, I genuinely can't tell who closed the gap, it's the kind of thing where the geometry just decides for you. "So. No more reasons."
"No more reasons," I say.
I kiss her, or she kisses me. Same problem as the gap — by the time it's happening neither of us has clean custody of who started it, and it doesn't matter, because it's been six weeks of standing too close in narrow rooms and finally, finally letting the distance collapse.
It's not rushed. That's the thing I'll remember.
We've rushed nothing else — six weeks of circling, of careful sentences, of recorders pointedly switched off — and we don't rush this either.
Her hands find the collar I never undid and undo it.
My hands find the small of her back, the warm length of her against me, and the press box is dark and blue-lit and ours, the glass cool, the ice below glowing, the whole enormous building holding its breath around the two of us in the one small lit place in it.
"This is a terrible idea," she murmurs against my mouth, smiling, I can feel her smiling.
"Catastrophic," I agree.
"We're in the press box."
"I know. I scored four hours ago. This building owes me."
She laughs, breathless, and the laugh turns into something else against my mouth, and I lift her — she's lighter than I expect, I've spent six weeks thinking of her as someone enormous, the lighthouse, the prosecutor, and she's just a person, warm and real and laughing in my arms — and set her on the desk where the recorder used to be.
Her knees come up on either side of me. Her hands are already working the buttons I just undid for her loose from their holes, and I help, and the shirt goes somewhere, off the back of a press box chair, gone.
Her palms flatten on my chest like she's confirming something, like she's checking the math, and then they slide up over my shoulders and pull, and there's no more distance left in the whole building.
I take my time with her sweater. She makes a low impatient sound and I say "I've rushed nothing else" against her collarbone, and she says "you are infuriating," and I get the sweater over her head anyway, slow, on purpose, and she stops being impatient the second my mouth finds the curve of her throat.
The desk is cold under her and I'm not, and the difference makes her gasp.
I learn the shape of her in the blue half-dark — the line of her spine when she arches, the catch in her breath when I find the spot just below her ear, the way her fingers tighten in my hair when I take my time, and I take my time, because we've rushed nothing and I'm not starting now.
She gets my belt. I let her. I get a hand under her, against the small of her back, and pull her to the edge of the desk, to me, and the sound she makes then is the most honest thing either of us has said in six weeks.
"Cole." Just my name. Just the one word, said low and undone, her forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we've been on the ice.
"I've got you," I tell her, and I do, and the rest of it is slow and certain and ours, the glass cool at her back and the ice glowing blue below and her hands gripping my shoulders like the desk might tip, the whole enormous building holding its breath around the one small lit place in it where we finally stop holding ours.
It's not the heat of it I'll remember, though there's heat, plenty of it, the kind that's been building for six weeks and finally has somewhere to go.
It's the rightness. It's her name for me — my first name, the one she didn't use for a month and a half — said again and again against my skin like she's making up for the time.
It's her breath breaking on a laugh halfway through, helpless, delighted, and mine answering it, the two of us laughing in the dark with our hands all over each other because somehow it's funny and enormous and exactly right all at once.
It's the most honest I've been with another person in years, and we barely use a single word.
After, we don't bolt. That's the other thing I'll remember. We don't do the awkward scramble. We end up in the press box seats, side by side, looking out at the ghost-blue ice, my arm around her, the good shirt a lost cause on the floor somewhere.
She puts her head on my shoulder.
I don't move. I'm afraid to move, the way you're afraid to move when a bird lands near you, when something wild and careful has decided you're safe and you do not want to be the thing that proves it wrong.
"I spent two years angry about your piece," I tell the ice.
"I know."
"I wasn't, really. I told everyone I wasn't. But I was. A little."
"You were allowed to be."
"That's the thing." I look down at the top of her head. "You were right about all of it. Every fact. And I spent two years being furious at a person for being right." I exhale. "And now I owe that person something I did not see coming. At all."
She tilts her head up. "What do you owe me?"
I think about it. I answer true, the only way I know how.
"I'll tell you when the piece publishes," I say. "Ask me then."
She studies my face for a long moment, the noticing, the thing she does, and then she puts her head back on my shoulder, and we watch the empty ice glow blue beneath us, and for the first time in a very long time I do not keep one hand on the exit.
There is no exit. I checked. I looked everywhere in this narrow blue room and there isn't one, and I find, to my complete surprise, that I'm relieved.