“People telling the truth don't explain shit. Stick to the script. You said it yourself, he’s going to believe the most boring version you give him.”
She looks at me, and for one second, I see how hard it’s going to be for her to walk down those stairs and lie to her father's face with me standing behind her. To take the realest thing she's ever done and call it work in front of the one person she's spent her whole life trying to be enough for.
“For the record,” she says, quietly, “I had a great night.”
“A fantastic night.”
“Lock the door behind me.” Already stepping back into officer mode, piece by piece. “When they come up, so it looks like I locked it on my way out.”
“It's my door.”
“Lock it anyway. Humor me. It's the kind of detail he checks.”
I watch from the window like a coward, because going down there would blow the whole thing, and there's nothing I can do but stand in the best morning of my life and watch it get cleaned up.
She comes out the front of the building into the gray light, and she's perfect. Clipboard energy with no clipboard. She doesn't rush. She lifts a hand to her father, all business, says something I can't hear, and I watch Coach Dixon's whole posture ease. He nods and turns to the man in the good jacket beside him and says something that the scout likes. The scout nods, seemingly impressed, and the three of them stand in my parking lot at seven in the morning, as if everything is exactly what it looks like.
I take a beat.
It works.
Her plan is working perfectly.
She walks in the opposite direction of the lot without explaining why, and not one of them thinks to ask, and that's when it lands on me. She did her part, and now I need to do mine.
Coach claps the scout on the back and points up at my building, and they start for the stairs, and I've got maybe forty seconds to stop being a guy who got everything he wanted last night and start being the kid with one strike left and a Carolina contract that’s mine if I act accordingly.
I look at the apartment. Two plates back to one. My bed made fast and ugly. Window cracked to lose the smell of her. The best night of my life scrubbed down to nothing in under forty minutes.
I lock the door because she asked me to. Then a few seconds later, I unlock it again, because they're knocking, and I open it up with a grin I don't feel and shake the hand of the man who's about to give me everything I ever wanted…except her.
“Coach,” I say with a faux smile. “Right on time.”
“Caleb.” He looks past me into the place, the bare, clean nothing of it, and nods like it confirms something good about me. “Looks squared away. Jasmine said you've kept it clean.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. And there it is. My first lie. Smooth as hers. “Probably, because I’m not even spending much time here. All I do is eat, sleep, and drink hockey.”
What’s crazy is I stand there shaking hands with my whole future while my whole present walks to her car alone, and I finally understand the math she's been trying to teach me since the gala.
It's not that we might get caught. It's that we won't. We're good at this, especially her, maybe too good. A few weeks ago, I had nothing, and nothing to protect. Now there's a contract walking through my door and a girl walking away from it, both of them real, both of them mine, and pointed dead at each other.
Somebody's going to have to choose. It'll be me. It's always me.
I just used to break the good thing on purpose. Now I’m learning, it’s way worse when the world lines up to break it for you.
“Come on in,” I tell the scout from Carolina. “Let me show you around.”
Caleb
Here's a thing I learned growing up with nothing. When you finally get a good thing, you take it somewhere nice. You don't keep a girl like Jasmine Dixon eating eggs off a plate on the floor of a bare apartment forever. At some point, you put on the one shirt you own with actual buttons, and you take her out like she's somebody, because she is.
The problem is that everywhere with people in it is a place where we can't be seen.
So I did what I do. I found the loophole. There's a casino an hour and a half out of town, off the interstate, the kind of place nobody from the program would ever drive to on a Tuesday, with a steakhouse on the top floor that takes reservations under fake names without blinking, because half the people up there are doing some version of the exact thing we are, just with worse intentions.
“You booked it under what?” she says in the truck, reading the confirmation off my phone.
“Mr. and Mrs. Paperclip.”
