Page 37 of Her Rival

It wasn't a kiss in any of the senses I'd been carrying in my head when I'd thought about kissing women in the abstract over the years. It wasn't the start of anything. It was the smallest possible meeting. Lips on lips. Dry. Sober. Both of us not moving, both of us with our eyes open, both of us with our hands at our sides, both of us holding our breath. It lasted, I think, less than a second. Half of half a heartbeat.

I lifted my mouth off hers.

I stepped back.

She hadn't moved. Her hand was still on the doorknob. Her eyes were open. Her face had done a thing it hadn't done in any other session, in any other moment, in any other room I'd ever been in with her, and I'd have given a lot of money I had a lot of, in that moment, to have a name for the thing her face had done.

"Hartley," I said.

"Don't."

"What."

"Don't say my name like that, Sturgill. Don't. Please."

I did not say her name.

I stood in the doorway and did not say her name, and after a moment she said, very small, very low, I'm sorry, and I said, Don't apologize, I started it, and she said, I didn't stop it, and I said, No, you didn't, and we stood there in the entryway with that on the table between us. The small dry kiss neither of us had stopped. The fact of it. And the fact of both of us not knowing what to do with the fact of it.

She turned the doorknob.

She stepped out.

I followed her onto the driveway, because I'd walked her to her car every other time and I wasn't going to break the pattern now. Especially not now. Especially not when not walking her would've said more than walking her. The desert cold of the evening was already on the air, and Brynn's SUV was sitting where she'd parked it that afternoon, in the wide gravel turnaround, the Pontiac under the floodlight at the far end where I'd left it.

She opened her own door.

"Tuesday," I said.

"Tuesday."

"I will be in the kitchen. You will come in. We will do the interview. Nothing will have happened."

"Nothing happened," she said, like she was practicing it.

"Not a thing, Hartley."

She got in. Closed the door. Didn't start the car for a moment. She sat in the driver's seat in the floodlight and pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead the way I'd watched her do once before in the parking garage, and then she started the car, and then she rolled the window down.

"Jett."

"Yeah."

"What was the article supposed to be about."

I looked at her. The question was so far out of context I had to play it back twice in my head before I understood it.

"The defending championship," I said. "The team. The title defense."

"And me."

"I don't follow."

"Why am I writing it. You haven't asked. You've been very polite for two and a half weeks and you've never once asked the actual question, which is why is Brynn Caldwell's best friend in the world — the one who hasn't been to Vegas in eight months, the one who flew in for the championship and gripped the railing of the owner's box for three hours and left the next morning, the one your name has been a problem for nine years — why am I the person Victoria Caldwell picked to write the cover story."

I had not, in fact, asked that question.

I'd spent two and a half weeks doing everything in my power not to ask it. Because asking it meant acknowledging that her presence in my life had a structural shape I hadn't been allowed to choose. That Victoria Caldwell had handed Dani Hartley to me on purpose. That the woman I'd been keeping the line on had been chosen for the role of standing across from me by the woman I most respected in this city. And that there were therefore answers to my situation I was being kept from, because Victoria knew something I didn't.