Chapter Twenty-Five
JUNIE
I opened the door.
He stood in my hallway in the bank-commercial jacket, hair still damp from the arena, holding absolutely nothing, which for a man whose religion forbids arriving anywhere empty-handed was its own speech, and his face was doing the thing, the new thing, the January thing, wide open at the depth where lying is a structural impossibility, and we looked at each other for a second, and then we both talked at once.
“I saw the tracked change,” I said, at the same time he said, “I should have driven here Wednesday.”
We stopped. He made a small gesture, after you, the world’s politest wrecked man.
So I went first, and here is the conversation, entire, because the great cosmic joke of our whole third act is how short it turned out to be once somebody attempted it.
“I read your silence as the verdict,” I said.
“Wednesday morning. You went quiet and I heard two years of Deacon in it, and I did the thing I do, I removed myself before you could, and I scheduled it, Saint, I scheduled myself like content, Hazel already performed the autopsy, you don’t have to.
I wasn’t protecting the team. I was protecting me from watching you do the math. ”
“I know,” he said. “I went flat. It’s what I do when something breaks loose, it’s the position, Olle built it into me and it saves games and it cost me you for three days, because from the outside flat looks like arithmetic.
I wasn’t doing math on you, Junie. There has never been math on you.
There’s been one number since January and I put it in the document eleven days in, timestamped, because I already knew, and I was too much of a coward to say it anywhere you’d have to respond. ”
“Eleven days,” I said. My voice did something unprofessional. “You wrote that rule before I even told you about the podcast.”
“You flinched at a word in a meeting,” he said.
“Week one. Somebody said the budget was ‘a lot’ and your whole face did a thing for half a second and then put itself away, and I went home and I couldn’t sleep and I opened your document and built a wall around whatever that was.
I didn’t know the story yet. I didn’t need it. I’d have built the wall anyway.”
“I resigned,” I said.
“Barb never processed it. She told me tonight in the hallway, verbatim, ‘I lose more paperwork,’ and blew a bubble.” A pause. “You’ve been on payroll the whole time. You may owe the franchise three days of retroactive content.”
“I love you,” I said, because apparently that was next in my queue, it just posted itself, no scheduling, no proofread, and his whole face opened another degree, and he said, “Junie. I have loved you since a ring light died. I broke rule seven in February and backdated nothing and told a continent tonight. It’s on every network.
My mother has called four times. Theo captioned it himself and added editorial. ”
“What was the editorial?”
“‘Took him long enough,’ with a clock emoji.”
“I love your brother.”
“He knows. He runs the numbers.” And then, quieter, in the register he saves for goalposts: “Can I come in.”
Four minutes. I checked the clock after, professional habit, 11:42.
The talking our wounds had made impossible for three days, for two years, took four minutes once attempted, and I pulled him in by the lapels of the bank commercial and kicked the door shut with my heel, and Hazel’s door, down the hall, audibly locked, and a voice through it called, “MARKET RATE,” and then the wind chime and the city and nobody else, forever, amen.
We hit the wall by the fruit bowl first, laughing, his mouth on mine and both of us grinning too hard to kiss properly, which we solved with repetition.
He kissed me like a man let back into a building he thought had burned, thorough, unhurried even now, one hand coming up to hold my face like taping a wrist, and I got the jacket off his shoulders and he said, against my jaw, “I parked crooked,” like a confession of arson, and I laughed into his neck and felt him smile against my temple, the rare one, learned by skin.
“Bedroom,” I said. “Unless you have media availability.”
“I’ve retired,” he said. “One podium per lifetime,” and picked me up, actually picked me up, a thing that has happened to me zero times outside of content, and carried me down my own hallway while I filmed nothing, told no one, and laughed the Waco laugh at private volume, and he ducked the hanging plant this time, which meant he’d kept the film on it, which meant he’d been planning on a return series all along.
We undressed each other slow and giddy, which I did not know could coexist until him.
Every button was an event. He peeled my T-shirt off, the clinch shirt, day four, dignity gone, and looked at me in the lamplight the way he looks at a fresh sheet of ice, and said, “Hi,” and I said, “Hi,” and he said, “This? All of it?” and I said, “Yes. Everything. No clauses, no clock, and I want it on the record that you asked from the podium tonight and sixteen states said yes,” and he laughed, out loud, the real one, the face one, in my bedroom, with his hands at the waistband of my leggings, and I felt the laugh everywhere it mattered.
“Yes?” he asked again there, because he asks everything, it’s the best contract I’ve ever been party to.
“Yes.”
He took his time about the fact of me. That’s his phrase for it now, entered into evidence later, sleepy, but I felt the policy before I heard it named: hands slow down my sides like he was re-learning a route he’d been afraid he’d lost, mouth at my collarbone, my sternum, the low of my stomach, and when I pulled at his shirt with intent he cooperated, and then there was skin, all of it, the old skate-blade scar, the shoulders, the ridiculous goalie thighs, and we went down onto my bed in a tangle that started as a controlled descent and ended in a bounce that made us both crack up, and he propped over me on his forearms, disciplined to the last, and waited out my giggling with the expression he saves for shooters who are dekeing themselves.
“Done?” he said.
“Almost.” I traced his jaw. “You read rule seven out loud to forty journalists.”
“I did.”
“With the timestamp.”
“Forensics matter.”
“Take me to bed, Lindell.”
“You’re in it,” he said, and kissed his way down my body and did not stop, and asked once more at the last of my clothes, “yes?”, and got my yes, and then he was patient and exact and entirely merciless, mouth and hands and that murmured Swedish against my thigh that I have officially never researched, and I was loud with only a locked door and a market-rate sister in the jurisdiction, both hands in his hair, and when I came apart the first time I said his name, the real one, and heard him answer with mine like a call sign, like a save announced over the PA.
I pulled him up and got my knees around him and rolled us, because three days of grief had left me with opinions, and I sat up over him in the lamplight and watched the most disciplined man in professional sports lie there undone with his hands resting easy on my thighs like he’d been issued them, and I said, “Yes?” because consent is a game two can call, and he said, “Yes. Junie. Yes,” on maybe half his available voice, and I took him in slow, both of us going still at the deepest point the way we do, one long open-eyed beat, taking the reading.
It held. It held with no paperwork under it at all now, no arrangement, no targets, nothing between us but us, and then I moved, and he moved, and it was giddy and then it was fierce and then it was both braided together, his hands spread over my hips, my palms on his chest where the ledger lives, the headboard commenting, the wind chime scandalized, and at some point he sat up and gathered me in and we finished like that, wrapped around each other face to face, my name breaking in the middle of his mouth, his in mine, and afterward neither of us moved for a long time, forehead to forehead, breathing in each other’s air like it was assigned seating.
“So,” I said eventually, into the dark of his shoulder. “What’s real?”
He huffed. I felt it in my whole body. “The tape,” he said. “And everything after the tape. And per tonight’s filing, several things before it.”
We surfaced at one a.m. for water and cold tacos, because Hazel, saint of a different franchise, had left the Bandido’s bag on the counter with a sticky note reading CONGRATULATIONS, IDIOTS, and we ate them in bed, a crime he permitted without inspection this time, which is how I knew everything had truly changed.
The tortilla, he confirmed, solemn, forgave us both.
And then, because we are who we are, we held the ceremony.
My laptop, his idea, which I want in the record because feral internet historians will claim it was mine.
We sat against the headboard, sheet-wrapped, and opened “Operation Sweetheart: Terms and Conditions,” fifteen months old, nine rules, one storm amendment, one blank line, one tracked change with a timestamp that had detonated a podcast. We read it through together one last time like parents going through a baby book.
At rule 6a he kissed the top of my head and explained nothing and I asked nothing, our oldest treaty.
At rule 8, blank forever, he said, “We were saving it,” and I said, “I know what goes there now,” and typed nothing, because it isn’t time yet, and he looked at me sideways like a man checking a scoreboard he doesn’t believe, and let it stand.
Rule 9 we did not read out loud. Some clauses you leave in the original.
Then I clicked File, and Rename, and he put his hand over mine on the trackpad, and we typed it together, four hands on one tiny keyboard, worst content team in Texas:
Operation Sweetheart: no terms, no conditions.
“Effective when?” he asked, deadpan, notarizing.
“Retroactive,” I said. “Per the file history, January 24, 11:07 p.m.”
He considered that with the full four-second Merrit silence, and then he nodded, once, the Lindell nod, verdict rendered, and closed the laptop, and pulled me down into the pillows, and somewhere across town a whiteboard in Barb’s office already said GAME 3 SUNDAY, and somewhere in a dorm on South Congress a sixteen-year-old was updating his receipts, and the last thing my beloved said before we slept, into my hair, in English, on purpose, out loud where I could finally hear it:
“Stay.”
“That’s MY apartment, Lindell.”
“Mm,” he said, already asleep, holding me like a lead in the third period, and reader, whoever you are, wherever this file ends up: I stayed.