17. Rhett
Rhett
I wake up in her bed at six because I always wake at six, and for the first time in five years waking up is not the worst part of my day.
I don’t move. I’ve learned, over a long career of early flights and shared rooms, how to wake without waking the person next to you, and I use it now to do the most selfish thing I’ve done in years, which is lie still and look at her.
Maren Hale asleep. The managing all gone out of her face.
Her hair’s a disaster and there’s a crease on her cheek from the pillow and one hand is fisted in the sheet between us like even unconscious she’s holding onto something, and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a building or out of one in longer than I can stand to count.
Her apartment in the morning is small and full of a whole life I’ve never been allowed near.
A row of paperbacks with cracked spines.
A coffee mug that says something I can’t read from here.
A photo on the dresser of her with a younger woman who has to be the sister, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.
The mascot on the shelf, watching us, judgmental.
I’ve spent two months in the rooms where she manages my life.
This is the first time I’ve been in a room that’s hers, and I understand, lying here, that I’d burn the season down before I’d give up getting to be in it.
That should scare me more than it does.
She stirs. Stretches. Opens one eye, finds me already looking, and doesn’t do the morning-after panic. She just looks back, sleep-soft and unguarded, and says, “You’re staring.”
“I’m reading the tape.”
“It’s too early for hockey metaphors.” But she’s smiling, the small real one, and she shifts toward me under the sheet, warm and bare and unhurried, and the slow thing I started last night isn’t finished, it turns out, it was never going to be finished in one night.
This time there’s no rush in either of us.
No two months of dammed-up want crashing through.
Just the gray morning and the quiet street and her mouth finding mine, soft, and my hand mapping her in the daylight the way I couldn’t in the dark, the curve of her hip, a small scar on her knee I don’t have the story of, the places that make her breath catch.
I take my time. I’ve got a reputation to protect now, she informed me at some point in the night, and the reputation is that I take my time.
“Tell me what you like,” I say against her skin, because I want the data and because I want to hear her say it. “In the daylight. Tell me.”
And she does, this woman who manages every word that leaves her mouth in public, she tells me, low and certain, there, slower, your fingers, God, just like, and I give her exactly what she asks for, two fingers curling into her while my thumb works her clit, watching her face the whole time, the most honest I’ve ever seen her, no message discipline, no load-bearing anything, just Maren coming apart in the gray light because I asked her what she wanted and then did it.
She’s still trembling when she pushes me onto my back and takes a condom from the nightstand and rolls it on and sinks down onto me slow, taking me an inch at a time, her hands flat on my chest, setting her own pace, riding me in the morning light like she’s got nowhere in the world to be, and she doesn’t, neither of us does, the rink doesn’t open till ten and for once the clock is on our side.
I let her run it. I’m a man who’s spent his life in control and I hand it to her and watch her take what she wants from me, her head dropping back, her own hand sliding into her hair, and it’s the most generous thing I know how to do, the letting go, and she knows it, she feels the size of it.
“Rhett.” My name in her mouth, ragged, building. “I’m —”
“I know. I’ve got you. Take it.” The same words from last night, the ones that undid her, and they undo her again, and she comes around me with my hands gripping her hips, and the clutch of her drags me right over the edge behind her, and she collapses onto my chest and we lie there in the wreckage of her bed breathing each other in while a city that would lose its mind over this goes about its morning four floors down, oblivious.
“We have to get up,” she murmurs into my neck, not getting up.
“In a minute.”
“You said that twenty minutes ago.”
“I’m older. Minutes are longer for me.”
She laughs, the real one, full, and bites my collarbone, and I think: this.
This is the thing I traded a marriage and a son for the chance to have and only learned how to want at fifty-three.
Don’t let me wreck it. Whatever’s coming, don’t let me be the one who wrecks it.
It doesn’t occur to me, lying in her bed at the happiest I’ve been in years, to aim that prayer anywhere but at myself. The danger’s me. It’s always been me.
***
Getting me out of her building is a tactical operation she runs like she runs everything.
It’s almost nine by the time we surface, and nine on a weekday means neighbors, means the coffee place on her corner, means a residential street in daylight with a retired hockey legend trying to look like anybody.
She lends me a ball cap that’s too small and a gray hoodie that I’m fairly sure is the one from the press room, the night this started, and the symmetry of leaving in it is not lost on either of us.
“Down the back stairs,” she says, all business, the comms brain fully online now.
“Left out the service door, not the lobby. There’s a cab stand two blocks east, not the one on the corner, the corner one has a guy who’s always filming for his channel.
Text me when you’re in the cab. Don’t take your sunglasses off till you’re moving. ”
“You’ve thought about this.”
“I think about everything. It’s what I do.” She straightens the too-small cap on my head, and her hands linger, and the business face slips for a second into something soft and scared. “Go. Before I do something stupid like ask you to stay for coffee.”
I almost make it clean. Down the back stairs, out the service door, gray hood up, an old man in a borrowed sweatshirt on a quiet street.
And then a woman comes out of the building with a dog and a travel mug and stops, and looks at me, the long look, the one I’ve gotten a hundred thousand times, the I-know-you-from-somewhere look.
“Has anybody told you,” she says slowly, “you look exactly like —”
“I get it constantly.” I keep walking, easy, unhurried, the voice flat and friendly and final.
“Have a good one.” And I round the corner with my heart going like I’m nineteen and just got away with something, which I did, barely, and that’s the part that catches up to me in the cab two blocks east with the door shut and the city sliding by.
Barely. We got away with it barely. One bored neighbor with a dog and a memory for faces, and the whole thing, her career, my comeback, my son’s franchise, the best morning of my life, was one oh my God it IS you and a phone camera from being over before it started.
I should feel the fear as a warning. A smart man would turn it into a reason to stop.
Instead, I sit in the back of a cab in a hoodie that smells like her apartment and I feel the fear and I feel the morning and I understand they’re the same thing now: the terror and the wanting, braided so tight I can’t get a blade between them, but I am not going to stop.
I knew I wasn’t going to stop in a film room in September.
I’m just finally telling myself the truth about it from the back of a cab.
I text her from the cab, like she told me.
In the car. Got recognized by a neighbor with a dog.
Handled it. Three dots, then: WHAT. handled it how.
call me. And then, before I can answer, a second message, and this one isn’t about the neighbor at all, this one’s the thing under everything, the thing she’s better at saying over a phone than to my face: that was the best night of my life and I’m terrified but I don’t regret it. both. all of it. both.
Both. She keeps doing that, giving me two true things that don’t fit together and refusing to choose.
I’m starting to think it’s the most honest thing about her, the both, and I’m starting to suspect there’s a third thing under the two she’s showing me, a thing she swallows every time she gets to the edge of it.
I write back: Both is fine. We’ll carry both.
And I mean it. I’ve carried heavy things my whole life, losses, surgeries, the slow weight of a family I let walk out the door.
I have never once carried a thing this heavy and called it fine and meant it.
That’s either love or it’s plain stupidity, and the cruel joke of being my age is that I’ve finally stopped being able to tell the two apart, sliding through a city that would eat us alive in a hoodie that smells like her.