Page 52 of The Art of Catching Feelings

“My brother called me Christopher Robin when we were young,” he said.

“Aw,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound too strangled. “That’s cute.”

Sothatwas the reason he’d cried. It made so much sense now. It made her heart hurt. She waited for him to say more about his brother, hoping that maybe he would open up to her—Daphne, not just Duckie—but he just signaled for the next exit and kept driving. She was conscious of the fact that they only had ten minutes left in the drive, and suddenly she was anxious to get him to keep talking.

“I’m sorry I had to ask you about that last play tonight,” she said. She could tell he really hadn’t wanted to talk to her, even more than normal—but it was to his credit that he’d stopped and done so anyway.

“It’s your job,” he said. “It’s fine. I haven’t had the best night.”

“Neither have I,” she said, more to the window than to him. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him glance at her, but she didn’t turn her head. He pulled up to a red light, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Just the car troubles, or something else?”

She did turn to look at him then, and was surprised to find him looking right at her. She had another one of those paranoid frissons up her spine, the sudden certainty that heknew. But of course that was ridiculous.

“You looked a little upset earlier,” he clarified. “After the game.”

“Did I?” she asked faintly. She hoped it hadn’t come through on camera, but from what little footage of herself she’d actually watched, it probably had. She was still getting used to seeing herself in high definition.

She was still getting used to seeinghimthis close. If she really thought about it, it was wild, how only a month ago she wouldn’t have known who Chris Kepler was. She wouldn’t have cared. Once, only a couple months before she’d said she wanted a divorce, Justin had dragged her to some fan event, where a bunch ofBattery players had been signing autographs. For all she knew, Chris had been there—she’d mostly stayed to the back of the crowd, fanning herself with a small paperback she’d pulled out of her purse. It had been unseasonably hot, and she’d gone home with a sunburn on her bare shoulders that had bothered her for a few days afterward.

“It’s cool if you don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “I don’t particularly want to talk about my night, either.”

“Look at us, the life of the party,” she said, then wondered if that was presumptuous somehow, putting them together in the same sentence like that. But he just glanced over at her, giving her a quick smile that didn’t reach his eyes. The light turned green, and he turned his focus back to the road.

“You don’t like giving interviews, do you,” she said. It wasn’t really a question, since the answer was already extremely obvious.

He shrugged. “I know I have to,” he said. “And it’s not always so bad. I like talking about baseball.”

“Just not about yourself.”

“I know it’s a privilege to have this job, and togetto talk about baseball as part of it.”

“Easy now,” she said. “I don’t have a microphone in my hand this very second. You don’t have to give me any sound bites.”

This time when he smiled, it did crinkle the corners of his eyes just a little bit. “I didn’t use to be this bad,” he said, then quickly looked over at her, as though he realized how that sounded. “It has nothing to do withyou. Like I said, you’re doing a good job. But suddenly I feel attention on me and I just…clam up. When we were sitting down to do that first pregame segment, everything was fine. And then out of nowhere, my heart started racing, I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was underwater, running out of air, and I just knew I had to get out of that interview and back to the surface.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed a few times, as if he was having trouble swallowing. “Like I said, nothing personal to you.”

That definitely put that whole incident in context. She’d thought he hadn’t wanted to be in the same space with the woman who’d heckled him, or that he’d been frustrated by her amateurish stumbling over the scripted questions. She hadn’t known he’d been feeling trapped.

“It sounds like you had a panic attack,” she said gently.

He glanced at her. “I’ve never had anything like that happen to me before. I even had the trainers check me out.”

“What’d they say?”

“They said everything looked fine.” He pulled a face. “They said it was probably stress. But whoisn’tstressed?”

Ain’t that the truth. “Who would you talk to, though, about stress? Like, does the team have a sports psychologist or, I don’t know, a counselor or something?”

It wasn’t lost on her that she was basically re-creating the first conversation she’d had with him by text, after he’d told her about his brother. But she hadn’t gotten a satisfactory answer then, and she couldn’t help but bring it up again now.

“I’m sure,” he said, then tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “We’re off the record, right?”

The whole time they’d been talking, she’d barely remembered her role as a reporter, even though they’d literally referenced it several times. “Of course,” she said, then gestured at her window. “It’s a right at this next street, by the way. Then your second left into the complex with the palms strung with Christmas lights.”

“ ’Tis the season all year round, huh?”

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