Rival Off the Record

7. Dani

DANI

I made it to my car before my legs gave out, but only because Brynn was watching from the glass and I'd be damned if I was going to do it in front of her.

The parking garage at Caldwell was four floors of cold cement and yellow lighting and exhaust. I made it to the third floor, hit the button for my rental two aisles over, and started walking.

Then I stopped walking. Then I changed my mind and turned around and went back the other way.

I'd forgotten where the car was. My hands had gone clumsy and far away, my head underwater somewhere on the second flight of stairs.

I found the car. Sat down in the driver's seat. Closed the door. Did not put the key in the ignition.

I sat there in the dark concrete quiet, pressed both hands flat against the wheel, and waited to find out whether I was going to cry or throw up, because it was clearly going to be one of them.

It was neither, in the end. What happened instead was that I started shaking.

Not the dramatic kind. The body-doing-its-own-thing kind, a fine vibration that started in my hands and moved up my arms and didn't stop.

I let it happen because there was nothing else to do with it.

After a while it eased off the way these things did, and I was left in the front seat of a Toyota that wasn't mine, looking at a concrete wall in his arena. Alive.

He hadn't burned me down.

That was the thing I kept coming back to.

I'd walked into that room ready for it. I'd dressed for it.

I'd rehearsed, in the shower that morning, what my face would do when the recognition hit his.

I'd prepared three different versions of what I might say if he chose to blow the whole thing up in front of Brynn, and the rehearsals had been awful, but at least they'd been mine.

At least I'd had some say in how the worst day of my adult life was going to go.

He hadn't blown it up.

He'd sat down across from me and put on a face I'd never seen him wear, a kind of polished blank, and asked me where I wanted to start, and he'd done the entire interview like that.

Like a man being interviewed by a stranger.

Like a man for whom the woman across the table didn't contain a single thing he was scared of.

And here's the thing I hated about myself for noticing, even sitting in a concrete garage in the worst hour of my adult year. He hadn't been a boy.

I'd been ready for the boy. I'd kept him frozen in my head for nine years at the height he'd been at seventeen, the lankiness, the slightly-too-large nose he hadn't grown into yet, the wrists always sticking out of his sleeves. The boy I'd ruined. That was the boy I'd dressed for that morning.

The man who walked into that room was nothing like that.

He'd grown into all of it. The shoulders he hadn't had at seventeen.

The jaw he definitely hadn't had. The way he carried himself across a room, the looseness of him, the unmistakable confidence of a body that had been used as hard as a body can be used and had won.

His hair was darker. His hands looked like the hands of a man who worked outdoors.

When he reached across the table to adjust the recorder, my brain did a small involuntary thing.

A tiny oh. A flicker that lasted less time than it takes to blink.

I hated myself for it with such immediate ferocity that I wrote down the next thing he said before he'd finished saying it, just to put my hand somewhere useful.

I was not going to be that woman. I was not going to be the kind of woman who, having destroyed a teenage boy, looked at the man he'd become and felt anything but the appropriate weight of what she'd done.

There was no version of this where I got to notice that Jettson Sturgill had grown up.

No permission for that flicker. No allowance. No quiet little drawer to put it in.

I shut it down.

I shut it down in the car, in the concrete garage, with my hands on the wheel and my forehead beginning to throb the way it did when I was lying to myself about something.

That wasn't kindness.

That was a much, much worse thing than kindness.

The first read I tried on it, sitting there, was that he was planning something bigger.

Holding the match for a better moment. He was a man who'd just been handed the world's most satisfying revenge on a national magazine platter and a nine-year fuse, and he was, by every law of the universe I understood, going to use it.

Today was just him deciding when. Sitting down today instead of blowing me up today meant he wanted to maximize the blow-up.

Wanted to do it when it would cost me more.

Wait until I'd filed the article, maybe, then go public with what kind of woman had written it.

Wait until I was on the long list for some award and knock me off it.

There were plenty of versions of that read, and I worked through several in a row, each worse than the last, and none of them quite landed.

Because none of them sounded like the man who'd sat across from me for forty-five minutes refusing to give me a single quote that could be twisted into a weapon against him.

A man planning revenge would have let me have a little rope.

The second read, which I tried next because the first was too horrible to sit in, was that he was waiting.

Not waiting to ruin me. Just waiting. The way a person waits at a door when they're not sure if they should knock.

He'd been blindsided. He'd had to make a decision in real time with Brynn in the room, and the decision was not now, and not now didn't mean not ever.

It meant he was going to think about it.

Maybe he'd call Coach tomorrow. Maybe Brynn tonight.

Maybe he was driving home right now to write down what he'd say, the same way I'd practiced for him in the shower.

That one was somehow worse than the first, because it meant the next forty-eight hours were just me waiting for the phone to ring with the end of my career on the other end.

And then the third read came, the one I tried not to let in, and I let it in for about two seconds before I shut it down.

The third read was that he hadn't blown me up because he didn't want to tell anybody what I'd done to him.

That was the one I couldn't sit with. The one that made the inside of my chest do something I didn't have a name for.

Because if it was true, it meant the man across the table had spent the last nine years protecting the boy I'd been cruel to.

Building a whole loud life on top of that boy specifically so nobody would ever know the boy had existed.

And I'd walked into his arena and put the boy back on the table just by existing, and his choice in the moment had been to swallow it whole rather than let anybody see what I'd done to him.

That wasn't kindness either. That was something stranger and harder than kindness. That was him, still, after all this time, finding the shape of the boy I'd ruined easier to carry than the cost of letting anybody else know that boy was there.

I sat in the car and thought about him standing at the door of that gym in his father's too-big suit.

About six miles home in dress shoes. About the fact that I had no right whatsoever to feel any of what I was feeling, because none of this was about me.

None of it had ever been about me. And I had to remember that, and keep remembering it, and not let myself slide into the warm familiar self-soothing version where the woman who'd been cruel to him gets to feel guilty enough to make herself the protagonist of his pain.

That wasn't an apology. That was just narcissism wearing an apology's clothes.

I'd done enough of that already. I wasn't going to do it again at twenty-six in his parking garage.

I started the car.

I drove down four floors of yellow concrete and paid the parking machine that didn't actually need paying, because I had a media credential. Got onto the surface street. Drove three blocks before I had to pull over at a red light and put my forehead on the wheel to breathe.

Then I drove to Brynn's. Because there was nowhere else to go.

She was already home.

She'd left the arena right after we had. Her car was in the spot under the building when I pulled into the penthouse garage. The kitchen light was on when I came up in the elevator. She was sitting at the island with two mugs already poured by the time I came through the door.

"Hey," she said, careful. Not the usual Brynn voice. Quieter. "Tea or whiskey."

"What time is it."

"Three thirty."

"Tea."

She slid the mug across. I sat down. Held it in both hands and didn't drink it.

Brynn watched me. She didn't ask the question.

She did the Brynn thing where she lets the question sit in the room and wait for me to be ready.

Except she was already setting up for the next round.

Brynn never just waits. Brynn waits while doing something.

She was already up, pulling bread out of the cupboard, a pan onto the stove.

"Grilled cheese," she said, like she was filing a report. "We're doing this again."

"Bry."

"Don't."

"I'm fine."

"You're a lot of things right now and fine isn't one of them, Dan." She started cutting cheese. "So I'm making you grilled cheese, and you're going to eat it, and we are not going to talk about what happened in that room until you tell me you want to."

"Nothing happened in that room."

She paused with the knife in her hand. Didn't look at me. Kept cutting.

"Okay," she said.

That okay was the worst thing she could have said. That okay was the Brynn version of I am not believing you but I respect you enough to pretend, and you are going to feel that exactly as much as I want you to. I'd been hearing that okay from her for eight years and it had never once not landed.

I drank my tea.

She made the grilled cheese. Put it on a plate in front of me with the chef's-knife smear of butter still on it.

Made one for herself too, because Brynn never made anyone eat alone, that was one of the things about her.

We sat at the island in her glass palace and ate grilled cheese in the kind of silence that's only available between people who've been listening to each other a long time.

After a while she said, "He liked you. Or he hated you. I couldn't tell which."

I almost laughed. I almost did.

"He didn't know what to make of me," I said. "First-interview jitters."

"Jett doesn't have jitters."

"Everybody has jitters."

"Not him." She picked the crust off her bread, a Brynn thing, a long-standing one, the thing she did when she was thinking out loud.

"He walks into a room. He owns it. Has since the day he showed up.

I have never in my life seen Jett Sturgill walk into a room and not know what to do with his face.

And today he walked into a room and did not know what to do with his face for about two seconds.

Then he locked it down, the way he does.

And you got the locked-down version, which is honestly worse than the chirping version. I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry."

"He'll be better next time. I'll talk to him."

"Don't."

That came out sharper than I meant. Brynn looked up.

"I mean it," I said, softer. "Don't. I'd rather have him cold and on time than have him there because you made him. Let me work the room myself."

She held my eyes longer than was comfortable.

"Okay," she said. The okay this time was different. Closer to the real one. "But I'm watching, Dan. Just so you know. Whatever's going on in there, with both of you, I am watching."

"There's nothing going on."

"Okay," she said again, in the first version. The dangerous one.

I ate the rest of the grilled cheese.

After dinner she sat with me on the couch and put on a baking show, and I watched without watching, and the whole valley out past the glass turned pink and then purple and then deep desert blue.

I thought about the next session. Thursday.

Less than seventy-two hours away. He was going to walk in.

I was going to walk in. Brynn was probably going to be in the room again, because Brynn was running point on the whole piece, and now Brynn was watching, which made everything worse and also somehow better.

Because Brynn watching meant Brynn loved me, and Brynn loving me was the only stable thing I had left that wasn't an envelope in a shoebox.

Sometime around eleven I went to the guest room, sat on the bed, and opened my laptop.

The interview tape was on it. I'd transferred it before I left the arena, a habit, never trust a single device with a recording. I put in my headphones and played it back.

His voice came through. The polished version. The forty-five minutes of nothing.

I listened to all of it. Every dodge, every joke, every shut door.

I listened to the way I'd kept asking and asking, and the way he'd kept giving me weather instead of climate, the careful curated version of a man designed never to crack.

I took notes the way I would on any interview.

Professional. Neutral. Marking the moments where I'd lost the thread and the moments where he'd handed me an opening I hadn't taken.

When I was done I had four pages of notes and exactly one usable quote, and the usable quote was about a teammate and not about him.

I closed the laptop.

I lay back in the dark and thought, I have to find a way to make him talk to me.

And right behind that thought, before I could stop it, came the one I shouldn't have let in.

I have to find a way to be in a room with him without him hating me.

I rolled over and shoved my face into the pillow and told myself it was the same thought. The same job. Two angles on the same problem. Just craft. Just work.

It wasn't, and I knew it wasn't, and not knowing what to do with that fact was somehow the hardest thing about the entire worst day of my adult life.

I fell asleep without meaning to, still in my clothes, the laptop closed beside me, forty-eight envelopes' worth of my father in a shoebox three thousand miles away, and a man who'd had every reason to ruin me today and hadn't.

Somewhere on the other side of this city he was going to bed too.

And we were going to do this all again on Thursday.