9. Dani #2
"That's the goal," he said. The voice came back to the Monday voice. Flat. Polished. No fingerprints. "If you want a quote, the quote is, 'I trust my captain and I trust my coach and I was lucky to be in the right place.' Use that. It'll fit the piece."
"Jett."
"What."
"That was honest."
"That was hockey." He clicked the laptop. The screen went dark. "Hockey I can do. The rest of it, you and I both know, is not going to happen."
It was the first time in two interviews that he'd referenced any of it. You and I both know. Three words, packed with nine years and a parking garage and a Monday afternoon and a green dress and a boy in a too-big suit. He didn't hold my eyes when he said it. He didn't need to.
"I wasn't going to ask," I said.
"I know."
"Then why bring it up."
"Because." He started gathering his stuff.
Laptop closed. Remote put away. "Because I wanted us both clear on the deal.
You get hockey. You write your article. I sit in rooms with you and answer questions about pucks and pads and Coach's tendencies as long as Victoria wants me to.
Then we both go back to our separate lives, which is what we both want.
Nodding now would save us both some time. "
I should have nodded. The professional part of me, the part that wanted the byline and the check, was screaming at me to nod, take the deal, walk out, write the hockey piece, get out clean.
I didn't nod.
I said, "What if there's a better article than the hockey one."
He stopped moving.
"There isn't," he said.
"What if there is, though." I kept my voice level.
The notebook was useless in my lap. I wasn't talking like a journalist anymore, I realized.
I was talking like a woman who'd walked into a room expecting war and been handed fifteen minutes of a man she didn't know how to put back in the box she'd brought him in.
"What if the story you keep refusing to tell is actually the story Victoria's paying for.
What if the magazine doesn't want a hockey piece.
What if I'm here because they want what you actually are and not what the cameras get. "
"You don't get what I actually am."
"I might."
"You don't."
"Try me, Jett."
He looked at me.
A full look this time. Not a glance. He turned his whole body toward me across the table and looked at me the way I'd been afraid he was going to look at me on Monday.
The way I'd rehearsed for in the shower.
The look that contained the whole nine years and the boy in the suit and the woman in the green dress and the homecoming gym and the six miles home.
He held it on me long enough that I felt the heat climb up my throat to my face, and I made my face hold still through it, because my face was the only thing I was still in charge of.
He let me hold the look.
He let me feel it.
He let me be the woman across the table from him.
Not the seventeen-year-old. Not the journalist. Not the abstraction of a nine-year wound.
Just the woman. Just for a second. Just long enough to be sure I'd understand exactly what kind of thing he was choosing not to do, every second he kept choosing not to do it.
Then he looked away.
"This is the deal," he said, picking his laptop up off the table. "Hockey. Pucks and pads. Coach's tendencies. You get fifteen minutes a session and I show up on time. The next one's Tuesday."
He walked past me. Did not touch the chair I was in. Did not touch the table. Kept a careful foot of space between his body and mine on the way past, and the carefulness of it was a thing I felt against my own skin like a hand that hadn't quite landed.
At the door he paused. Didn't turn around.
"See you Tuesday, Hartley," he said.
The way he said Hartley was different.
Not friendly. Not warm. Not anything that could've been remarked on by Brynn or Coach or anyone watching from outside.
But it wasn't Ms. Hartley. It wasn't the polished blank from Monday.
It was a man saying a woman's name with full awareness of what saying it was costing him.
I sat in the empty video review room for a long time after he left, pen in my hand, the wall-screen dark, my heart doing whatever it does when you've just been handed something you promised yourself you wouldn't notice.
I noticed.
I sat in his arena, in his room, in his chair, and I noticed all of it, and the lie I'd told myself in the parking lot two days ago, the one about the personal and the professional being separable, blew apart in my hands like a paper bag full of air.
I drove back to Brynn's. I did not tell her any of it.
I went to the guest room, opened my laptop, played the recording of the second interview, and somewhere in the middle of his fifteen minutes about the goal I had to pause it and press the heel of my hand against my sternum and breathe through the unwelcome enormous fact of how he'd sounded talking about the play.
He had loved that goal. He'd loved his teammates while he talked about it. He'd loved his coach. He'd loved his sport, with a guarded, specific, shielded grown-man love that he'd let me see one piece of. Exactly one. No more.
The hockey wasn't the easy version. The hockey was the part of him he could let a stranger touch, because all the other parts were locked, and he was telling me which doors I was allowed near.
I opened a fresh document. I didn't mean to. My hand opened it the way a body does the thing it used to do before the thinking part of you gets there. I sat with the blank page in front of me and I wrote a sentence.
The man on the screen looked at himself like a stranger who had done a beautiful thing.
I wrote it without meaning to. I wrote it the way I used to write at twenty-two, when I'd been a writer for a summer, before I took the editorial job and pulled my own pen out of my hand and swore off ever pointing it at anything again.
Four years of editing other people's sentences.
Four years of refusing to write my own. And the first sentence I'd written since the Gnomon Review piece in September was a sentence about him.
I closed the document without saving it.
But the writer in me had woken up and stretched, and I could feel her in the back of my head, looking around, deciding what she was going to do with the body of the woman she'd been living inside while the woman went to work.
I'd been a writer for a summer at twenty-two. I'd been pretending not to be one ever since.
I closed the laptop.
I lay down with my work clothes still on and stared at the ceiling, and somewhere in the back of my head the question I'd refused for nine years to ask myself finally surfaced and put its hands on my collar.
What if he is not a man you can fix by writing him beautifully.
What if he is just a man.
And what if the article was always going to be the smaller of the two problems.
I closed my eyes and I did not sleep.
Tuesday was five days away.