“She’s new to this one-on-one thing I have her doing with you, but she doesn’t do well with people getting too familiar. She’s particular. Fragile, if we’re being honest, though she’d take my head off for the word.” He finally looks at me. “So you keep things real business-like, okay? Don’t get friendly with her. She can’t handle friendly, and I can’t have her rattled. You understand me?”
My whole future is in this man’s hands, but I just had to listen to him call Jasmine fragile, call her a thing to be managed, when I’ve watched her walk into the loudest building on this campus on purpose.
What the fuck is he talking about? She’s the least fragile person I have ever met. Damn, her own father has been in the same house as her for twenty-three years, and he doesn’t know her at all.
I want to tell him that.
The want is so big it has a heartbeat.
“Understood,” I say.
“Good.” He nods, satisfied, like he just protected something.
“She’s lucky,” I say, before I can stop myself. “To have somebody looking out for her.”
“She’s my daughter. That’s not luck, that’s the job.” He says it like the two things are the same. They’re not. “She doesn’t make it easy. Never has. But she’s mine to worry about.”
“Yes, sir.”
And walking out, I think he’s got it exactly backwards. She makes it easy. So easy, I’d hand over the only future I’ve got just to keep doing it. He’s the one who made loving her hard, and he doesn’t even know he did it.
I make it to the parking lot before my hand finds the side of my truck. I stand there breathing, because the want to go back in and defend her is the exact want that would end my career before it even started, and I know it.
So I hold it, but holding it feels like swallowing glass.
I need to distract myself, so I call my brother.
“Hey.”
“Hey, C., what’s up?
“Just checking on you.”
“Aww, ain’t that sweet. Same shit, different day,” he sighs. “Just tired as all hell. How’s Vegas?”
“It’s cool.”
“Don’t get your ass kicked out again. I need you to make it big so we can all get out of this hellhole.”
I feel that one in my chest.
“I won’t fuck it up.”
On Saturday, we win.
I play the cleanest sixty minutes of my life with that Carolina guy a weight at the back of my neck the whole time. No after-the-whistle. No extra shove. Every ugly instinct I have, I locked somewhere deep in my gut.
Afterwards, I come off the ice and Jasmine’s at the tunnel, doing her job, but Coach is right there beside her. So I do the thing we agreed on. I go cold. I look through her like she’s furniture, because that’s rule one, and because her father is standing eighteen inches away.
“Good discipline tonight, Adams,” Coach says.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Jasmine logged it. Clean game, no incidents.” He claps me on the shoulder and says, to her, not to me, “See? Told you he’d come around once somebody held him accountable.” He speaks to her like she’s a stranger and like the win is all his doing.
Jasmine just nods and goes smaller.
She says, “Noted,” in a flat staff voice, writes something down, and doesn’t look at me, and I don’t look at her. We are so good at this, so practiced at disappearing in plain sight, that her own father doesn’t feel the thing crackling in the air between us.
