Page 46 of The Tiger in the Sack

“The first time I got on a motorcycle with the helmet on and nobody looked at me like a Kingman, I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t have a word for it.” I looked at the city because it was easier than looking at her. “It was just me and the bike and Vito and nobody stopping me on the sidewalk to ask if I was going to have a better season than Chris.”

She was quiet. Listening. Not forgiving, but listening.

“When you were in that tree and you called me a jackass. You made Mandalorian jokes. You didn’t google me. You didn’t make the face.” I looked at her now. “I wanted to keep being that guy for one more night. And then another night. And I told myself I’d tell you, and I kept not telling you, and I know how that looks.”

“It looks like you were keeping me in the dark.”

“It looks like that because that’s what it was.”

Something crossed her face. Not softening exactly, but a crack in the precision of it.

“I know why you kept it on,” she said. “I even think I understand it.” She looked at the river for a moment. “But I was a secret. Whatever this was, whatever it might have been, I was the thing you kept in the box with the lid on.” She turned back to me. “That feels real shitty, Kingman.”

“That’s not—” I stopped. Because I had been about to say that’s not what this was, and I did not have the right to tell her what it was. She got to decide what it was. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to feel that way, but you’re not wrong.”

“I know I’m not wrong.”

The phone came out of her pocket. I watched her thumb move on the screen. Not dramatically. Just the way she did everything else, clearly and without fuss.

“There’s a car four minutes away,” she said.

Fuck. Fucking, fuckity fuck. “Okay.”

She kept the phone in her hand. We stood at the overlook with the city doing its full performance across the water and I didn’t go anywhere and neither did she and the four minutes felt like fourty-hundred years and also about thirty seconds.

“I don’t date football players.” The words were directed to me, exactly. More like she was reminding herself. “I especially don’t date football players who kept me in the dark about who they are.” She paused and clicked on her phone again. “I know you didn’t plan to hurt me. But my rules are my rules and they exist because I made them for a reason.”

There was nothing to say to that. She was right. She was completely, exactly right, and the rightness of it sat in my chest right alongside the other thing, the thing that knew those six nights had been the most real six nights I’d had in longer than I could measure. Both of those were true at the same time and only one of them mattered right now.

The headlights came up the hill and pulled into the parking lot.

She picked up her helmet from the wall. I reached for it without thinking, some reflex about carrying things, and she looked at me and I put my hand back down.

“I’ve got it.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

The car came to a stop at the edge of the lot. She took two steps toward it and then stopped. Didn’t turn all the way around. Just her profile against the lights, the helmet at her side.

“I gave you the whole ride to tell me yourself.”

She got in.

The door closed. The taillights went down the hill and disappeared around the curve and the overlook went quiet, the way parks go quiet after people leave them, like the space was recalibrating around the absence.

I sat back down on the wall.

The city was beautiful. It had absolutely nothing useful to say about any of this.

I sat there longer than I needed to, helmet in my lap, looking at the river and the bridges and the lights reflected in the water and not thinking about anything useful, just existing in the fact of what had happened. Eventually I remembered that Devou Park closed at dusk and I’d been pushing that limit when we arrived. I was surprised no one had been by to kick us out.

Probably had and then witnessed the utter shutdown I’d just taken, and left me to wither alone in my ineptitude.

I put the helmet on. Walked back to the bike.

Vito wasn’t there.

That was the thing that hit me. Not a new thing, I had left him home on purpose, but standing next to the bike in the dark with nobody to unlatch from a harness, no weight to settle against my chest for the ride back, the bike just a bike, I felt how quiet it was in a way I had not felt on the way out.