Page 27 of The Reckless Rookie

The contract. The bench. My mother on the porch for a decade. Everything I’ve built proving I don’t need any of them.

It’s a bad trade, a losing hand, a fence I should not lean on.

I lean on it anyway.

Eyes open. I look at the man who reads me and doesn’t want anything off me and I decide, clear and certain and all the way through.

Then I go up to the house, alone, one more night.

Because when it happens I want to have chosen it in daylight, not fallen into it in the dark. That much of myself I get to keep.

Chapter fifteen

Finn

I’ve been telling myself it’s a decision I still get to make.

That’s the lie I run the whole drive back, an hour of black road and me pretending there’s a version of tonight where I’m the kind of man who thinks it through and does the smart thing. I’m good at that lie. I’ve been telling it since the first night at the paddock, when a woman I’d known for six hours looked at me like she could see the wiring and I decided, right then, that I’d keep my hands to myself and my head down and do my six months and go.

Great plan. Real disciplined.

I made the actual decision that same night and I’ve been pretending ever since that it was still open.

I figured something out on the ice, the night I didn’t fight.

I learned to ask myself the question. Do you have to, or do you want to? It’s supposed to be a brake. It stopped my hands cold with a man’s jersey in my fist and the whole building screaming for blood, because the honest answer was want to, and I finally heard the difference in time.

So I ask it now, driving toward her in the dark. Do you have to go to her tonight?

No. Obviously not. Nothing’s forcing it. No emergency, no horse down, no excuse waiting at the top of the road to make it look like something that happened to me instead of something I did.

Do you want to?

Yeah. More than I’ve wanted anything since before the worst night of my life turned me into a highlight.

And this is what’s different, what I couldn’t have done a month ago. I don’t flinch from the answer. I don’t dress it up or talk myself out of it or pretend it’s smaller than it is. I want her. That’s the whole truth and I let it be true and I don’t apologize to myself for it. The question was never going to save me tonight. Tonight the honest answer is yes, and for once I’m not scared of my own wanting. I’m going to go where it’s pointed.

Aimed right, for once.

I sit in the truck at the top of her drive with the engine ticking.

Then I pay it.

This is new. Old me swung first and thought about the consequences in the holding cell. This me does it in the driveway, in the dark, with time to turn around.

I don’t turn around.

The house has one light on.

I cross the yard I’ve spent three weeks not crossing. No tools in my hands, no reason on my tongue, nothing to hold up in front of me if she opens the door and asks what I think I’m doing. That’s the whole point. I want to be standing there with nothing. If I’m going to do the most dangerous thing I’ve ever chosen, I’m going to do it in the open, unarmed, the way she chose it in daylight.

She showed me how to do this. She decided in the sun where she couldn’t pretend it was an accident. I’m just the slow student finally turning in the assignment.

Everybody wants something off me. Always have. The autograph, the goal, the comeback story, the clean six months that make somebody’s program look good. I built a whole self out of giving people the surface and keeping the rest, and it’s kept me safe and it’s kept me alone and I never minded the trade.

She’s the first person who looked at me and didn’t seem to be shopping. But if I’m wrong. If I walk up to that door and I’m just the placement that would look good graduated, or the young thing that’s convenient this far out in the county, or anything at all but the man she wants, then it breaks something a prison sentence can’t reach. The felony can only take my freedom. This could take what I didn’t know I still had.

I go anyway.