Page 111 of Her Rival

"I am too, Jett. The same deal. The same terms."

"Okay."

I closed my eyes again.

The blanket was warm. The rug was soft. The light went long and orange through the glass. The man I'd said I loved at his kitchen island twenty hours earlier was holding me on the floor of his living room with a blanket over us, and the deal we'd made was the deal we'd made, and the room had on it the specific quiet weight of two people who'd said the rest of their lives out loud.

He fell asleep first.

I held him.

I did not fall asleep.

I lay on the rug with the warm weight of him against me and the valley deepening toward dark, and I thought about the four people I'd loved in my life. Brynn. My grandmother. My mother before she'd been broken. The man currently asleep with his head against my shoulder. The math on love was a kind of math I'd spent my entire adult life refusing to do. It was now a thing I was going to spend the rest of my life doing every day, and the doing of it was going to be the small steady thing.

It was, I decided, a kind of math I could live with.

It was, I decided, a kind of math I was going to do well.

And I thought, because the writer in me had started thinking again whether I'd given her permission to or not, about the pages on my laptop. I'd been writing for three weeks. They'd started as the article and stopped being the article somewhere around the night he told me about the kid in the suit, and what they were now was the truest thing I'd ever made. The truest thing I'd ever made was also a loaded thing, because the man asleep against my shoulder was the subject of it, and the subject of it had spent his whole life making sure no one ever got to write it.

And it was good. I'd known it was good the way you know your own pulse. But I hadn't let myself hold the other thing next to it until that night on the rug, which was that Victoria had read the first twenty pages on Monday and gone quiet in the way people go quiet when a thing has outgrown the room it was built for. By Tuesday the word national had started getting used. By Wednesday a name I'd spent my whole career reading on a masthead, a contributing editor at the Atlantic named Marchetti, had asked Victoria to send him the draft.

The piece had stopped being a team feature and started being a door. The specific door. The one back to the city and the byline and the version of me that had walked onto a train at twenty-two certain she was going to be a person who mattered in print. Six weeks of severance. A Brooklyn lease bleeding out by April. This was the thing that closed that math, and it had the man asleep on my shoulder printed all the way through the middle of it.

I could feel the pull of the true version low in me, certain and mine. And the pull lived dangerously close to the old pull, the one that had once made me hurt him to keep myself safe, and I did not yet know how to tell the two of them apart. I was going to have to. I could feel that too. Soon.

And the thing that had turned a team feature into that door was the slump. I knew that, and I did not love knowing it. A defending champion winning quietly through October was a nice regional read. A defending champion coming apart in November, the best man on the ice playing the worst hockey of his life with no injury to point at and no explanation anybody could pry out of him, that was a national story. That was the kind of story that made a contributing editor at the Atlantic ask to see a draft. His worst month was my best break. The worse he played, the bigger the piece got, and the wider that door swung. And somewhere in the last week I'd started to feel the shape of a thing I did not want to look at directly. The door back to my whole life was being held open by the worst stretch of his.

The sun came down on the valley.

The room went pink at the edges.

He slept against my shoulder.

I held him.

26

JETT

Coach kept us late on a Wednesday for no reason except that he could, and because he'd decided over the summer that the way you defend a title is you make November hurt worse than April, so we ran a forecheck drill until the legs went and then we ran it four more times after that.

I had a good practice.

That sentence does not sound like much. For most of the guys, "good practice" is the baseline, the thing you turn in on a Wednesday, nothing to write home about. For me, for about eight years, there was no such thing as a good practice, because there was no such thing as a practice I treated like a practice. Every drill was a game. Every rep was a thing to win. I came to the rink the way I came to everything for most of my life, which was loud, and at a hundred miles an hour, and braced, because somewhere underneath all the noise was a kid who'd learned young that if you weren't the loudest thing in the room then the room belonged to somebody else, and the somebody else was never kind with it.

I'd skated like that for eight years. It had won me a lot of hockey games. It had also, I was starting to understand, been a thing I did so I wouldn't have to be quiet, because quiet was where the kid lived, and I'd spent my whole adult life making sure I was never quiet long enough for him to catch up.

I wasn't loud at practice on Wednesday. I was just good.

I made the reads. I moved the puck. I chirped Moose when Moose ate it in the corner, because some things are sacred and Moose eating it in the corner is one of them. Tank chirped me back about something my mother would not have approved of, and Langley laughed so hard he blew his gap and Coach made the line skate it again, which was Langley's fault and somehow became mine, the way everything in a locker room eventually becomes the loud guy's fault. For thirty seconds it was just the noise a room full of men makes when none of them is carrying anything. But I didn't need the chirping the way I'd needed it before. Didn't reach for it like a guy reaching for a railing. I ran the forecheck drill the fifth time the same way I ran it the first, which I'd never once managed in my life, and when Coach finally blew it dead and let us off I skated to the bench not emptied out and not braced for the next thing but just, for once, done. The good kind of done. The kind where the body's been used up and the head's quiet and the quiet doesn't have any teeth in it.

Stone caught me at the gate.

He didn't say anything, which was Stone. He pulled his helmet off and shook the sweat out of his hair and looked at me, the captain look, the one that took inventory, the one he'd been giving me for eight years. I waited for it the way you wait for a guy to total up a number.

He didn't total it out loud. Stone says about a third of what he's thinking and makes you earn the rest. But I could read the number on his face anyway, because I'd been reading Stone for eight years, and the number on his face was a thing I hadn't had words for myself until I watched him land on it. For eight years I'd played like the ice was on loan and the bill was coming, like somebody would skate out and take it from me the second I stopped moving. I hadn't played like that this week. I'd played like it was mine. That was the read on his face. He'd clocked it before I had.