9. Beau #3
“That’s not how a team works—”
“—want to ‘spend time’ with the one girl on this campus who has correctly identified athletes as a problem.” The treadmill noise stops.
She’s giving this her full attention now, which is somehow more alarming.
“See, that’s interesting. That’s a real interesting choice.
Because the Sloane I know would sooner date a refrigerator. ”
“Maybe I’m persuasive.”
“Maybe you’re up to something.” A pause, and her voice changes, drops the gym-floor swagger, goes somewhere quieter and more serious, and I realize the spitfire thing is partly a bit and partly armor over something that is not a bit at all.
“Here’s the thing, Beau. She’s had a bad year.
Worse than she lets anybody see, and she lets people see almost nothing, so multiply whatever you’re imagining.
The last guy who got close to her treated her like a thing he was entitled to, and he’s still — he hasn’t stopped.
So if you’re playing some kind of game, or if this is a bet, or if you’re bored and she’s a project, I need you to hang up right now and lose my number and never look at her again, and I will personally make sure the whole campus knows exactly what ‘not even that good in the sack’ was being generous about. ”
I straighten off the lamppost.
“It’s not a bet,” I say. And I mean it, in a way that surprises me, given that the thing it actually is would not exactly reassure her. “It’s not a game. I’m not bored. And whatever’s going on with the guy who won’t stop — I know about it. I was there, at the party. That’s part of why.”
There’s a silence on the line. Gym noise filling it. I can hear her deciding.
“You stepped in,” she says. Not a question. She knows. Of course she knows.
“I stepped in.”
Another silence. Longer.
“Okay,” Margo says finally, and the swagger comes back, but it’s got something underneath it now, something that’s let me past the gate by maybe an inch.
“Okay. I’m going to give you her number.
But understand me, Sorensen, and I want you to really hear this, with your whole hockey brain: if you hurt her — if you make her smaller, if you make her sad, if you make her go quiet in the way she goes quiet that you don’t even know about yet — I will cut your dick off.
I want to be clear that’s not a figure of speech.
I have access to good knives. I cook. I’m very precise. ”
“Understood.”
“I mean it.”
“I believe you completely.”
“Good.” A clank, a treadmill spinning back up; she’s already moving on, the interrogation filed, the gym reclaimed. “She gives the best people her whole self and they keep handing it back like it’s the wrong size. Don’t be another one of those. That’s the entire briefing. We’re done here.”
“Margo.”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
A pause. “Don’t thank me. Thanking me is weird. We’re not there yet.” And she hangs up.
I stand on the path holding my phone, the afternoon gone fully cold around me, and I find I’m still smiling, and also that something in my chest has shifted in a way I’m not going to look at directly.
The way she goes quiet that you don’t even know about yet.
I file it the way I file things — a beat late, after it’s already lodged.
The phone buzzes.
Margo
[contact card: Sloane]
Margo
This is a leap of faith and you have not earned it. Don’t make me regret it.
Margo
And FYI I told her you’d probably text. So she’s expecting you. You’re welcome. The dragon giveth.
I save the number. I look at it for a second — Sloane Beckett, sitting in my phone now, a thing that didn’t exist this morning — and I think about how easy it would have been to just stop by the shop.
Mormor has the number. Mormor would’ve handed it over in a heartbeat.
One block, no interrogation, no threats involving knives.
But Mormor would have known. And knowing she’d have looked at me over her reading glasses with that face, the one that’s been waiting two years, and she’d have asked questions I don’t have answers to and made a thing of it forever, and I’d take a five-foot-six dragon and her precise knives over that any day of the week.
I put the phone away.
I’ve got Sloane’s number, an exhibition game tomorrow, an ex running her mouth to thousands of people, and twenty-some hours until I find out whether the plan is a plan or just a thing I said on a sidewalk.
I head home.
I don’t text Sloane yet. I want to. I draft it three times in my head before I’m off the path, which is three more times than I draft most things, and every version is wrong — too much, too little, too obviously rehearsed by a guy who’s been rehearsing it since Tuesday.
I’ll text her after the game.
When she’s seen me play. When the answer’s already most of the way to yes because she watched me be the best on the ice the way I watched her be the best on the stage.
I’m aware, as I think it, that I’ve just admitted I want her to watch me play.
I file that one too.
A beat late. The way I file everything.