The Snap, page 12
“Sorry, yeah, of course,” I stuttered, fumbling with my phone. “Sorry, I was just thinking about a different…” Stop talking, you full moron. James let it go, but by the time he left he wasn’t hanging over my workspace wall anymore but standing several steps behind it, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets.
As soon as the door closed behind him, I brought up the text from Thanksgiving. I’d saved it, reading and rereading the brief messages to myself while I wondered why James never made a move, why our text exchange had stopped there.
Happy Thanksgiving, Pop Tart. Hope you got your fill today.
You too. Go for the extra dessert. ;)
Shit, shit, shit, shit.
On brittle-boned legs, I walked into Richard’s empty office and found a copy of the staff directory on his overstuffed bookcase. I sliced my finger on the first page and stuck it into my mouth, tasting blood, as I used my left hand to trace down the column of phone numbers. It didn’t take long to find a match, and when I slid my finger backward toward the column of names, a boulder of dread anchored my stomach. I was going to be sick, gastric acids churning and roiling as they bubbled up through my gut and rested at the base of my throat.
I was in deep, deep trouble.
The matching phone number belonged to Coach Guillory.
* * *
*
I’d sent suggestive text messages to the coach. No one would care that he reached out to me first, because that was the deal. It was right there in the expression “locker-room talk,” like the one we had downstairs. Like it was assumed this building was one giant man cave, enter if you dare.
Some teams, I’d learned, just didn’t hire women—no fuss, no muss. Others made sure their female staff never interacted with the players, keeping them in the corporate offices like tigers prowling in a zoo enclosure. The Bobcats were special in allowing me to do my entire job, in letting me into the locker room with Brent and Richard. And this was how I repaid them.
I hurried back to my desk and dumped the rest of the truffles into the garbage, then dug them out and moved them to Julie’s trash can. Their smell was overpowering, sickeningly sweet. I wished I could brush my teeth.
On Tuesday I forgot to set the copier to print the clips double-sided and came back from the bathroom to find an entire ream of wasted paper. It had to be done again, which meant I was late, but that in turn meant that Coach Guillory wasn’t in his office when I got there. Setting the papers down as quickly as possible, my eyes snagged on the family photo on his desk. Did Coach’s wife slip his phone off the nightstand while he was in the shower and go through his texts? He’d stopped playing only a few years ago, and I’d known enough college athletes to know their girlfriends checked their phones either constantly or never. Had Mrs. Guillory seen it? Was she going to come crashing in here one day to announce in front of everyone what I’d done?
By Friday my nails were gone, and I had a permanent ache in my jaw. This was my dream job, and I was fucking it up. Every success, every bit of ground I’d gained over the past few months, was slipping away as my head hung lower and lower.
During Coach’s press conference, I sat ramrod straight in my chair, covered head to toe in a black turtleneck and hunter-green dress pants. I hadn’t so much as shown my wrists since Monday. As Coach gave his opening remarks, I forced myself to look at him but not to stare. He was in a good mood—it was Friday, and they’d earned a weekend off to rest and watch other teams go to war. Coach’s smile was easy, his back arched casually forward, and he cupped the podium’s edges instead of gripping them.
“Come on, guys,” he teased the packed media room, “give me a hard one.” He looked straight at me and winked.
It was in front of everyone—from the podium, with cameras pointed at him. The air froze in my chest, a hard bubble, as I waited for accusing fingers to turn on me like swords.
But there were none. Beside me, Bernie nudged my shoulder and shot me a grin. Steven asked a question about whether it was important to Coach that the postseason path go through Dallas, and the press conference rolled forward. No one cared. They thought that Coach was being friendly and charming, and he was. And maybe everything was okay after all.
* * *
*
By the end of the day I was itching for our big night out. It had been a stressful week, I hadn’t done anything social in months, and if I couldn’t release some pressure there was no getting around it—my eyeballs were going to explode. I wanted a night to feel young and pretty. I wanted dollar drink specials and graffitied walls and pop music. I wanted to get drunk.
“We ride at nine,” said Mo when I passed him near the coach’s hallway toward the end of the day. He held out his fist to bump. “Bring quarters—they do a flip cup thing.”
I put on a playlist from senior year of college and took a hot shower. Then, wrapped in a towel, I browsed through my closet and perused the section of shirts my dad didn’t know that I owned. These were work friends, but it was after work hours. I could get away with being a little flashy, right? I thought about James’s perfect hair, his cocky grins. The way he sat at lunch with his long legs out straight, crossed at the ankle under my chair.
Maybe a lot flashy.
I was halfway through my shirts when I pushed aside a wrap blouse and saw something that made my hand freeze on the hanger.
The next shirt—a tissue-sized number of silver satin with a tie back—was facing the wrong way. It was a small thing, something no one but me would even notice, but I was extremely particular about the way clothes hung in my closet, and this one was backward.
I squeezed the fabric between my fingers. It released a scent that set off spiders at the base of my spine—stale cigarettes.
All this time I’d assumed it was Flossie coming into my apartment, poking around her dollhouse, making sure everything was just so, but I’d been wrong. It was Dave. Dave hovering outside the door while I slept, pressing his hands against it to affix the Post-it notes. Dave’s form filling my little bathroom, gliding back the shower curtain to reveal the space where I stood naked. Dave’s footsteps padding across the shag carpeting, down the little hallway, and into my bedroom. Dave’s fingers walking their way along the clothes in my closet and stopping at a shirt—this shirt, maybe the most revealing one I owned, and pressing it close enough to himself to transfer his scent.
It was so violating, and I had no idea what to do about it. Was I supposed to talk to Dave or Flossie? What if I was wrong? What if no one believed me?
I could not stay in this apartment for another second. I grabbed a shirt at random—black satin, with flutter sleeves—and pulled it on over skinny jeans. A pair of Uggs and I was good to go.
I would not worry about Coach Guillory flirting in public or my landlord touching my things in private or wherever James’s head was at. I was twenty-two. It was my only Friday night of the season.
I was going out.
* * *
*
It was so cold that the snow crunched beneath my boots as I picked my way over the snowbank and down the icy sidewalk toward the entrance to Sloppy Hal’s, a dive bar near the university section of town that really leaned into its name. The windows seemed to pulse out with each thump of bass, and a trail of abandoned cigarette butts led to the door. I handed my ID to a bored-looking bouncer, who shined a little flashlight at it but passed it back without looking down and waved me inside.
Abby, Mo, and James stood in a cluster on the far side of the giant bar that filled the center of the room. I had to push my way across the sticky floor and through the half-standing, half-dancing crowd to reach them.
“You made it!” said Abby, pulling me in for a sloppy hug. She wore dark flared pants that showed off her legs and a diamond-bottomed sleeveless top. Her cheeks were flushed a bright pink.
“Aren’t you freezing?” I yelled, struggling to make myself heard.
“No.” She indicated her cup. “Drunk blanket.”
A hand clamped on my shoulder, and I jerked away at the touch. When I turned, James’s palms were raised. “I just wanted to see what you’re drinking.”
Pull it together. “Sorry. I’m still cold, I guess. A rum and Diet Coke?”
“Good idea.”
“Excuse me?”
“Because of the prank—the corn syrup. It was a joke.”
“Oh. Right.”
He made his way to the bar while the three of us bobbed our heads to the music. “Do you guys come here a lot?” I asked.
Mo shook his head. “Like twice a season. We’re all too tired when we’re not working.”
“So when we do get out, we have to make it count!” Abby winked at me and downed the rest of her drink, which looked like it was made entirely of red dye 40. She leaned in uncomfortably close. I could smell the sugar on her breath. “Marketing is going to be insane now that we’re in the playoffs. I have people calling me asking to work with us—like, what? And my boss said I could spearhead Coach Guillory’s radio spot. Do you think he’s kind of hot?”
I made a face just as James walked back with four drinks, then tried to course-correct with an overly bright smile. “The line was long,” he said, pushing two of them into my hands, “so I loaded up.”
I took a big gulp, which lodged in my throat like an air bubble. The thought of Coach Guillory and my texts and his itches brought up the same feeling as Dave and my shirt. It was like the entire world was made of fingers.
Meanwhile Mo, still caught in conversation with Abby, held up his hand and said, “Please, no work talk. Tonight—we dance.” He held his forearm upright and made tight little circles in time to the music. Abby shimmied her hips, and the two of them bounced happily around to Usher.
I took another gulp from my first cup—was there any soda in there?—and locked eyes with James. He was staring at me intently, and my heart jumped. His sweaty hair was pushed back at an odd angle I was itching to fix. His jaw twitched as he swallowed. I watched the movement travel down his throat and to the base of his neck, right where his skin met his sweater. He leaned in, lips twisting into his usual smirk before it melted off his face as his gaze slid to the right to focus on something behind me.
I turned to see what could only be the new college scouting guy clap the disinterested bouncer on the shoulder as he walked in.
He was a human Ed Hardy T-shirt. His hair was black and spiked, his skin rivaled Brent’s for fakest tan, and he greeted everyone, including me, who he’d never met, with hugs and ear kisses.
“This is Carter,” said James, now suddenly several feet away and giving me a you own this mess look. “Carter, this is everyone.”
“You guys fucked up already or what?” As opening lines go, it wasn’t a strong showing. But when everyone else’s bodies automatically angled away, I felt kind of bad for Carter. I hated seeing people left on the edge of a group, mostly because I was always so afraid it was going to happen to me.
“So you just graduated?” I yelled over the National blaring through the speakers. It was “Mr. November”—one of my favorites—but the drunken sing-along of the crowd made it impossible to hear. Carter threw an arm over my shoulder and pulled my ear to his mouth, and I forced myself to take a breath. To not treat every human interaction like an assault. It was enough of that tonight.
“Yeah—URI.” I waited for him to ask me where I’d gone to school, but he just nodded to the music and scanned the rest of the bar.
“You like this song?” I tried again.
He shook his head. “Not really.”
The DJ put on the Killers, and the packed bar cheered, including Mo, who pogoed in time to the music, slopping his soda onto the floor. Things were starting to spin for me, and instead of backing off, I kept sipping and sipping at one drink and then the other, until both cups were as empty as I wanted to feel.
“Mo!” yelled James just as Brandon Flowers sang that while he did have soul, he was not a soldier. I turned, surprised by the sharpness in his tone, and met his eyes. They were like onyx, hard and dark, and his jaw was tight. “Mohammad! Come outside with me.”
“I’m not a machine,” Mo protested, trailing after James through the throng of bodies in the middle of the bar. “I cannot just leave during this part of the song!”
Abby looked at Carter, then winked at me. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she announced in a singsong voice. And then it was just the two of us standing there.
I bobbed my head a few times. Had I ever been less qualified to make small talk in my life? Finally I tried, “So you were in DKE?”
Carter yammered on and on about Greek life while I swirled the ice around my empty cup and tried not to feel the bass pounding behind my eyebrows. Every few minutes someone bumped into me as they made their way to or from the bar, and I was starting to sway on my feet. It was too loud in here, and way too hot. I needed some air. I needed to leave, but there was nowhere for me to go, no safe place where men didn’t linger where they shouldn’t and I could just be still.
“I have to go,” I slurred finally, not caring that I’d cut Carter off in midsentence. James was the only reason I came out tonight anyway, and he was mad for some reason I couldn’t understand—why was he mad at me? He bought me two drinks, and then he just got mad. I hated that look on his face, and I hated even more knowing it was for me.
What did I do?
Was I not friendly enough? He made that joke about the diet soda and I didn’t laugh—I should have laughed more there. Things turned after Carter came, so maybe he didn’t want me talking to Carter. But that didn’t make sense, James was the one who invited Carter, wasn’t he? I guess I invited Carter. But he had no problem with me talking to Mo…
I didn’t understand it, I couldn’t find the line. If I raised a fuss over things, then I was the no-fun police, but if I was too easygoing, then Coach Guillory thought it was okay to ask me to scratch his back. Did James think I was flirting with Carter, just by talking to him? Because I wasn’t flirting, and if I didn’t talk to him, Carter would think I was stuck-up. And where the hell was I supposed to look in the locker room, anyway? Who thinks naked media is a good idea?
I was done. I would say goodbye to Abby and then get out of here. Take a cab home, sleep with a bear trap at the end of my bed. I didn’t want to be there, but I couldn’t be here. I turned, scanning the dark bar for her telltale blond hair, but it was overcrowded thanks to the stupid nonperforming bouncer. Every inch of space was filled with people drinking, dancing, talking, laughing, just—being in my way. I went up on my toes to try to see over their heads. I scanned the length of the rectangular bar—not there. I looked by the door—nothing there. I turned and located the little hallway that led to the restrooms.
And that was when I saw Abby, pushed up against the wall outside the ladies’ room making out with James like the plane was going down.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NOW
As a general rule, I leave the family stuff to my brothers. Jeff and Luke both still live in Ohio, and both married nice Ohio girls (Jeff’s wife, Lisa, is from Indiana, but she had cheerfully relocated) and were raising nice Ohio children. I saw them at Christmas when the football schedule didn’t interfere and for a week every summer, and whenever we played at Cleveland I got everyone tickets and tried not to feel irritated that none of them rooted for my team.
Now I was sitting in my car outside of the stadium FaceTiming with Lisa and Morgan, Luke’s wife, who were at breakfast together in Morgan’s sunny yellow kitchen. “It’s so nice to have you ‘with’ us,” she said, laughing, and I raised my Byrne Dairy to-go cup in a salute.
Lisa was all business. “So for Mom’s seventieth.” Both of them called my parents Mom and Dad, which was—fine. It made everyone happy on both sides of those relationships, so far be it from me to say how completely cracked I thought it was. “We were thinking of a full-family trip, because she’s always wanted to and we’ve never done it.”
“The kids really haven’t been old enough,” Morgan said. “But since Benny’s finally potty trained,” she put one flat palm toward the ceiling and briefly closed her eyes, “I think we’re ready.”
“The obvious choice is a cruise,” Lisa said in her first-grade teacher’s voice that made me want to break in with Is that obvious, though, Lisa? “But I also thought—if we can get all the kids’ spring breaks to line up—maybe the Bahamas?”
Morgan grinned. “Is that where they have that giant slide that goes under the sharks?”
“From the pyramid, right. It’s too much for Benny and Lola, but the big kids should be able to do it.”
As the two of them chattered on about JetBlue points and chartered fishing boats, I watched my fingernails disappear into the Styrofoam of my cup. “This is a nice idea, guys, but I doubt I could get the time off, especially with everything going on right now.”
Morgan and Lisa exchanged a quick look that, on Morgan’s end, clearly said, Let me handle it. “Is there a time that would be better?” she asked. “Summer can be hard because everyone has camp, and then we can’t do fall because Dad has football—”
“So do I.”
Lisa’s tone was flat. “It’s Mom’s seventieth birthday, Poppy. It’s a big deal.” There was no winning with her or Jeff. When I came home, I was the prodigal daughter who soaked up all of Dad’s attention even though they were the ones who’d committed to living nearby, who helped my parents with weekend projects and sat through Sunday dinner every week. If I didn’t come home or join them on a birthday trip, it was because I was too selfish and self-involved to care about anyone but myself. Given those two options, I’d take the one that let me sleep in my own bed and stay caught up on my emails.
