Chapter 8
Cole
I didn't call because I didn't know what to say, and I'm a man who, when he doesn't know what to say, says nothing, which my mother will tell you is the single most infuriating thing about me, and she raised me, so she'd know.
It wasn't anger. Let me be clear about that, because I've spent two years being misunderstood and I'm done with it.
I read the piece six times. Six. I read it the slow way, the only way I read, one finger under the words like the kids at the center, because that's how I learned and that's how I'll always do it and I stopped being ashamed of that around the same time I stopped being a headline.
Six times, and every time it was exactly what she told me it would be. Fair. True. The picture.
I didn't call because the piece was public and what we were was private, and I am protective of private things in a way that, from the outside, looks exactly like a man walking away.
I know it looks like that. I've watched it look like that to other people my whole life.
It looked like that to a journalist with a spreadsheet two years ago and she wasn't wrong about what she saw, she was wrong about what it meant, and I was about to do the exact same thing to her that I did then — go quiet, go private, let her fill the silence with the worst available story.
I figured that out on the morning of the third day, standing in my very clean kitchen, drinking water like a disgrace.
So I get in the car.
I don't call first. I should call first. In retrospect, calling first would have been the move, but I'm not a call-first guy, I'm a stand-in-the-doorway guy, and I drive to her apartment and I knock on her door at nine in the morning on the third day, and she opens it in pajamas with a coffee in her hand and an expression that has about half a second of pure relief in it before she gets it under control.
I saw the half-second. I'll take the half-second to my grave.
"I should have called," I say.
"You're here now."
"I know what I want," I say, because I've had three days to figure out how to say it and this is the best I've got. "I need to know if it's a problem for you. The piece is done. Your assignment's done. So I need to know if—" I run out of road. "If this is possible. Us. Now."
She looks at me for a long moment, the noticing, the thing she does, and she's still got the coffee in her hand and her hair's a disaster and she's never looked better, which I do not say, because there's an order to these things.
"The embed is over," she says. "I'm not your beat reporter. I'm the person who wrote a piece about you. That's the line I have to be honest about — I'm not going to pretend it isn't there."
"I know."
"I want to be clear about what I'm choosing. I don't get to be confused about this later and call it a mistake. So I'm choosing it now, on purpose, with my eyes open, in pajamas, which is not how I pictured this, by the way."
"You pictured this?"
"Shut up." But she's fighting a smile. "I want to be clear about what I'm choosing."
"Then be clear," I say.
She steps back from the door.
Her apartment is exactly what I would have guessed and somehow better than I guessed.
It's the specific warm chaos of a person who lives inside her own head for a living — books in stacks that have clearly become furniture, notebooks everywhere, a wall of articles and printouts with string between some of them like she's solving a murder, three coffee mugs in various states on various surfaces.
It smells like coffee and paper and her.
It's the home of a working mind and I want to live in it immediately.
"Don't judge the wall," she says.
"I'm not judging the wall. I'm impressed by the wall. Is that — am I on the wall?"
"You are not on the wall."
"There's a string going to a thing that looks like—"
"You're a little bit on the wall. The piece is on the wall. Stop reading my wall, it's invasive."
"You wrote four thousand words about my entire interior life."
"That's different, that's journalism—"
I kiss her.
I've been wanting to since the doorway, since the half-second of relief, since probably the press box, since possibly the parking garage, since maybe the moment she asked me four years ago — no, that was a different woman, that was the literacy coordinator, but it feels like it's been four years, it feels like it's been my whole life — and she kisses me back, coffee mug abandoned somewhere, and it's nothing like the press box.
The press box was two people finally letting the distance collapse. This is two people who already collapsed it and are choosing it again, in daylight, with no recorder anywhere and no assignment between us and nothing left to be careful about.
It's slower. It's surer. There's no glass, no blue ice, no enormous building holding its breath — there's just the path to her bedroom, taken badly, both of us refusing to stop touching long enough to walk it well.
My shirt comes off somewhere near the murder wall.
Hers somewhere past it. She walks me backward with her hands flat on my chest, grinning against my mouth, and I let her steer, because letting her win is its own kind of winning and I figured that out weeks ago.
The backs of my knees hit the bed and she pushes and I go, and then she's over me, gray morning light coming soft through real curtains, and she takes a second — just a second — to look at me, the noticing, the thing she does, except now there's nothing professional in it at all.
I reach up and tuck her wrecked hair behind her ear and she turns her face into my palm and the second stretches out warm and quiet between us.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
Then she leans down and the quiet's over.
We learn each other slow, in daylight, no recorder, no deadline, nowhere to be.
I find the places that make her breath stutter — the inside of her wrist, the dip of her waist, the spot at the base of her spine she didn't know she'd give away.
She finds, with what I can only describe as journalistic thoroughness, every single thing that undoes me, and files each one with a small satisfied sound that I am going to be hearing in my head at inconvenient moments for the rest of my life.
She's better at her job than I am at mine and this is somehow further proof.
She says my name. My first name. She's been saying it for two days in my head and now she's saying it out loud against my skin, low and unhurried, and it does the thing it did in the press box, the hand on the back of the neck, except there's no part of me holding anything tight now, no hand on any exit, because I checked three days ago in my kitchen and there isn't one, there was never one, I just kept pretending there was because pretending was safer than this.
This is not safer than that. Her hands in mine, pressed into the pillow on either side of my head, her forehead dropped to mine, both of us past careful, past clever, past every word we've used on each other for six weeks — this is not safer than anything.
This is so much better than safe.
After, we're a tangle in the warm wreck of her bed, my heartbeat coming down slow, her cheek on my chest, her hand drawing lazy nothing on my ribs.
Neither of us says anything for a while.
We've said enough. For the first time in two years I have absolutely nowhere I'd rather be and nothing I'm bracing for, and I lie in the gray light of a stranger's bedroom that isn't a stranger's anymore and think: this.
This is the thing I owe you. The answer was always going to be everything.
After, she gets up — pulls on a shirt that's mine, that I left, that she's apparently keeping, which I clock and decide not to mention because mentioning it would risk her taking it off — and announces that she's going to make us actual food.
"You can cook?"
"I can cook better than you can," she says, with the supreme confidence of a person who is about to start a fight she wants to have.
"It's the one thing I'm better at than you.
You've got the hockey and the reading and the brooding in doorways.
I've got eggs. The eggs are mine. Don't come for the eggs. "
"I'm an excellent cook."
"You drink water and eat protein in the shape of food. That's not cooking, that's compliance."
"My mother taught me to cook."
"Your mother is in Cork. Your mother cannot help you here."
I sit on her kitchen counter, in a kitchen that is the opposite of mine, cluttered and warm and alive, and I argue with her about eggs for twenty extremely pleasant minutes while she makes — I'll admit it, I'll go to my grave admitting it — genuinely excellent eggs.
I lose the argument. I lose it on purpose, a little.
I'm a man who scouts everybody, who reads the half-second tell, who knows when to sell the cross-ice look and take the lane, and the lane here is to lose the egg argument and let her win the thing she wants to win, so I lose it, and I watch her be delighted about it, and I think: this is the thing I owe you.
This. I'll tell you what I owe you and the answer is everything, the answer is this kitchen, the answer is the eggs.
She gives me a plate. The eggs are perfect. I tell her they're fine.
"Fine," she says, scandalized.
"Fine to good."
"FINE TO GOOD."
Later, while she's in the other room arguing with Frank on the phone about whether she's allowed to write a follow-up — "no, Frank, a different player, I'm not writing about — Frank, that's not — okay, that's wildly unethical, I'm hanging up" — I pick the piece up off her coffee table, the printout, the one with my whole interior life in four thousand words.
I read it a seventh time.
One finger under the words. Slow, the way I do.
And this time it doesn't feel like a verdict. The first one felt like a verdict — guilty, with photographs. The second one, when she sent it, felt like an acquittal, like someone had finally read the whole file.
This one, the seventh read, on a couch that smells like coffee and her, with eggs I called fine sitting good in my stomach and a woman in the next room defending the ethics of the profession to her editor at the top of her lungs —
This one feels like a beginning.
She comes back in. "Frank's a monster but the piece is fine. Are you reading it again?"
"It's the best thing anybody's written about me."
"You said that already."
"It's still true." I set it down. "Come here."
She comes here.
"For the record," she says, settling against me, "and you can quote me on this one — the eggs were not fine."
"The eggs," I agree, "were a hell of a piece, kid," in my best Frank voice, and she laughs so hard she nearly falls off the couch, and I catch her, because that's the whole thing, isn't it, that's the lane I sold everything to take —
You catch her. You stay. You don't go quiet. You don't keep one hand on the exit.
You read the whole thing, one finger under the words, all the way to the end, to find out if you were right about the dragon.
The barn started it. I always had a feeling.