Chapter 1 #2
That’s the thing I notice, standing there with the folder against my ribs. The most reliably funny man in American soccer looks at me for a full second and elects not to be funny, and it is so much worse than if he’d tried something.
“You knew,” I say.
“Since eight this morning.”
“You knew in the corridor.”
“I knew in the corridor.”
“You stood in my shot and let me call you furniture.”
“Yeah.” He sets the coffee down on the bench.
“I’ve had twenty minutes to feel bad about that and I’ve mostly landed on would do it again, so I’m going to be honest instead of clever, which for me is the hard one.
” He looks up. “The second you knew, I was going to turn into a work problem. You’d have started managing me right there in that corridor and you’d never have stopped.
I wanted one conversation before that happened. ”
“That’s not a reason. That’s a preference.”
“It’s a preference I was extremely aware of at the time.”
“You let me insult you to keep a conversation.”
“You called me structurally unnecessary.” He turns the cup a quarter-turn on the bench. “Do you know how long it’s been since anybody—”
He stops.
Starts again, lighter, the whole face rearranging itself back into the version that’s on the billboards. “It was a good insult. I’m a connoisseur. I wanted another one.”
I watch the sentence he actually meant go past like a train that wasn’t stopping here.
I have handled athletes for eleven years. I know the toolkit — the deflection, the practiced humility, the charm that arrives pre-loaded and asks you for nothing so you’ll hand it everything. I know it because I built half of it.
I do not know what to do with a man who swerves that badly in front of a professional.
“Sit down,” I say.
He sits.
I stay standing, because the folder is heavy and because he’s tall and I have spent a career learning where to put myself in a room. “I’m going to say four things. You’re going to hear all four before you say anything charming.”
“That’ll be difficult but I accept the challenge.”
“One. This is a campaign, not a favour. I don’t need you to be nice to me and I’m not going to be nice to you. If you spend eleven months trying to win me over, you’ll spend eleven months bored.”
“Noted.”
“Two. Nothing goes out that I haven’t cleared. Not a story, not a post, not a candid your teammate takes on a phone. If someone puts a camera near us and I haven’t signed for it, you walk away mid-sentence. I don’t care how it looks.”
“Easy. Three?”
“Three. There is no version of this where—”
“Sorry. Quick thing.” He lifts a finger. “Coffee order.”
I stop. “What?”
“Your coffee order. People are going to ask what my girlfriend drinks. It’s the most common question I get about anything, ahead of my ankle and substantially ahead of my opinions.
” He is completely serious, or doing the thing where that’s indistinguishable.
“And I’d rather not have to say contempt. ”
“That’s not — you don’t need my coffee order for a campaign.”
“I need it for a Tuesday. Somebody’s going to ask me on a Tuesday, in a car park, with a phone out.”
Eleven years. Eleven years of media training rooms and hostile press conferences and one senator, and this is the question that empties my head.
“Cold brew,” I say.
“Great. Cold brew.”
“Which I pour at eight and drink at four.” It’s out before I’ve cleared it, which is not a thing that happens to me. “Warm. Every day. I don’t know why.”
Carter Reinhardt looks up at me from the bench with an expression I am going to have to develop a policy on, and says, gently, “Okay.”
The corridor is very quiet. Somewhere on the floor below, a door closes.
“Where was I,” I say.
“Three.” He doesn’t even pretend he wasn’t counting. “You were about to tell me there’s no version of this where we’re friends.”
“How—”
“I’ve met you twice and you still haven’t used my first name.” He picks up the cold coffee, considers it, puts it back down. “Go ahead. Three.”
And now I have to say it improvised, without the run-up, to a man who has already guessed it, which is a completely different sentence than the one I had.
“Friends is a mess,” I say. “Colleagues survive contact. That’s not an insult, it’s a load-bearing decision.”
“Load-bearing.” He nods slowly. “Like furniture.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m going to be so careful with that one for the next eleven months, and you’re going to hate every single time.”
“Four.”
He looks up, and I have not moved and he has not moved and yet the distance between us has been quietly renegotiated by somebody, and my heart goes once — hard, out of time, like a chair scraping in an empty room.
I have a column for everything. I don’t have one for that.
“Four.” My voice does something I haven’t authorized, so I keep it short.
He’s close enough now that I can see the tape edge above his collar and a raw pink line on his forearm where somebody’s studs found him on Saturday, and close enough that I watch this one land in real time.
“If you ever hand a piece of my life to anyone — a reporter, a brand, your own social team, anyone — without asking me first, I will end you professionally. I’ll be very good at it.
You won’t see the first six months of it happening. ”
He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t reassure me either, which I notice, because everyone reassures me.
“Okay,” he says. “Can I have one?”
“No.”
“I’d like one anyway.”
“Of course you would.”
“When you’re doing the thing.” He turns his hand over, vague, then finds it.
“When you’re three moves ahead of everybody in the room and it’s costing you something to be.
I’ll be able to tell. I’d like to be allowed to notice out loud.
Not fix it. Not fuss.” He shrugs. “Say it happened, once, and then drop it.”
My phone buzzes.
A contact request. Atlanta area code. Carter Reinhardt, followed by a winking emoji I didn’t add and wouldn’t, under any circumstance my career depends on, add.
“Priya,” he says. “She’s efficient.”
“Somebody decided I was reachable without asking me.” I open the contact and delete the emoji keystroke by keystroke — there is no satisfaction in this life quite like removing a man’s emoji one character at a time — and save him under the only label that’s accurate.
Atlanta Forge. Talent. Risk. No first name. A first name is a door.
Joss lights up the screen underneath it. My oldest friend, calling because she’s heard, because she always hears. I decline it, and she will make me pay for that.
When I look up, he’s still waiting for an answer to a question I would very much like to pretend he didn’t ask.
“No,” I say.
“Fair enough.” He picks up the cold coffee and stands. “For the record, I think you’ll be great at this. You’re going to be the best thing that has ever been done to my public image.”
“That is the least appealing sentence anyone has ever said to me.”
“I workshopped it.” He’s at the top of the stairs. “Eight tomorrow. Priya’s call.”
The first syllable of his first name is already in my mouth. It has no business being there. It got there on its own, the way the look in the corridor got there, and I put it back with the practiced ease of a woman who has spent three years putting things back.
“Reinhardt.”
He stops.
I don’t know why I’m saying it. It is the first unbudgeted thing I’ve done in four years. “Why me.”
“They gave me a list.”
“Of what?”
“Six names. Marketable, cleared, every one of them would have said yes in a heartbeat.” He shifts the cup to his other hand. “I gave them one.”
Then he’s gone down the stairs, two at a time, like a man late for something he’s looking forward to.