Page 87 of Close Knit

Her face scrunches up in disbelief. “Why don’t you stop playing football?”

“What?” I’ve obviously said the wrong thing, but I don’t know what to do in this situation. My instinct is to run, to numb, to block.

“This is my job, my life. Turn off the comments? Make my account private? Do you not understand that this is how I keep my community? It’s how I connect with people. I respond to every comment, every question about yarn and stitches and recommendations. But these comments, they’re all about me,” she breathes out, the words cutting through me like a knife. “They’re all about who I am…and who I’m not.”

I remember her telling me about being bullied online as a kid; this situation is probably bringing back all those painful memories.

People are ruthless.

I can’t really promise her that tomorrow this will blow over or that there won’t be more pictures.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have even suggested that.” I reach for her, but she flinches. “These comments are fucking ridiculous. And they aren’t true. You are the sweetest, kindest, most wonderful person to ever exist.”Fix this, Cameron. Fix it.“What if you delete the app for a day? Or stay off your phone?”

Daphne shakes her head in a panic. “I don’t need a solution right now. I know I can delete the app. I can sit here and delete each and every comment before ten more sprout up. Do you not understand what’s hurting me? This is my safe space. Every time I opened my socials, I felt excited, I felt connected. Now I want to throw up. Even my emails are full of reporters asking me to confirm the relationship.”

“Look, I get that, I’ve been there. The best thing for us to do is lay low,” I tell her, trying to soothe her. “Until the article gets taken down.”

“My retreat is in four months! I can’t lay low.” She sighs. “The worst part is that I don’t even care about the article. When I saw it last night, I thought,Oh well, this rumor sucks, but I thought the comments would stay on the article, not filter to my personal pages. When I helped with the auction, no one even paid attention to my channels, but now this?”

“You didn’t do anything. This is my fault,” I confess.

“It’s so stupid, Cam. I feel like that eleven-year-old girl again, reliving everything that was said to me now multiplied through a megaphone,” she whispers. “I thought football was about community, about love and support.”

This game is my life, but its darker aspects are undeniable. Despite the fact that these hostile people are the minority, they always seem to make their voices heard. Now they’re screaming at Daphne.

“This will all blow over,” I say.

“What if I can’t do my retreat? What if a sponsor sees the hate and decides to pull the funding? My followers aren’t going to want anything to do with this, with me. I already put down the deposit and made the plans,” she stammers. “I—I worked so hard to put myself out there, to take a risk, and now…I knew this Yes Year was going to get me in trouble. I should’ve listened to my sister. I should’ve played things safe, not decided to leave my comfort zone.”

I need to make everything okay. I feel helpless—until my eyes catch on a pair of loose knitting needles on the coffee table.

I grab the needles and a spare ball of yarn next to them.

“Hey, hey, hey.” I drop to my knees. “Daphne,” I say, trying to get her attention as she looks past me.

“What is this?” She glances at the supplies in my hand.

“I need you to teach me how to knit,” I say.

“What?”

“It’s now or never.” I force a smile. She doesn’t seem to register it. “You said knitting is a good distraction. We can use a distraction, can’t we?”

“I can’t even think straight and—”

I close my palms over both of her hands, pulling her phone away. “If I don’t learn how to knit, I won’t know what to do with myself.”

She inhales, her face softening. “Okay.”

Over the next ten minutes, I struggle to grasp the basics of knitting. She’s patiently explained the long-tail cast-on method multiple times, but it feels like solving a Rubik’s Cube in the dark. Watching her knit with practiced ease is mesmerizing.

“Now you try.” Daphne hands it over to me. I attempt to mimic her, but my fingers are as useless as two pool noodles on land. “No, Cameron, you have to stab it, strangle it, and throw it off a cliff.”

I laugh at her serious tone. “I never knew knitting was so violent.” A half-smile flickers across her face, but it’s fleeting, a ghost of her usual warmth. “Can you just show me again?”

She wraps her small hands around mine, guiding me through the motions. I should be focused on learning, but all I can think about is the crease in her nose, the intensity in her eyes. Our faces hover dangerously close. I want to go back to last night, to finish what we started, to make her feel better in a way my words are failing to. But we can’t. Not now.

Just as her breath graces my jaw, she pulls away. “You’re doing good,” she says.

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