And now the kitchen goes very quiet.
“The scout moved his trip up,” she says. “He flew in last night. My father wants to walk him through the whole thing this morning. It’s something he’s really good at. He’s doing the same for Neo, Shane, and Bass. He gives the scouts a picture-perfect setup of the kid they're betting on.” She's already standing. “They're coming here. To show off how put-together you are. In forty minutes.”
It takes my brain a second to catch all the way up, and when it does, the floor drops out, because I do the geometry the same time she does. Her car's in the lot. Her shoes are by my door. There are two plates in the sink, two cups on the counter. There’s a girl in my shirt who is also, technically, the compliance officer assigned to keep me out of exactly this type of shit.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Forty minutes. We can–”
“Thirty-eight now.”
She moves like someone defusing a bomb. She gathers her clothes off my floor, fast and methodical, with no wasted motion. I'm right behind her, wiping down the counter, dumping her coffee, shoving the second plate to the back of the cabinet as if a scout will even give a shit that I have a girlfriend.
“Your car,” I say, stressed. “Your dad knows your car.”
“I parked on the next street over.” She's already buttoning her clothes and smoothing her curls back into a low ponytail. “I always park on the next street over. Force of habit.”
And that shit lands wrong in my chest, that she's been planning her own disappearance from my place since the first night. That loving me already came with an exit route mapped before she ever walked in.
“Jasmine.”
“I need my left shoe, and why are you calling me Jasmine?”
“By the radiator and because that’s your name. Can you please look at me for a second?”
“I don't have a second, Dixon. I have,” she checks the phone, “thirty-five minutes and a four-minute walk, and I have to be standing in that lot looking like I came from my apartment, not yours.” She finds the shoe. Steps into it. “If I'm late, he notices. If I'm flushed, he notices. He notices things too. It’s why he’s a good coach, and it's the one thing we have in common.”
“So what will you tell him?” I say. “When he asks why you're already here. Why is the compliance officer at the player's apartment at seven in the morning?”
She stops. Just for a second. And I watch her build it, the lie, right there in real time. Hell, maybe lying isn’t that hard for her.
“That I came early to do a conduct walkthrough before the visit,” she says. “To make sure there was nothing in the apartment that would embarrass the program. That it's my job, and I take it seriously.” She takes a quick breath. “It's even true. That is my job. He'll believe it because it's the most boring possible version, and the boring version is always the one he believes about me.”
I hate that.
“It’s that easy?”
“None of it’s easy.” She gets her bag. “It's just what we have to do.”
And that's the part that takes me out. I got that one all wrong. It’s not just that she can lie to him, but that she's so good at it. I wonder what else she’s lied about? Has she lied to me yet?
“Hey.” I catch her hand at the door. “Come here. One second. I'm cashing in the rule.”
“Which rule?”
“You don't disappear on me. Not even into the work. Especially not into the work.”
She looks down at our hands. “This isn't disappearing. This is me keeping you in the game. There's a difference, and you're going to have to learn it, because it's what we are now.” She nods at the door, the lot, the thirty minutes between me and a scout on my stairs. “Every good morning ends with somebody walking up to take it back.”
Fuck, I hate that even more.
The phone buzzes again in her hand. She looks at it, and the blood goes out of her face. I’ve never seen such a strong reaction from her unless she’s coming for me.
“He's early,” she says. “He's in the damn lot. He's early.”
There's no walk-to-the-next-street version of this anymore. There's no clean exit. There's a coach and a Carolina scout standing in my parking lot, and the only door out of my apartment empties straight into them.
“Okay.” I'm thinking fast, which I'm good at when it's a game and useless at when it's her. “You go down. You're the compliance officer. You did the walkthrough, you're leaving, and you brief them on your way out. Boring version. You said it yourself, he always believes the boring version.”
“How did I get here so fast, Dixon?”
