Chapter 9
ISAK
The sound of my last name hit somewhere below my sternum. Not a crack, not an explosion. Just a hand pressing flat, slow and deliberate, holding something in place that had been trying to move.
My whole system went still. Not calm. The kind of still that happens when everything redirects at once.
A boat moved somewhere on the river below us.
Slow. Unbothered. The city was the same across the water, still doing its whole thing, lit up and gold and completely indifferent to the fact that she had just called me Kingman, like she had on the practice field, and the word landed in me like a pin through a map.
She knew on the ride.
That moved through me the way cold water does. Slow and everywhere at once.
She had known. Behind me on that bike, cheek pressed against the back of my helmet, arms around my ribs. She had known and she had still come to the overlook. She had still taken her helmet off and sat on the wall and talked to me about the city and she had known the whole time.
She was standing now.
I stayed where I was.
The bad choices were right there in front of me, both of them.
Door number one, play it like this was nothing.
Like she was nothing, like six nights of texts until midnight were nothing, like the way she had held on to my jacket on the curves of I-275 was nothing.
If all of this was nothing, it wouldn't hurt.
Door number two, take the helmet off and try to explain to a woman who had already made her decision that I had real, actual reasons.
Neither of those doors was a winner.
She deserved the truth. Jules echoed in my head, but this time she was calling me a dumb asshole. I picked the option where I was at least honest about it.
My hands found the helmet and I pulled it off.
The air hit my face cool and sharp, the river smell underneath everything. I set the helmet down on the stone wall next to hers and I looked at her.
She looked back.
Right now there was nothing between us and nowhere to look except at each other. And I already knew I was fucked.
Not in the fun way.
She had the expression of someone who had already won the argument and was not going to celebrate it.
"The helmet is off." What I didn’t say was what it cost me to do that. This was me going all in for her.
"I know exactly who you are."
"I get that." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "I'm not saying—"
"Then say what you're saying." Her voice wasn't cold, wasn't angry. Just precise.
I found the words the only way I ever found anything important, which was by saying the wrong thing first and working backwards.
"The first time I got on a motorcycle with the helmet on and nobody looked at me like a Kingman, I didn't know what that was.
I didn't have a word for it." I looked at the city because it was easier than looking at her.
"It was just me and the bike and Vito and nobody stopping me on the sidewalk to ask if I was going to have a better season than Chris. "
She was quiet. Listening. Not forgiving, but listening.
"When you were in that tree and you called me a jackass.
You made Mandalorian jokes. You didn't google me.
You didn't make the face." I looked at her now.
"I wanted to keep being that guy for one more night.
And then another night. And I told myself I'd tell you, and I kept not telling you, and I know how that looks. "
"It looks like you were keeping me in the dark."
"It looks like that because that's what it was."
Something crossed her face. Not softening exactly, but a crack in the precision of it.
"I know why you kept it on," she said. "I even think I understand it." She looked at the river for a moment. "But I was a secret. Whatever this was, whatever it might have been, I was the thing you kept in the box with the lid on." She turned back to me. "That feels real shitty, Kingman.”
"That's not—" I stopped. Because I had been about to say that's not what this was, and I did not have the right to tell her what it was. She got to decide what it was. "I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to feel that way, but you're not wrong."
"I know I'm not wrong."
The phone came out of her pocket. I watched her thumb move on the screen. Not dramatically. Just the way she did everything else, clearly and without fuss.
"There's a car four minutes away," she said.
Fuck. Fucking, fuckity fuck. "Okay."
She kept the phone in her hand. We stood at the overlook with the city doing its full performance across the water and I didn't go anywhere and neither did she and the four minutes felt like fourty-hundred years and also about thirty seconds.
"I don't date football players." The words were directed to me, exactly.
More like she was reminding herself. "I especially don't date football players who kept me in the dark about who they are.
" She paused and clicked on her phone again.
"I know you didn't plan to hurt me. But my rules are my rules and they exist because I made them for a reason. "
There was nothing to say to that. She was right.
She was completely, exactly right, and the rightness of it sat in my chest right alongside the other thing, the thing that knew those six nights had been the most real six nights I'd had in longer than I could measure.
Both of those were true at the same time and only one of them mattered right now.
The headlights came up the hill and pulled into the parking lot.
She picked up her helmet from the wall. I reached for it without thinking, some reflex about carrying things, and she looked at me and I put my hand back down.
"I've got it."
"Yeah. Sorry."
The car came to a stop at the edge of the lot. She took two steps toward it and then stopped. Didn't turn all the way around. Just her profile against the lights, the helmet at her side.
"I gave you the whole ride to tell me yourself."
She got in.
The door closed. The taillights went down the hill and disappeared around the curve and the overlook went quiet, the way parks go quiet after people leave them, like the space was recalibrating around the absence.
I sat back down on the wall.
The city was beautiful. It had absolutely nothing useful to say about any of this.
I sat there longer than I needed to, helmet in my lap, looking at the river and the bridges and the lights reflected in the water and not thinking about anything useful, just existing in the fact of what had happened.
Eventually I remembered that Devou Park closed at dusk and I'd been pushing that limit when we arrived.
I was surprised no one had been by to kick us out.
Probably had and then witnessed the utter shutdown I'd just taken, and left me to wither alone in my ineptitude.
I put the helmet on. Walked back to the bike.
Vito wasn't there.
That was the thing that hit me. Not a new thing, I had left him home on purpose, but standing next to the bike in the dark with nobody to unlatch from a harness, no weight to settle against my chest for the ride back, the bike just a bike, I felt how quiet it was in a way I had not felt on the way out.
I got on. Started it up.
The city on the way home was the same city it had been two hours ago.
Same bridges, same lights off the river, same turn onto Vine.
With her behind me and the weight of her hands at my sides and every single mile of it had apparently become a place something had happened that was burned into my mind forever.
Great.
The Broasis was lit up when I came off the elevator, which meant Jules had found every light switch in the place. Fox was in the kitchen. The blender was going. I smelled coconut.
I dropped my helmet on a hook by the door.
Fox turned around. Took one look at my face and turned the blender off.
He didn't say anything. That was how I knew how bad it showed.
Jules came around the corner from the hallway with Vito in her arms. She had the expression of someone who had been waiting for this exact moment since she'd sent me out that door four hours ago.
Vito saw me and launched himself from Jules's grip with total disregard for her structural integrity, hit the floor, and crossed the room to wind around my ankles with the focused intensity of a cat who had been patient long enough.
I crouched down and let him headbutt my jaw twice.
His version of okay, let's talk about your evening.
"Hey, buddy."
He headbutted me again. Less diplomatic this time.
Jules settled on the arm of the couch. She had found the popcorn again. She had also, apparently, found a second bowl, because she was offering one to Fox, who came over from the kitchen and took a handful with the energy of a man fully prepared to watch this unfold.
"Did you tell her," Jules said, "or did she find out?"
That wasn’t really a question. It never was with Jules. Just the exact shape of the thing, handed to you, with the expectation that you'd stand in it.
Fox found something interesting to study on the middle distance.
"She found out," I said. "In fact, she already knew."
Jules closed her eyes.
One second. Exactly one second. Then she opened them again and looked at me like a Kingman woman who loved her person completely and was not going to pretend this was fine.
"Come here, sit down, Isak."
I sat on the couch. Vito jumped up immediately, walked across my lap, and arranged himself on my chest like he had been planning this position all evening.
Heavy. Warm. His purr kicked in at a volume that was honestly a little aggressive.
He stared at my chin with the green eyes that had never once in his life communicated anything but complete honesty.
He was absolutely judging me. He was also not going anywhere.