Chapter 26
Carter
We’ve got nineteen minutes before Priya needs me back inside for the sponsor walk-through, and Sloane Vega is in the passenger seat of my car in the players’ lot, in her rival-club lanyard, explaining exactly why this is a catastrophic idea.
“Tinted windows are not a legal defense,” she says. “There are forty cameras on this facility. I helped audit the placements.”
“You audited my parking lot.”
“I audit everything. It’s the whole personality — your words.” But she’s already turned in the seat, her hand already flat on my chest, and the lecture is doing the thing her lectures do lately: arriving with her mouth four inches from mine and absolutely no follow-through on the leaving.
“Nineteen minutes,” I say.
“Eighteen.” She kisses me, hard. “And we are absolutely not—”
We are, though. That’s the trouble with us in the after of the away trip — we keep drawing the line and then living on the wrong side of it, fully aware, completely unable to be sensible in a parked car that smells like spearmint and bad judgment.
She tries to climb over the console and the car immediately fights her.
Her knee jams the gearshift. Her hip hits the wheel and the horn goes off — one short, deafening BLAT across the entire players’ lot — and we both freeze, hearts going, and then she’s hissing “move your seat back, move it, move it” and I’m groping for the lever like a man defusing a bomb and the whole seat drops with a clunk that throws her forward into my chest.
“Smooth,” she breathes.
“You’re the one who honked—”
“Don’t.” She’s wedged half over me, one foot in the footwell, the other braced God knows where, my mirror knocked askew. “Do not narrate this.”
I shove her skirt up to her hips and find her already bare and wet under it — no time, she came ready — and the noise I make is not dignified.
She gets my belt open, my zipper down, drags me out into her fist and strokes once, rough, her thumb through the wet at the tip, and rolls a condom down me with brisk filthy efficiency.
Plans for contingencies I haven’t even had yet.
“You brought—”
“I brought everything. Shut up. Sixteen minutes.”
There is no good way to do this and we do it anyway.
She gets a knee up on the seat and the other foot ends up flat against the dash, and she lines me up and sinks down — and Christ — slow at first, the head of me stretching her, then all at once, every inch in one greedy drop, so tight the smart remark I had loaded just dies.
It punches a sound out of her right against my mouth.
Her elbow catches the window switch and it whirs down two inches; cool air, the lot, exposed — she swears and stabs it back up without breaking rhythm.
It’s frantic. It’s graceless. My knee’s against the door and her shin’s against the wheel and every few seconds the car objects — a creak, the suspension rocking, her heel finding the horn-adjacent zone so I have to grab her ankle and move it mid-thrust like we’re spotting each other in the gym.
She’s fucking herself down onto me with her skirt rucked to her waist and her teeth in her lip to stay quiet, the windows fogging at the edges, the wet sound of it obscene in the sealed-up car, and I get a hand between us and work her clit in tight circles and her rhythm goes ragged—
—and then she’s laughing. The rare one. The real one.
Right in the middle of it, gasping it into my neck, we are doing this in a Honda, even as she clenches around me and chases it, and I’d take a year’s fine and a fortnight’s fitness fine on top for the sound.
I plant a hand on the roof for leverage and drive up into her and she muffles the finish against my shoulder, shaking, and I’m right behind her, gone, both of us jammed and sweating and ridiculous in four square feet of a car that was never built for this.
“This is so unprofessional,” she breathes.
“Deeply. File a complaint.”
“With who. I’m the complaints department.”
She goes first, biting down on her own knuckle to keep it quiet, and that — Sloane Vega muffling herself in my passenger seat — is what takes me with her, fast and hard and stupid, my face in her neck and her name not making it all the way out.
And then, of course, a knock on the glass.
We go to stone. Earl’s voice, mild, through the fog on the window: “Reinhardt. Coach wants the group in five.” The smallest pause a human being has ever deployed. “Your meeting’s running long.”
“Thanks, Earl,” I say, in a voice that fools absolutely no one.
“Mm,” says Earl, and his footsteps go, and Sloane drops her face to my shoulder and shakes — laughing so hard she’s gone silent with it — and I am so far gone for this woman it ought to be a diagnosable condition.
She reassembles in ninety seconds flat. The skirt, the hair, the lanyard, the head of communications snapping back online like she was never once a person who climbed over a console.
I get to watch the entire reboot, and it’s the most intimate thing I’ll see all week, and she does it in my wing mirror.
“Three-nothing,” she says, hand on the door. “I didn’t get caught. You did.”
“Earl doesn’t count. Earl’s family.”
“Earl absolutely counts.” And she’s gone — back across the lot toward the building in enemy colors like she owns it — and I sit in a car that smells like her now and think the thought I keep not finishing, the one with the three words in it.
I don’t finish it this time either. I just put it in the glovebox with the rest of them and go play football.
***
It’s midnight in the film room and I’m watching footage of myself on a rooftop, scrubbing it back and forth, trying to find the exact frame where I stopped acting.
I know it’s in here. I’ve watched it eleven times.
There’s a second — somewhere between the staged lean and the part the long lens couldn’t hear — where my face does a thing I didn’t authorize, the same way Sloane says hers did, and I keep slowing the playback down trying to catch the frame where the fake one becomes the real one, like if I can find it I can learn how to stop it happening again.
I can’t find it. There’s no clean frame. That’s the whole problem with the thing.
It doesn’t switch. It bleeds.
The film room at midnight is the loneliest good room in the building — banks of screens dropped to standby, the analysts’ coffee rings dried on the desk, the hum of machines that watch football so we can keep pretending football is a thing you can solve.
I should be studying the back line we play Saturday; I’ve got their shape cued up in another window.
Instead I’m running forensics on my own face, scrubbing a rooftop frame by frame like security footage of a crime I can’t prove happened, because somewhere in those twelve seconds I stopped acting, and I need to know exactly when — the way you need to know exactly when a hairline turned into a break.
The door goes. Mateo, in a hoodie, at half past midnight, because the man has a sixth sense for me watching the wrong footage.
He doesn’t ask why I’m studying campaign clips instead of the back line we’re playing Saturday. He drops into the seat beside me, watches thirty seconds of it, and then he says, in Spanish, easy: “I have seen you play five hundred games.”
“Mateo—”
“Right now you have the face you get in the eighty-ninth minute. Down a goal. Still sure we’re going to score.” He looks at me sideways. “I know that face better than my wife’s.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“No.” He stands, claps me once on the shoulder, heads for the door. “It’s harder than that.”
***
At breakfast Jules slides into the seat across from me with his phone already out and the look of a kid who needs an adult.
“My mom saw the cover,” he says, turning the screen toward me.
There’s a paragraph in careful, formal English — Jules’s mom writes the way Jules studies, like every sentence might be graded — and at the end of it: And the pretty lady, she’s your friend’s girlfriend?
She looks kind. Tell him I said be serious.
I laugh before I can stop it, the real one, too loud for the canteen.
Jules grins, relieved. “Sir—” He catches it. “Sorry. Carter. Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing for the sir. And tell your mom I’m extremely serious.” I steal a piece of his toast. “Tell her she looks kind because she is. Don’t tell her the rest.”
“Yes, sir.” A breath. “Sorry, sir.”
I let him have it. For the length of a stolen piece of toast, eating breakfast while his mother fact-checks my fake relationship from another continent, nothing in my life is complicated, and I’d bottle it if I could.
***
Priya pulls me into the media suite at ten and lays it out like a gift.
“A podcast. The big one. Live-to-tape, two days out.” She’s bright, certain, already past my objection. “Unscripted. No prep notes — prep reads as prep, and this host’s whole brand is finding the thing people didn’t plan to say. We want it raw. Raw is what’s converting.”
“Raw.” I keep my face doing the easy thing. “Did Sloane agree to raw?”
“Sloane will agree.” She’s already onto the next slide. “It tests through the roof.”
I leave the room and I call Sloane before the door’s finished closing, because that’s the deal we built without signing it — she hears it from me before she hears it from the machine.
She picks up on the second ring. I tell her all of it: live, unscripted, no notes, a host who digs.
The line’s quiet for a second. “Unscripted,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“So they’ll ask things we haven’t rehearsed. About us. With no script to hide behind.”
“Yeah.”
Another quiet, a different shape this time.
“Okay,” she says, and she doesn’t thank me, not in words — but the okay lands softer than her okays usually land, with the edges off it, and I’ve learned to hear the difference between the okay she gives Priya and the one she only gives me. This was the second kind.
I’ve started collecting them, her okays, the way she collects everything else — the one she hands Priya, flat, a door clicking shut; the one she’s started giving me, the edges sanded off, a door left on the latch.
I don’t tell her I’ve begun keeping a column on her the way she keeps one on the rest of the world.
She’d either be horrified or she’d understand it exactly, and I genuinely don’t know which of those would scare me more.
I tape my ankles alone after we hang up, slow, the ritual, and I sit there thinking about an unscripted hour and a host who finds the real answer, and the one true thing in my chest that no script has ever gotten near.
***
Mateo finds me at half ten that night, in the players’ lounge, and he doesn’t sit down.
He just holds up his phone. The podcast host’s page, her photo, the tagline she’s known for, the long list of guests she’s made cry on a live mic by asking the one question they came in armored against.
“I looked her up,” he says. Five words, in Spanish, flat as a back four holding the line:
“She asks about the grief.”
And he stands there in the doorway letting it land, not softening it, the way you don’t soften a thing a man needs to brace for — because Mateo’s seen the face I make in the eighty-ninth minute, and he’s the only one in this building who’s also seen the other one, the one I make exactly once a year, on a date I don’t tell anyone, and he’s just told me it’s about to be asked for on a microphone in front of the world.
I don’t say anything. There isn’t anything. I sit in the lounge with my taped ankle and the host’s face on Mateo’s phone and two days to figure out how to go on live air and be asked, by a professional, for the one thing I have never once said out loud.