Page 132 of Her Rival

"And I'm running the piece. The true one. All of it. Your name, the money, the church town, the kid in the suit. You don't get to take it back tomorrow when you're scared."

"I'm not going to take it back." He took one step toward me, just one, and then he stopped himself, his hands at his sides, still letting it be mine, even now, even here. "Hartley. Can I come to you."

"Yeah," I said. "You can."

He crossed the rest of the tunnel and put his hands on the sides of my face. Both of them. Cold and shaking, the way I'd put my hand on the side of his face in his kitchen the night I said it the first time. And the Jumbotron caught us, I found out later. Caught the whole thing. The soaked hockey player and the woman in the press credential at the mouth of the tunnel, four stories tall over a building that was still emptying out. My mother saw it from section 114, awake for it. Brynn saw it. Victoria saw it. Nineteen thousand strangers saw it. And for the first time in either of our lives, neither one of us was hiding from a single one of them.

"I love you," he said. Out loud. In the open. In front of everyone. The most private man I'd ever known, on a Jumbotron, with no distance left anywhere on him. "I should have said it like this the first time. In the light. Where you could check the records."

"The records are public now," I said.

"The records are extremely public now."

"I love you too," I said, and I said it the way he'd said it. Out loud. In the open. Where the whole city could pull the filing. And I was not, for once in my entire life, afraid of who might be reading.

He kissed me in the cold coming up off the ice with the horn still ringing in the rafters. Somewhere eight rows up, a woman who'd spent twenty-six years pointed at the floor was on her feet and awake for it. And I kissed the man I loved in front of everyone. Found. Seen. Out of the box for good.

We had a lot left to figure out. You don't un-hide two people in one hockey game.

But we were going to figure it out the new way.

In the light. Where anybody could see.

34

JETT

The drive home was quiet, and it was the first quiet of my life I did not have to fill.

That was the thing I kept noticing, going up the canyon with her in the passenger seat of the Pontiac, her hand on my thigh the way it had been on the night of our first dinner a hundred years ago. Except this hand was the hand of a woman who'd come down out of a box in front of nineteen thousand people to find me, which is a different hand than the one that hasn't decided about you yet. I did not turn on the radio. I did not chirp. I did not do the thing I'd done in cars my whole life, which was make noise so the silence couldn't get a word in. I just drove, and she sat there with her hand on my leg, and the quiet sat with us like a third thing in the car that we both, for once, trusted.

The headlights came up the canyon road and into the gravel turnaround, the same one she'd driven away from at gray almost-morning two days and one lifetime ago. I cut the engine. We sat there a second in the dark with the valley black below us, both of us looking at the house.

"I haven't been back since," she said. "I keep waiting to feel like it's not mine anymore."

"Is it working."

"No," she said. "It feels like mine. That's the inconvenient part."

I got the door for her. I'd gotten her the door from the beginning and she'd let me from the beginning, the one piece of taking-care she never fought me on. We went up the steps into the house I'd made safe and empty and that was about to be neither. She stopped in the entryway and looked at it, the glass and the dark valley and the kitchen island where she'd handed me the truest thing anyone ever made about me, and I watched her decide to stay in it.

This is the part that matters, and I am not going to be a coward about it now the way I was for eight years.

She kissed me in the entryway, and it was not the frantic kind. Not the kind we'd done before in the dark, against doors, with the lights off, two people getting at each other fast so nobody had too long to look. She kissed me slow, with the lights on, and when I reached for the switch on the wall out of eight years of habit, she caught my hand.

"Leave it on," she said.

"Hartley."

"I want to see you." She said it the way she said the true things, flat and clean and merciless. "I've been writing about how nobody gets to see you for five weeks. I'm done doing it in the dark. Leave the light on."

So I left the light on.

I took her up to the bed with the wall of glass and the valley under it and every light in the room burning. And I did the thing I'd never once done in that bed or any other. I let myself be looked at while it happened. She undressed me slow, with her eyes on me the whole time, the writer's eyes, the ones that read the shape of a man by the holes he leaves. There was nowhere to put my hands that hid anything, and I let them stay where they were and let her look. She looked at the scar on my shoulder from the second year and the one on my hip from the fourth, the body eight years of a hard game had built and used up. She did not look away from any of it. I did not flinch. And that, it turned out, that was the thing. That was the whole spice of it. The not flinching. Two people who'd spent their lives making sure nobody got a long look, finally lying down in a lit room and taking the long look on purpose.

I laid her back and I went slow. Slower than I'd ever let myself go, because going slow means staying in the light. It means letting her watch my face while I touched her, and watching hers while she let me. I'd spent my whole life going fast in the dark so nobody could read me, and I was done with that. I was done with all of it. I put my mouth on her and she said my name, my real one, not Hartley's joke. Jett. Her hands in my hair, her eyes open, watching me see her. I felt her come apart against my mouth with the lights on and her gaze on me the whole way down. Nothing hidden. Nothing managed. No distance anywhere in the room.

When I came up over her she put her hand on the side of my face. The same way she had in the kitchen the night she said it first. The gesture that meant the thing she didn't have words for. I pushed into her slow and we both watched it happen, watched each other's faces do the thing faces do, the thing you spend your life making sure nobody catches, and we caught it. We caught all of it. On purpose. In the light. I moved in her slow and steady and she wrapped her legs around me and pulled me down until there was no distance left to hide in even if I'd wanted one, and I didn't. God, I didn't. I wanted to be seen all the way to the bottom by the one person who'd already gone down there and come back and stayed.