Page 23 of Her Rival

He looked at the man on the screen like a stranger who'd done a beautiful thing. Like he was watching somebody else's son.

I picked up my pen. Set it down. Picked it back up.

"You don't see yourself in him," I said. Not quite a question.

He glanced at me. The first real look since I'd walked in. Less than a second. Looked away.

"I see the goal," he said.

I let that sit.

He clicked the remote again and the play ran one more time, and this time he didn't talk. He just watched it. Wrist flick. Glove down too late. Roar from the crowd. Twenty grown men piling on him from every direction. Brynn somewhere in the box above, screaming. Victoria in slow motion bringing both her hands up to her own face and pressing.

And me, somewhere in that owner's box too. Sitting on my hands and not making a sound while a hockey team won a championship a few hundred feet below me and the man I'd ruined at seventeen hoisted a trophy nobody from our hometown had ever told him he was allowed to want.

I watched the play with him. I did not look at him while we watched it. I'd promised myself before I came in that I wouldn't, that I'd be a clean professional in this room until I was back in my car, and the looking was a thing I'd specifically promised myself I wouldn't do.

I broke the promise about thirty seconds in.

I let my eyes go sideways for the smallest possible second. Just the bottom edge of his jaw under the cap. The line of his throat. The way his hand sat on the remote, loose, his thumb on the pause button without him noticing he'd put it there. He was three feet from me. He smelled clean. Like the generic institutional soap from the showers here, and underneath it something warmer that was just him. The warm specific smell of an actual living man. And I felt that animal part of me, the part I'd been firmly explaining to myself I did not get to have, lift its head off its paws and look toward him.

I cut my eyes back to my notebook.

I wrote down absolutely nothing. The pen made a line on the paper that didn't connect to any word.

He paused the screen at the same second the goalie's glove came down. Set the remote on the table. He didn't turn his head, but I knew the second he registered I'd looked, because his shoulders tightened the way shoulders do when somebody else's attention lands on them and the body doesn't quite know whether to brace or to lean.

He braced.

He shut down so visibly I felt the temperature drop in the room.

"That's the goal," he said. The voice came back to the Monday voice. Flat. Polished. No fingerprints. "If you want a quote, the quote is, 'I trust my captain and I trust my coach and I was lucky to be in the right place.' Use that. It'll fit the piece."

"Jett."

"What."

"That was honest."

"That was hockey." He clicked the laptop. The screen went dark. "Hockey I can do. The rest of it, you and I both know, is not going to happen."

It was the first time in two interviews that he'd referenced any of it. You and I both know. Three words, packed with nine years and a parking garage and a Monday afternoon and a green dress and a boy in a too-big suit. He didn't hold my eyes when he said it. He didn't need to.

"I wasn't going to ask," I said.

"I know."

"Then why bring it up."

"Because." He started gathering his stuff. Laptop closed. Remote put away. "Because I wanted us both clear on the deal. You get hockey. You write your article. I sit in rooms with you and answer questions about pucks and pads and Coach's tendencies as long as Victoria wants me to. Then we both go back to our separate lives, which is what we both want. Nodding now would save us both some time."

I should have nodded. The professional part of me, the part that wanted the byline and the check, was screaming at me to nod, take the deal, walk out, write the hockey piece, get out clean.

I didn't nod.

I said, "What if there's a better article than the hockey one."

He stopped moving.