8. Jett
JETT
I carried it alone for two days, which was about a day and a half longer than I had any business carrying anything alone. The second night I gave up.
Monday night had been bad. I went home from the arena and sat in the front hall with my back against the door for a stretch I didn't track, because I didn't look at any clocks.
Eventually I got up, made a sandwich I didn't eat, and went to bed at nine like a child.
I slept for about an hour. Lay awake the rest of it, running the conference room back on a loop.
The door. Her face turning toward me. Brynn saying her name.
The three-second drop. The choice. I worked through every version of it.
What would've happened if I'd told Brynn right there.
What her face would've done. The exact second she'd have understood, and the exact second after that, when she'd have started loving me harder than I could survive being loved by her.
I couldn't make the loop stop running.
Tuesday I went to practice. I did practice.
Chirped Moose about his beard. Gave Coach a thumbs-up when he asked if I was good.
Scored on Langley three times in scrimmage, and the second one I went out of my way to celebrate, the long stupid arms-out glide I did for the cameras even when there weren't any cameras, because if I did the bit hard enough I could almost believe I was the man doing the bit.
I was not the man doing the bit. I was a man inside a man doing the bit, watching from somewhere behind my own eyes.
And I could feel Stone clocking it from across the ice the whole practice.
He didn't say anything. Stone never said anything.
He just watched, the way he watched everything, with that flat dark gaze that meant he'd already taken in more than you wanted him to.
After practice he stripped down at his stall the way he always did. No rush. Deliberate. As I walked past with my towel he said, quiet, not looking at me, "You free tonight."
"Why."
"Just am I free or am I not."
"You're free."
"Come by, then. Seven."
He didn't say if you want. Didn't say we should talk.
Didn't say you've been off, didn't say I'm worried about you.
He just said the thing and let me decide what to do with it.
The Rhett special. Which was why Rhett worked.
Which was why I went home, showered, put on a clean shirt, and got in the car at six forty-five.
Rhett's place sat up in the hills not far from mine, but it was a different kind of place.
Mine was a museum. His was a house. Lower-slung, warmer, lights on in the kitchen because Victoria was probably in there cooking something he'd pretend not to enjoy.
The big stone fireplace going on the far side of the living room, because Victoria liked a fire and Rhett liked Victoria.
That was about the size of his domestic life now. Eighteen months in.
I parked. Sat in the car a minute. Watched the house do its warm-house thing through the windshield.
The thing about going to a man's house to break is you have to break before you ring the doorbell.
You can't get all the way to the doorstep with the words still inside you and then break in the man's actual living room, because then the breaking happens to the room and the man both, and that's bad manners.
And I'd been raised, whatever else I'd been raised with, to have manners.
So I sat in the car and did the work of getting the worst of it out where Rhett wouldn't have to see it.
Dragged the back of my hand across my eyes a couple times.
Breathed through my nose. Gathered the loose pieces of myself into a vague person-shape.
Then I went up and rang the bell.
Victoria opened the door, which I hadn't expected, and her face did the brief soft thing it did when she saw me.
The oh, you thing. Victoria Caldwell, terrifying woman, had decided about a year ago that she liked me, and once Victoria decided to like you, she did it the way she did everything.
Completely. For keeps. I had not yet gotten used to being on the receiving end of that.
"Hi, kid," she said.
"Hi, Vic."
"He's on the back deck. Six-pack in the fridge in the garage if you want it. I'm making myself scarce." She squeezed my arm as she passed, brief, no comment, the way Victoria touched the people she'd decided to keep. Then she was up the stairs and gone.
I got the six-pack. Went through the house, through the kitchen, out the slider to the deck.
Rhett was already out there, fire pit going, hair still wet from his shower, in a henley and the same kind of joggers we'd all been wearing for ten years.
A bottle of tonic water sweating on the table next to him.
I set the six-pack down. Opened one. Sat.
For a while we sat the way two men sit on a deck and don't say anything.
The fire popped. Somewhere down the valley a coyote called.
Vegas glittered past the rim of his land like somebody'd tipped a tray of broken glass into the dark.
I drank the first beer in maybe four pulls and opened the second before I realized I was doing it.
"Slow down," Rhett said. Not a chirp. Just a flat observation.
"Yeah."
I slowed down.
He waited. He was good at waiting. He'd been a man who waited eighteen months in plain sight for a woman who couldn't yet see him. Waiting another forty-five minutes for me was nothing.
I drank half the second beer. Set it down. Looked at the fire.
"I know her," I said.
He didn't ask which her. Didn't say who. He just turned his head slightly, the smallest tilt. The listening posture.
"The writer," I said. "Brynn's friend. Dani Hartley. The one doing the feature." I rolled the bottle between my palms. "She and I grew up in the same town. We went to high school together. I knew her then."
He waited.
"She bullied the absolute hell out of me, man.
For years. Sophomore through senior year.
She was the worst of them. She's the reason I left home as fast as I left home.
" The words came easier than I'd thought once I'd started, which was the trick of it.
The only hard part was getting them started.
"There was this thing she did our junior year.
A dance thing. A whole set-up where she pretended to like me for a couple weeks, then made me look like an idiot for it in front of the whole school.
After that it was bad until I graduated.
Then I got out. And I have not said her name out loud in nine years. "
Rhett let that sit.
"Brynn doesn't know," I said. "Brynn's been her best friend for eight years and Dani never told her any of it.
Brynn doesn't know I knew her in high school.
Doesn't know what Dani did. Doesn't know the person she introduced me to on Monday is the same person I've spent years not being. Brynn has no idea."
"And on Monday Dani walked into the conference room."
"You didn't say anything."
"I didn't say anything."
He thought about that. Looked at the fire. Took a sip of his tonic water. The thinking was real. That was the thing about Rhett: he actually thought when he was thinking. He wasn't just queueing up his next sentence.
"Why didn't you," he said.
"Because to tell Brynn what Dani was, I'd have had to tell Brynn what I was.
The kid she made me. The before-version.
And I couldn't." I stopped. Started again.
"I've built a whole life out here on top of that kid.
I don't even know if he's still in there.
I'm not going to find out for the first time at twenty-six, on a Monday afternoon, with a national magazine watching. "
He nodded once, small. He got it. The fact that he got it without me having to argue any of it was such a relief I had to look away for a second, because my eyes had gone hot in a way I wasn't going to let him see.
"So you're going to keep doing the interviews."
"I'm going to keep doing the interviews."
"And not say anything."
"And not say anything. Not to Brynn, not to Coach, not to anybody. She does her piece, she leaves, the kid stays buried."
"How many more sessions."
"I don't know. Three, four. Maybe five, depending how she structures it."
Rhett took another sip. Put the bottle down. Turned and looked at me for the first time, that flat dark gaze on full, and I let him look. No point trying to dodge Rhett when Rhett actually wanted to see you.
"Jett."
"Yeah."
"Are you going to be all right."
I almost laughed. I think I made a small noise on the way to a laugh that didn't make it.
"I don't know," I said. It came out flatter than I meant.
More honest. "I haven't been all right since she walked into the room.
I keep thinking I should be over it by now.
I should've shaken it. This was a teenage girl nine years ago.
I'm a grown man, I'm a champion, I have everything that woman never gave me a chance to want, and I cannot stop running it on a loop, Stone. I cannot make my head let it go."
"Okay."
"Okay what."
"Okay, you're not over it. That's an answer. We work from there."
"What does that mean."
"It means you keep doing the interviews. You give her nothing. You come over here on the bad nights. You don't drive past your own turn for the third night in a row trying to figure out what to do with your hands, which you've done twice already this week by my count."
"You watched my Maps."
"I watched the Pontiac. From the deck. You came past once Sunday night, once last night. You didn't see me. I didn't say anything because you weren't ready to." He paused. "You're ready now."
"Yeah."
"You don't have to do this alone. That's the whole point, Jett. That's all I'm telling you. You don't have to do this alone."
I sat with that. The fire popped. The coyote called again, further down.
"I haven't been alone in this room in eight years," I said. "I don't know how to be not-alone in it. I don't know how to do this with somebody else in the room."
"You're doing it right now."
"I know. I just don't know how to do it after tonight."
"You don't have to figure that out tonight. You showed up. You said it. The next thing you do is the next thing."
I looked at him. He was looking at the fire again. The smallest curve of mouth that meant he wasn't about to do anything performative about what I'd just told him. No hug. No speech. No Big Captain Moment. Just this. A man on a deck. An offer to keep being the man on the deck.
"Don't tell Brynn," I said. "Or Victoria. Or anybody."
"I wasn't going to."
"I'm serious, Stone."
"So am I."
I believed him. That was the strangest part, sitting in the firelight with all of it spilled and somebody else's eyes on it now.
I believed him. Rhett did not lie. Rhett did not embroider.
He'd carried his own things in silence for so many years that he had no instinct toward telling someone else's.
He'd said I wasn't going to, and that was that.
"What if she figures out I'm a wreck and starts to feel bad for me," I said.
"Dani."
"Yeah."
"What if she does."
"I don't want her to feel bad for me. I want her to —" I stopped.
"I don't know what I want her to. Apologize, maybe.
But I don't even know if I want the apology.
I want her to know I'm not the kid she made anymore.
I want her to look at me and see the man I built and feel like she has no claim on this version of him.
I want her to do her article and go back to wherever and never come near me again. "
"Okay."
"What."
"Just okay."
"That's not just an okay, Stone, I know you. That's an okay with teeth in it. What."
He shrugged. Took another sip. Looked at the fire.
"You want a whole lot of specific things from a woman you don't want to come near you again," he said. "Just an observation."
I sat with that.
He let me sit with it.
After a while he opened the cooler at his feet, pulled out another tonic water, and handed me a fresh beer without asking if I wanted one. We sat on the deck without talking for another half hour while the fire burned down and Vegas blinked away at the bottom of the valley.
When I left around eleven he walked me to the Pontiac.
At the door he put one hand on my shoulder for about three seconds and then took it off, which from Rhett was approximately the most physical affection a man could expect to receive in his lifetime, and he said, "Come over Friday. Same time. Don't make me ask twice."
"Friday."
"Friday."
"All right."
I drove home up the hill road with the windows down and the desert cold coming in and the radio off, and somewhere about halfway to my own driveway I realized I'd been carrying my shoulders an inch lower than I had in three days.
Nothing about the situation had actually changed.
One other person on earth knew what it was.
That turned out to be the only thing that needed to change for the night to feel survivable.
I went inside my empty house.
I went to bed.
I slept.