Chapter Thirty-Two

"You know, most people just reverse down to the highway and use the incredibly wide shoulder there to turn around," Orion Broderick called.

At this distance I couldn't tell if he was smiling or scowling. "I prefer a challenge!" I called back.

Was that a laugh? It might have been a laugh. Or he just had something caught in his throat.

What was the move now? Did I get out of my car? The driveway wasn't wide enough for me to pull alongside him, one arm casually out the window, and pretend I just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I'd stop by.

"You're kind of in my way!" he called.

Did he expect me to go around? I mean, he was the dude in the oversize Princess; he should be the one who went around, surely.

Then he stuck his head out the window and added, "I guess you'll just have to come to the house!"

Behind me, the gate began to open.

This time, taking my cue, and also not wanting to execute another embarrassing eighty-point turn, I did reverse all the way back along Orion's gravel road to the cabin, and pulled into a spot beside the garage. It looked so different without the snow. I hadn't really registered much about the yard before it was covered over when I'd been there before, but now the drainage ditch I'd spun my tires in initially was obvious, and just as obvious was the fact that I probably hadn't had to go all the way over to turn around, since there was plenty of space.

Another mechanical whirring sound, and the (clearly new) garage door came to life, admitting Orion, Princess, and the dog into the building.

"Stay in your car!" This time he sounded almost urgent. "She freaks out with strangers, hold on!"

She? What, Princess? His truck had a stranger danger issue?

The barking started up again, and Orion's voice was lower, soothing. When he and the dog emerged, the dog was pulling real damn hard on a leash that looked like it might snap at any second.

I rolled up my window, leaving only a communication crack at the top. For insurance against dog attack.

"She won't actually go after you; she's just scared," he explained, totally not dragging the dog away or telling it to stop threatening me. "Lie down."

The dog, some kind of massive shepherd mix, looked up at him with a clear Are you fucking serious? look, then, to my shock, lay down on the gravel.

Orion pulled something from his pocket and gave it to her. She swallowed it. "Good girl. Des is a friend, okay? We're not going to eat him. And he's not going to hurt us. Okay?"

"Speak English, does she?" I heckled from the safety of my vehicle.

"Okay, we'll reserve the right to eat him later, but only if he's earned it."

I couldn't help giggling a little at that. I mean, out of context, it could be kind of a fun threat? Pressing my hand over my mouth, I stifled a full-on laugh.

He looked over at me, brow creased in amusement, but all he said was, "I'm going to put her in the run in back until you're inside. She'll be fine in about ten minutes, just as long as you sit very still on the couch."

"What if I have to pee?"

"I guess you'll take your chances." He led the dog through the cabin, and I totally chilled out in my car like a calm guy having calm thoughts and for sure not bouncing from He doesn't hate me! to He still might hate me, but the dog's needs are more important than hating me!

He returned quickly to stand outside my window, looking down. "So. This is a surprise."

"I would have called to say I'd come by, but I don't have your number."

"So you drove all day just hoping I'd be twiddling my thumbs in the cabin?"

"Uhh." I considered it. "No. I drove all day just hoping you'd be living your normal life and you could make a few minutes of time for me within that context."

"For what, exactly?"

Feeling like he was being a little freaking confrontational, I said, "I can't believe you sent what I wrote to Sports Now ."

"No?" He ran his hand through his hair. "Because it felt like about the only thing I could do, once I'd read it."

"In order to humiliate me like I'd humiliated you? Because it's a real wild revenge plot."

Orion leaned down, his eyes at the crack in my window, looking at me so intently that it was hard to maintain eye contact. "It was way too good to keep to myself, and I knew you could pull it at any time. Did they tell you the good news?"

"What good news?" I asked, but distractedly, because part of me was still liquified from the way too good to keep to myself comment.

"Des Cleary," he said, slowly, drawing it out, pausing way too long. "We got the cover." Then he turned and walked away. "You should come inside!"

"The cover?" I repeated faintly. "The cover ? We got the cover?"

I did not scramble to follow him in, but it might have been a near thing.

My curiosity had to wait about fifteen minutes for some kind of elaborate prove to the dog that Des isn't lunch ritual was performed in which she—Gizmo, because of course she was Gizmo—was given chicken for looking at me for longer and longer periods of time. I'd have to tell Vix that he was great with dogs as well as kids and old folks.

The cabin had been altered since the last time I was there. A door now took the place of one of the living room windows, which went out to a deck with a staircase down, presumably to wherever the dog had been when I was getting settled and looking nonthreatening on the couch. I thought about the last time I'd sat there, when I'd looked over and seen cameras waving around in the windows, and kind of understood why he might want a giant, loud dog around. Come to think of it, I hadn't seen any fencing around the place.

"Is your gate just for show?" I asked.

"Not just for show. I mean, I'll have a recording of anyone who comes down the driveway, and you can't get through it without a tank."

"Yeah, but ..." I thought about it. "I mean, it doesn't go around the whole property?"

"I priced that, but it was expensive, and would have required pulling out a lot of perfectly healthy native trees, so I figured I'd go for the maximum psychological ‘Keep out' without dropping a hundred thousand dollars on a fence that a motivated person could probably climb over anyway."

"Fair. Plus, you have Gizmo." At her name, the dog looked at me.

"Good girl," he told her, and he gave her another treat. "Lie on your mat now."

She went to a bed so plush I'd seriously consider sleeping in it myself and lay down, still eyeing me mistrustfully.

"Giz, relax, I've got this."

She held out for another minute, then sighed and settled her head on her paws.

"Good job." Orion stood from his crouch beside her and looked at me. "Cup of coffee?"

I blinked. "Coffee? You have coffee? Here? "

"I have coffee. Here. Yeah." He glanced down at the dog again, then at me. "I'll go make it. You just stay there."

"What if she mauls me while you're not here to protect me?"

He grinned. "I have Band-Aids around here somewhere."

"Hilarious."

Gizmo did not maul me. She looked up when Orion left the room for the kitchen, glanced at me again, then put her head back down. So I took it to mean that I'd passed the friend test and could keep all my vital bits where they belonged.

"It's half-caff," he said a few minutes later, handing me my favorite rubber ducky mug. "I added cream, because you liked it in tea."

I tried not to make a face. "Half-caff?"

"I didn't want to start up my old addiction again completely, so I premix the bags in one big bag, and voilà, half-caff." He raised an eyebrow. "Would you rather ancient tea?"

"No!" I pulled the mug close to me. "No, no, I'll take this, thank you."

"You're welcome."

He sat in his armchair with his familiar mug.

I stayed on the couch with mine.

We sipped coffee.

Gizmo closed her eyes.

"So you're drinking caffeine again?" I asked, because I couldn't decide what we were supposed to do now. I could feel lingering fight energy in my limbs, unexpelled since that moment in the driveway when I thought he was going to make me go around him, but I also desperately wanted him to kiss me so I'd know we were okay. Were we okay?

"I decided you were right, in a way. I did actually enjoy coffee enough to outweigh the benefit of full restriction." As if to demonstrate this, he sipped, closing his eyes to savor it.

I gulped. Not coffee. Just, like, the part of my heart that was now in my throat, watching Orion taking pleasure in something. I forced my voice to be light and teasing. The dog would probably disapprove if I launched myself at her human. "So what I'm hearing is, I was right. Coffee is the best."

The slightest hint of a smile turned his lips as he opened his eyes. "In a limited sense. I don't want to need coffee every day. I want to choose it."

Do you want to choose me? I managed to keep myself from saying it out loud.

"But you're not wrong," he added. "I think for most of my life it felt like my survival was based on a series of all-or-none decisions. All the caffeine or no caffeine. Totally public figure or completely isolated." Briefest hesitation. "I was in the closet to nearly everyone, or my entire world was torn apart for people to gawk at."

I winced. "Sorry. Again."

"The point is that I realized not everything had to be one extreme or the other. I could have coffee in the house and drink it when I was in the mood." He looked at his watch thing. "Though we're close to my cutoff."

Either Bakers Mine was a place where time sped up significantly, or it was still literal morning. "Uhh, it's not even noon yet."

"Do you have any idea how long the half-life of caffeine is?"

"I think we both know I don't."

For a second we teetered on casual humor. Then it collapsed under its own weight, and we looked away from each other.

Awkward. Er. Sooo. We'll just slide on past that . I cleared my throat. "So. The cover?"

"The cover. I did the photo shoot for it already."

"No shit." I shook my head. "Seriously? How was it? I mean, do you feel fulfilled now?"

He smiled a little. "Maybe if you keep a dream around too long, you never feel fulfilled? Or maybe I just have better priorities now than when I was a kid."

"Not me, nope, cover story in Sports Now , I'm done. I can die happy." I sipped more coffee.

"Really?" His tone was light. "Is that all you want out of life? A cover in a magazine?"

My gaze passed over his and landed on the bookcases where all his back issues of Sports Now had lived the last time I was there. "What happened to your archive?"

"I decided it was time to move on. Then I got your thumb drive."

"Yeah?" I thought about me sitting there, finding the letter, discovering my dad had lied about the only thing he'd ever seemed to value. Not that I'd intended to go back and look at that page with all its rank betrayals again, but I found myself a little adrift now that I couldn't. "I guess maybe it was time. To move on, I mean."

"I thought so too. If you hang on to something too long, it goes sour."

I looked back over at him. "Do you mean me? Because I swear to god, I will not become a psycho stalker. I wrote the thing; it's out of my system."

"What's out of your system?" His gaze locked onto my face, and I tried to shove all the See how casual I am; see how I'm definitely not fixated on kissing you again? I could muster into my expression, though it cracked immediately. Fuck, I'd forgotten how seriously deep his eyes went sometimes.

"Um. You know. This. Us. Like"—I air-quoted—"‘us.' Not a thing. Super over it."

"Are you?"

"I mean . . . aren't you?"

He held my gaze. "I tried really hard to hate you. I mean, I did hate you, before we met. You were easy to hate. It meant I didn't have to think about being in the closet, imagining everyone turning on me, trying to decide from one person to the next if any of them would stand by me if they knew. It was a super shitty way to live."

I opened my mouth, but he shook his head.

"I'm not going to thank you for outing me like an asshole. I'm not grateful for that, Des. I never will be. I had a plan. I just wanted a few more good years playing and saving the money I made and working with brands and then I'd come out, and I figured I'd have built enough relationships that even if the worst did happen, I'd survive it mostly intact."

I swallowed hard. "Oh."

"When you published that article, about all I had was some money in the bank and a few friends I'd already told. Most of the guys on the team were good about it, quietly. They even talked about wearing armbands or something, but I told them I didn't want that. Me being outed was not the same as Colin Kaepernick taking a knee. You know? I didn't want to appropriate that movement for this."

"But they still fired you. For being gay."

"They asked me to resign for ‘being the cause of a controversy that negatively affected the league.'"

"Same thing," I countered.

"Yeah. I mean, you could see it a few different ways, but yeah, I agree with you. And even though something you did resulted in that, I could only blame you for part of it. They shouldn't have made me resign, no matter what some college reporter had said about my personal life. I was a kick-ass player, and I would have kept making them money, and I'd done nothing wrong, which they knew. I wasn't even accused of doing anything unethical or immoral. But they made me resign anyway."

A new thought crossed my mind. "It wasn't Marlo Ramos, was it? Because I work for her now, but I can't continue to work for her if she was part of that decision."

"Marlo? No, I love Marlo. She's just in charge of the stadium. Not ‘just' like that's not a massive job I definitely couldn't do, but ‘just' as in she doesn't have any input into the decisions about the team's brand ." He didn't air-quote it, but he didn't need to. "I'm still sad that I didn't get to play out my career, but I also got to live that life for a few years, and most people don't. And even then ... there were a lot of trade-offs. I could never go back to being in the closet all the time, constantly worried that I'd say the wrong thing, that if I got too comfortable with someone, I wouldn't guard my words as well as I needed to. I'd slip up just once, and the sky would fall. I don't miss that part for a second. I couldn't go back to it even if it meant going back to the team." He shook his head. "The me who could live that way is gone, I think. Now that I know what it's like to live openly as myself."

"That sounds super fucked up," I said, because I felt like I needed to acknowledge that reality, which I had never lived. "And I still wish I hadn't published that stupid article. I wish I'd never seen the picture."

"I know. Because you wrote about it in that thing you sent me."

"Oh, right. I keep forgetting you've read that." I hunched. "Holy shit, I keep forgetting that soon everyone will read it."

He grinned. "The circulation of Sports Now isn't actually the entire population of the earth."

"No, but I bet it's almost everyone I speak to on a daily basis. Except for my landlord, who is not the Sports Now type. I think he'd go in for, like, Architectural Digest . And maybe some niche publication about dung beetles or something."

"Yeah, Vix Black said something about you working at the stadium. You went back to Conquistos?"

"I did. I wasn't ... sure where else to go. I got very fired. Fired in no uncertain terms."

So there were a few things Orion didn't already know, at least. His surprise was a little gratifying. "Really?"

"For telling the press where you were, which I obviously did not do, and like, the logistics of it don't even make sense? Why would I tell the press where you were while I was still there? Wouldn't I wait until I was at least a few miles away before calling up a bunch of jackals and siccing them on you? Whatever, doesn't matter. I got fired and tried to go back to Conquistos but it was a stupid idea and I slept in my car and I wrote that thing and Vix found me a job at the stadium because she used to be married to Marlo, and actually I kind of love it? I get to see all the games when I'm not specifically working during them."

He leaned forward. "You've been watching? How's Bram Hunter actually playing after his injury? I can tune into the play-by-play, but some lines were damaged during the storm and the internet hasn't been the same since, so it's hard to watch online."

I remembered seeing Bram Hunter behind Jesse Diaz when I'd pretend-couriered Marlo's birthday gift to him. "I'm not really sure. There's no talk that I've heard that he's more injured than he's letting on. Also, is he friends with Sac United? Because I swear he was at a house party when they were in town."

Orion laughed. "I bet. It's a pretty small world, and it's not like places where soccer is super cutthroat, at least not yet. We're allowed to fraternize with other teams."

"Cool. Yeah. I think he's probably okay. They haven't benched him, anyway. I think he did almost get in a fight with someone, but I missed it."

"Also not surprising."

A not-actually-that-awkward silence fell. I finished my half-caff. It was nice to sit in the cabin without being trapped in the cabin. "It doesn't snow in August, does it?"

"No, Des. You're safe from snow this time."

"Thank fuck." Although now I wasn't sure what to do. Since I could leave anytime. I cleared my throat. "So, uhh, you didn't answer my question."

"What question?"

"The one about, like, this. Us. I mean."

"You didn't answer my question, which I asked first."

I frowned. "Wait, you did? What?"

He set his mug down. "You said you were ‘super over' us. And I asked if that was true."

"I'm pretty sure that's cheating," I said, stalling.

Orion raised his eyebrows. "Yet here I wait for an answer."

"Uhh." I didn't put down my mug because I needed it to fidget with. "Uhh, so, listen, I don't want to sound like a creeper is the thing. Maybe I'm not super over it? But I'll get there! I will not be, like, hung up on you for the rest of my life or anything." I smiled weakly. "Never fear." I kind of did, though. Fear that. Because once I'd kissed Orion Broderick, I couldn't imagine kissing anyone else.

He nodded. "What if I ... wanted you to be hung up on me for the rest of your life?"

"Uhhhhhhhh." Was "uh" a syllable? A word? A sound? "You mean as a fitting punishment because I'm a monster and you detest me?"

"No, you dork." He got up, took the two steps to the couch, and leaned down. "Because I'm hung up on you too."

"Oh," I said, in the second before he kissed me.

And then, eons later, when we took a pause from kissing, I managed to add, "Good."