15. Beau
Beau
I’ve been awake since five and my shoulder isn’t why.
That’s the part that bothers me. My shoulder’s bad this morning — worse than usual, a deep ache that’s moved from the joint into the muscle around it, the kind that means I overcompensated in practice yesterday and my body’s filing the invoice.
But the shoulder I know what to do with.
Ice it, eat the ibuprofen, don’t tell anyone, play through it. The shoulder is a managed problem.
The other thing is not a managed problem.
The other thing is that I kissed Sloane Beckett in a dark studio yesterday and she kissed me back, and I have not had a single clean thought since.
And I think: that’s the thing she does to me.
Yesterday I kissed her to shut Vivienne up — that was the play, that was the read, the only move that killed the thing Vivienne came to do — and somewhere in the middle of executing the play I stopped executing anything, and felt her hand close in the front of my jacket, and that was that.
Game over. Whatever was holding the line in me went down and hasn’t come back up.
I noticed, of course. A beat late. The way I notice everything.
I noticed about an hour after I’d walked her out, lying in bed staring at the ceiling, that I’d told her next time I’ll ask, and that next time had come out of my mouth like a fact rather than a possibility, and that neither of us had said anything about it.
I said it like there’s going to be a next time.
I have to text her.
I broke two rules yesterday, seven and three, and the protocol when you’ve blown up the terms is that you make contact, you reset, you find out where you stand. That’s the businesslike reason and I’m going to hide behind it.
The problem is the texting itself.
I sit at the kitchen counter with my phone and I open the thread and I start typing, and this is the part nobody sees, the part I’ve spent thirteen years making sure nobody sees — that writing a sentence I care about is a different sport for me than it is for other people.
The words don’t sit still. I type one and it looks wrong, and I read it back and it’s not wrong, the letters are just doing the thing, and I delete it anyway because I can’t tell anymore if it’s wrong or if it’s the page, and the second-guessing is where I lose every sentence that matters.
Texting Cash is easy. Texting Cash is yo, you up.
Texting Sloane something that’s true and dry and exactly right and gives nothing away — that’s eleven drafts.
Yesterday worked. V bought it. Delete.
We should talk about yesterday. Delete — sounds like a breakup, and also like I want to talk about the part of yesterday I actually want to talk about, which I’m not going to.
Hope the showcase casting goes your way Monday. Delete — too much, gives away that I remember, that I’ve been thinking about her thing instead of my own.
I sit with it. The revision is where I lose sentences. I know this about myself. The only way I send anything that matters is to write it once, fast, before the second-guessing starts, and hit the button before I can take it apart.
Vivienne looked like she got cross-checked. Good work yesterday.
Send. Before I can revise it. Good work — businesslike, partner-to-partner, the kiss filed under operations. Safe.
I put the phone face-down and go ice the shoulder.
It buzzes before the ice is on.
Sloane
I did nothing. You committed a felony against the rulebook and got lucky.
I’m smiling at the phone. I’m aware I’m smiling at the phone. I’m sitting alone in my kitchen at six in the morning with a bag of ice on my shoulder, smiling at a phone like an idiot.
Felony. You’re being dramatic.
Sloane
Two counts. Tier three AND rule seven. Premeditated.
Sloane
I’ve consulted the document. You’re facing real time.
What’s the sentence
Sloane
Still deciding. Leaning toward making you carry boxes at the shop again.
That’s not a punishment. I like carrying boxes.
Sloane
I know. That’s the tragedy. I have no leverage over a man who enjoys manual labor.
And I laugh — out loud, alone, in the kitchen — and there it is again, the thing she does, the dry landing that catches me off guard because I’m braced for the punchline and she doesn’t do punchlines, she does the true small thing two inches to the left of where I expected it.
I read it twice. Not because the letters are doing the thing this time. Because I want to.
I’m in trouble. I noticed that days ago. I’m noticing it again, harder.
By the time the guys are up, I’ve got the shoulder iced and the ache dulled and I’m at the counter with a fresh coffee, and I make the mistake of checking the thread one more time, and Sloane’s sent something about Margaret trying to install a “BookTok shelf” and using the word algorithm incorrectly four times, and I’m grinning at it when Cash walks in.
He stops. Looks at me. Narrows his eyes.
“Why are you smiling like that?”
“I’m not smiling.”
“You’re smiling like that. At your phone. You’ve got the—” he gestures at his own face, vaguely “—the thing. The face. Wyatt. Wyatt. Come look at his face.”
“I’m reading something funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“Margaret thinks BookTok is a person.”
This is true, and it’s also a deflection, and Cash — who is a lot sharper than the volume suggests — clocks the deflection even as he laughs at the Margaret part.
He grabs the coffee pot and points it at me.
“You’ve been weird as hell since yesterday.
You came home and went straight up and you’ve been weird. ”
“I’m not weird.”
“Theo.” Cash raises his voice toward the stairs. “Back me up. Beau’s being weird.”
“Beau’s always weird,” Theo says, coming down, because Theo’s first contribution to any morning is contrarian by reflex.
He looks at me for about one second — Theo’s whole personality is one-second looks that see too much — and then says, flatly, on his way to the fridge, “He kissed the theater girl in the drama building. It’s all over campus. He’s weird because it went well.”
The kitchen goes quiet.
“He WHAT?” Cash says.
“I’m getting eggs,” Theo says, getting eggs.
“You kissed her? In public?” Cash rounds on me, delighted, betrayed, alight. “And you didn’t lead with that? Holy shit. I had to hear it from Theo, who heard it from — Theo, who the fuck did you hear it from?”
“Margo.”
“Why are you texting Margo—”
“I’m not. She posted something. There was a comment.” Theo cracks an egg. “People saw it. Drama kids gossip more than we do. It’s done numbers.”
Wyatt’s wandered in by now, hair a disaster, and he’s looking at me with the warm steady attention he brings to things, and he doesn’t pile on the way Cash does. He just says, mild, “You okay?”
And that’s the one that gets me, because it’s not did you kiss her or was it good — it’s you okay, the actual question, the one Wyatt always asks because he actually wants the answer, and I don’t have a clean one.
Because the honest answer is no. The honest answer is that I kissed my fake girlfriend to win a scene and lost a part of myself I’m not going to find again, and I can’t say any of that in a kitchen full of guys at six-forty in the morning.
“I’m fine,” I say. “It was strategy. Her — there’s a girl in her department who was about to make trouble. I handled it.”
“You handled it,” Cash repeats, gleeful. “With your mouth.”
“Cash.”
“Strategically.”
“I will pour this coffee on you.”
“He’s blushing,” Theo observes, to the eggs.
“I’m not—” I am not blushing. I refuse to be a man who blushes. “Eat your eggs, Theo.”
But Cash is grinning at me across the counter, and Wyatt’s got a small private smile like he’s worked something out and isn’t going to say it, and Theo’s gone back to his eggs having detonated the room and walked away from the crater the way he does, and I sit there in the warm chaos of my own kitchen with a bag of melting ice and a phone full of a girl who’s never far from my hand lately, and I think: they bought it.
The whole point is that people buy it. The plan’s working.
The plan’s working, and the strategy worked, and Bella’s gone quiet — I noticed that too, three days of silence where there used to be texts — and Vivienne’s stumped, and the entire arrangement is performing exactly as designed.
And the only problem in my entire well-run life is that none of it feels like a strategy anymore, and I can’t tell anyone, least of all her.
We’ve got a game tonight. Real one — conference, counts for the standings, first of the season that means something.
It’s the UMass Minutemen, who finished ahead of us last year and have not let us forget it, and who knocked us out of the conference tournament two seasons back in a game I still think about more than is healthy.
O’Grady runs a light morning skate and an early team meal and sends us home to rest, and the whole day I’m doing the thing where the game is supposed to be the only thing in my head and it mostly is, except for the part of it that’s checking my phone.
She texted at four.
Sloane
Margo’s dragging me to your game. For appearances. I’m bringing a book for intermissions.
Sloane
Same seats?
Same seats. Behind the bench.
Sloane
Don’t do anything stupid trying to impress me. It’s a conference game. Be a professional.
I don’t get stupid on the ice. The ice is the one place I never get stupid.
Sloane
Famous last words, Sorensen.
And I put the phone in my bag and I get on the bus and I make myself leave her in the parking lot of my own attention, because she’s right, it’s a conference game, it counts, and the ice is the one place I’ve never once let anything follow me.
We’ll see if that holds.
The Nest is full and loud by the time we hit the ice for warmups, and I don’t look for her.