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When Carly went to reopen the door, Beth’s hand moved from the sink to the handle. She held it shut.
“You’re not letting her win, are you?”
Carly rubbed her forehead. Her feelings weren’t some big game. “No. I just know when to quit.”
“When to run away, you mean?”
“Fat chance of that when you’re blocking my way.”
“You could move me,” Beth said, gesturing to Carly’s biceps. “But you’re not. Which tells me you don’t really want to leave. Come on. You can’t stay away from football for the rest of your life just because one person was mean to you.”
Mean? Letting her guard down and being rejected, again, wasn’t about meanness. “You’re a fine one to talk.”
Beth folded her arms and leaned back against the door, her eyes rolling to the ceiling. “Oh, here comes the deflection. I can’t wait to hear what you’ve got to say about my life.”
“What life? You haven’t had one since your divorce.”
Beth grunted. “There’s nothing you can say that’ll hurt me.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you. I want you to be happy, and you aren’t. You’ve given up everything that’s important to you—your career, your friends, coaching—to sit in the corner of a gym making snarky comments about everyone else’s lives instead.”
Beth didn’t flinch. That was what made Carly go further.
“And you’ve got a method for it,” she said. “You’ve had it since City. You decide in advance that stepping in will make things worse, and then you stand on the touchline and watch. You did it with me. Every single Sunday, you watched me sit in that corner, and you decided it would only make things worse if you said something.” Her voice cracked. She didn’t stop. “And now you’re doing it again with a bunch of girls who don’t even know your name, and you’re calling it realism.”
Down the corridor, Wham! gave way to Mariah Carey.
For a long moment, Beth didn’t say anything. When she did, her voice was quieter than Carly had heard it in years.
“Yes,” she said. “I am. Because I can’t go through that pain again. It’s easier to expect little, get close to no one. I know it’s cowardly. I know exactly what I did at City, and I’ve had fifteen years to think about it, and you don’t get to tell me anything about it that I haven’t already told myself in the middle of the night.” She lifted her chin. “But at least I’m honest about it. I know what I’m doing.”
“And I know what I’m doing. I’m in control here.”
A pause. Then Beth said, “No,” and stepped away from the door. “You’re not. I know you kissed her, and I know how you feel about her. You can’t just back out of that now and pretend it hasn’t happened.”
Heat rose up Carly’s neck, part surprise and part anger. “How did you know that?” she asked quietly, fists clenched by her sides.
“I came back for my phone.” Beth didn’t even have the decency to look sorry. “The weights room door has a window in it, and you walked past me looking like you’d just been shot.”
Carly stared at the tiles. She could have denied it. She’d been rehearsing that version for a week.
“If I’d stayed five minutes longer,” she said, “I’d have kissed her again.”
“So you left.”
“So I left.”
Beth nodded slowly.
“What did she look like? When you left.”
Carly didn’t want to answer that. She’d spent a week not answering it.
“She didn’t move,” she said eventually. “She just sat there. Holding on to the bench like someone had told her to stay put.”
Beth tore a paper towel from the dispenser and folded it into a neat square, not looking at her. “For what it’s worth, Jenna says she’s never called anyone mate in her life. Paige told Jenna, and Jenna told me, because she seems to think I’m some kind of oracle.”
Carly opened her mouth to say that proved her point. Then she didn’t.
