12. Jett #2
I don't know why. I've turned it over a thousand times.
The honest version is the wine had something to do with it, and the laugh at the noodle had something to do with it, and the story about her grandmother had something to do with it, and the fact that she'd used the word Iris in my kitchen and hadn't flinched while she did it had something to do with it, and all of those things had stacked themselves on top of each other while I wasn't watching.
By the time we got to the door my body had already decided I was walking her all the way there.
She turned at the door.
Her hand on the doorknob.
I was standing closer to her than I'd stood at any point in seven sessions.
Closer than I'd stood to her at the championship eight months ago, before I knew she was there.
Closer than I'd stood to her since the night of the homecoming dance, when I'd stood across a high school gym and watched her hold my eyes for one full second from another man's arm.
I was a foot away. I could smell her hair.
She didn't let go of the doorknob.
She didn't turn it.
She looked up at me with the soft animal look people get when they've stopped controlling their own face because the controlling has cost them more than they can keep paying, and I looked down at her with what I knew, with absolute clarity, was the same look.
Because I'd had no control over my own face for about thirty seconds, and I'd stopped trying somewhere between the noodle and the kitchen and Iris.
"Jett," she said.
"Yeah."
"I have to go."
"I know."
"I have to."
"I know, Hartley."
The space between her mouth and mine was about the distance between I know and I don't. About the distance between nine years of welding shut and the small unwelding I'd been doing all night without quite admitting it.
About the distance between the kid in the suit and the man I'd built to make sure the kid never had to feel anything again.
I leaned in about half of it.
She didn't move.
I leaned the rest.
It wasn't a kiss in any of the senses I'd been carrying in my head when I'd thought about kissing women in the abstract over the years.
It wasn't the start of anything. It was the smallest possible meeting.
Lips on lips. Dry. Sober. Both of us not moving, both of us with our eyes open, both of us with our hands at our sides, both of us holding our breath.
It lasted, I think, less than a second. Half of half a heartbeat.
I lifted my mouth off hers.
I stepped back.
She hadn't moved. Her hand was still on the doorknob.
Her eyes were open. Her face had done a thing it hadn't done in any other session, in any other moment, in any other room I'd ever been in with her, and I'd have given a lot of money I had a lot of, in that moment, to have a name for the thing her face had done.
"Hartley," I said.
"Don't."
"What."
"Don't say my name like that, Sturgill. Don't. Please."
I did not say her name.
I stood in the doorway and did not say her name, and after a moment she said, very small, very low, I'm sorry, and I said, Don't apologize, I started it, and she said, I didn't stop it, and I said, No, you didn't, and we stood there in the entryway with that on the table between us.
The small dry kiss neither of us had stopped.
The fact of it. And the fact of both of us not knowing what to do with the fact of it.
She turned the doorknob.
She stepped out.
I followed her onto the driveway, because I'd walked her to her car every other time and I wasn't going to break the pattern now.
Especially not now. Especially not when not walking her would've said more than walking her.
The desert cold of the evening was already on the air, and Brynn's SUV was sitting where she'd parked it that afternoon, in the wide gravel turnaround, the Pontiac under the floodlight at the far end where I'd left it.
She opened her own door.
"Tuesday," I said.
"Tuesday."
"I will be in the kitchen. You will come in. We will do the interview. Nothing will have happened."
"Nothing happened," she said, like she was practicing it.
"Not a thing, Hartley."
She got in. Closed the door. Didn't start the car for a moment. She sat in the driver's seat in the floodlight and pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead the way I'd watched her do once before in the parking garage, and then she started the car, and then she rolled the window down.
"Jett."
"Yeah."
"What was the article supposed to be about."
I looked at her. The question was so far out of context I had to play it back twice in my head before I understood it.
"The defending championship," I said. "The team. The title defense."
"And me."
"I don't follow."
"Why am I writing it. You haven't asked.
You've been very polite for two and a half weeks and you've never once asked the actual question, which is why is Brynn Caldwell's best friend in the world — the one who hasn't been to Vegas in eight months, the one who flew in for the championship and gripped the railing of the owner's box for three hours and left the next morning, the one your name has been a problem for nine years — why am I the person Victoria Caldwell picked to write the cover story. "
I had not, in fact, asked that question.
I'd spent two and a half weeks doing everything in my power not to ask it.
Because asking it meant acknowledging that her presence in my life had a structural shape I hadn't been allowed to choose.
That Victoria Caldwell had handed Dani Hartley to me on purpose.
That the woman I'd been keeping the line on had been chosen for the role of standing across from me by the woman I most respected in this city.
And that there were therefore answers to my situation I was being kept from, because Victoria knew something I didn't.
"I didn't ask because I assumed you needed the money," I said.
"That's a piece of it."
"What's the other piece."
She looked at me through the open window. The floodlight caught half her face. The other half was in shadow.
"Ask me on Tuesday," she said. "Ask me on Tuesday in your kitchen with the recorder off, and I'll tell you. Some of it. As much as I have."
She rolled the window up before I could answer.
She drove away.
I stood in the driveway in the desert cold a long time after the taillights disappeared, and I thought about a kiss that had lasted half of half a heartbeat, and a question I'd been avoiding for two and a half weeks, and the dry little sound she'd made at my kitchen island on Tuesday over her own bad notes.
And the fact that I'd heard Dani Hartley's real laugh and now I wanted to hear it again.
On purpose. Sober. With no spaghetti involved.
Just because I'd asked her something funny.
That was the thing I hadn't, until that moment, fully understood.
I'd been carrying the line for two and a half weeks under the false impression that what I needed from her was distance.
I hadn't needed distance.
I'd needed to know if she was a real woman or a thing I'd built in my head at seventeen and never let out of the cage.
And the real woman had eaten my spaghetti.
The real woman had told me about her grandmother.
The real woman had stopped me at the door not because she didn't want to be kissed but because she did.
And the real woman had then asked me a question at her car window in my driveway that meant she'd been thinking, all this time, about what she was actually doing in my life.
Not just about what she was supposed to write about me in the magazine.
I went inside.
I shut the door.
I leaned against it a long minute with my eyes closed.
Then I called Rhett.
He picked up on the second ring.
"You all right."
"No."
"Want me to come over."
"No."
"Want to come here."
"No."
"What do you want, then."
"I want to know if you've ever kissed a woman you swore to yourself you weren't going to kiss."
A long pause on his end.
"Once," he said.
"What did you do after."
"Kept her."
"Stone."
"You asked."
"You're not helpful."
"I never said I was helpful. I said I was here. There's a difference."
I almost laughed. Made some sound on the way to one.
"Friday," he said.
"What."
"Come over Friday. Whether you want to or not. Come over Friday."
"Okay."
We hung up.
I stood in my entryway and looked at the door I'd kissed her against half an hour before. I thought about Tuesday. I thought about the question she'd asked me. I thought about what Victoria Caldwell, who did not make accidents, had done by picking Dani Hartley to write a magazine piece about me.
Then I went to bed in a house too big for one person, and I lay in the dark, and I did the math on the next forty-eight hours.
Tuesday was three days away.
She'd come into my kitchen. The recorder would be off. I'd ask her the question I'd been avoiding for two and a half weeks.
She'd tell me as much of the answer as she had.
And I'd tell her, I realized as I lay there, that I'd been on her side for longer than either of us had agreed to.
Not all of it. Not the money. Not the kid in the suit.
Just enough of it to let her see what kind of man was choosing not to burn her down.
Just enough to let her decide what she was going to do with that information.
Tuesday.
Three days.
I closed my eyes and tried to count my way to sleep.
I made it to four hundred before I gave up.