Chapter 16 Nate - January 2019, Chicago #2
Her name was Cass. She was the sister of a winger from Nashville, and she was funny and extremely good-looking. She had decided sometime in the second hour that Riley Kowalski was the best thing in that room, which is a conclusion I've never held against anybody.
He let it happen, and he was good at it.
He did the grin. He did the bit where he lets somebody land one on him and takes it beautifully.
She put a hand on his forearm while she laughed and he did not move his arm, and later she put a hand flat on his chest while she said something into his ear, and he tipped his head down to hear it.
I catalogued every point of contact, the forearm, the shoulder, the chest, the back of a hand on a lapel while she fixed something that did not need fixing. I had a pre-scout brain and it did not have an off switch. It ran the whole time and it made me sick.
And the thing that got me was not her. It was that the cover story was working. That is what we built it for, on purpose, on paper, and I stood at a rail and watched it work and could not tell, from thirty feet up, any difference between the cover story working and the cover story being true.
He came up to the suite at midnight and I had him against the door before the lock had finished turning. He got half a word out. I did not let him have the rest of it.
I kissed him with a hand flat on the door beside his head and the other at his throat, thumb under his jaw, holding his chin up, and I did not hurry any part of it.
Something in me wanted it fast and I would not give it that, so it was slow, and thorough, and it went on until he made a sound against my mouth that was not a joke and had nothing left in it.
"Okay," he said, when I let him breathe. "Okay, so we're doing this. I want you to know I came up here with about four things prepared and every one of them is gone."
"Take your coat off."
"That's the plan, buddy, that's been the plan since…"
I got the coat off him myself.
I put my mouth on his forearm, and on the point of his shoulder, and flat on his chest over the ribs, and stayed at each one until his breathing changed, and then stayed longer. He got a hand up into my hair and forgot it was there.
Every place a woman in a ballroom had touched him with a fingertip, I put my whole mouth on it, slow, in order, until there was nothing of it left in either of us.
I did not say one word about any of it, and neither did he, and I'd bet the building that both of us knew what was happening the entire time.
When it was over he lay on his back with an arm over his head and looked at the ceiling for a while. "So. Somebody appears to have won an argument that nobody was having."
I did not answer him.
And he let it go. Riley Kowalski, who had never once in his life let a thing go, put one flat sentence on the table, let it lie there, and reached for a glass of water instead, and I lay in the dark and understood that his not pushing it was more information than anything he could have said.
The item ran Monday morning. I found out about it the way the public did, from my phone, in a hotel gym.
Sentinels' captain-in-waiting steps out with a woman.
A photograph from the gala, cropped tight, me leaning in to hear something, and beside me Caroline Vance, the composed woman from dinner, whose father is the chairman of the network, seated to my left by a seating chart revised on Friday.
I had spoken to her for the length of a salad course.
There was a source, and the source said there was more than friendship between them, which was engineered by a professional.
By the middle of the morning it was a chyron, and a man on television said the word dynasty.
I called my uncle from a stairwell.
"Nate! Good weekend?"
"Take it down."
"Take what down?"
"Uncle Marsh!" I've never once used that voice with him.
It came out completely level, which is worse than shouting and we both know it.
"You planted an item about my personal life.
You moved a seating chart. You did it without asking me and after I said no to you twice, and now you are going to make a call, and it is going to stop today, and the program is finished.
Not paused. Finished. There is no version of this we do next month, or in the summer, or the week I sign something. "
There was a pause on his end. "You understand this was help?"
"Make the call."
"It's made," he said, pleasantly, the way he says everything. "For what it's worth, Nate, nothing in that piece is untrue."
"I know. That's the part I'd think about."
I hung up and stood in a stairwell with my hand over my mouth. It had been on television for an hour. There was a media day at eleven.
Riley was in the concourse when he saw it, and I know that because I saw him see it.
There is a bank of monitors outside the media room, and he was standing in front of it in a suit with a lanyard on, alone, holding a bottle of water, five days out of a hotel room in Chicago where he had read me a newspaper.
I came around the corner and he turned and looked at me. There was nothing in his face. Not anger. Nothing at all. It was the face he uses on a scrum after a loss, and I had never in twenty-two months had it pointed at me.
He walked past me, two feet away. "Kowalski."
"Big day, Sinclair." And he kept going.
At eleven we did a joint hit, because a producer had requested us in September and nobody cancels a segment over weather.
That was not a handshake, that was a customs inspection.
He gripped it correctly, he let go on the correct beat, he smiled the whole time with nothing behind it, and a woman with a clipboard said, "That was great, guys, so much energy. "
He answered every question. He was funny. He got the room. He did not look at me once in half an hour.
The message came few minutes before midnight.
Riley: Notice of Withdrawal. pursuant to article nine of the constitution of the kowalski-sinclair invitational, the undersigned hereby withdraws his franchise from the league, effective 11:59pm eastern, 28 January 2019.
all keeper rights, draft picks and future considerations revert to the commissioner's office, which is now solely occupied by you.
relegation is waived. there's nowhere to go. it's been a good league
I read it sitting on the end of a bed with the lights off.
It was perfect. That is the thing I could not get past. It had the article number right. It had an effective date. It was in the exact register we built on a notepad in a Courtyard off exit fourteen, the whole machine, deployed correctly one last time, by a man who was not making a joke.
And what I did, before I stood up, before I typed one word, was screenshot it, both thumbs, fast, like a man saving a file off a burning laptop, because he could unsend it.
That was the entire thought in my head. There is a function on a phone that takes a message back, and I took a picture of it, and put that picture in a folder, and did not give the folder a name.
The thread had been running since October 2017, fifteen months, and it had never once gone a full day. I did not type anything. There was nothing to type that was not a confession, and I had a great deal of practice at not making one.
I put the phone face down on the nightstand, and after about a minute I turned it face up again, which is a thing I started doing in a different part of my life for a completely different reason.
It stayed dark all night.