Page 40 of One on One
“I’m sure.” His voice is cold.
I wince.Cavalier,he called me. A perfect word for my attitude toward all the jobs I’ve had until now. They never made me happy, and I didn’t want to be happy making videos about dishwashers or debit cards anyway, and I was too afraid to do the one thing I found fulfilling. So I quit, and quit, and quit. And it’s true, my financial situation enabled me to make those choices. “Sorry, you’re right. I shouldn’t have assumed. And I wasn’t thinking about what would happen if we got caught. I’m afraid this is going to break him.”
I can hear him swallow. “He was crying after practice today,” he says.
“Yeah.”
He puts his head in his hands and groans. Looks back up at me, blinking, worn out. Opens his mouth to speak, and then groans again.
Finally he sighs and sits back in his chair. The wheels squeak. “I don’t think there are cameras in the practice gym. But there are cameras outside the practice gym, and records of who swipes into the building. You can’t say you were there.”
“Do we need to worry about that? The FBI isn’t going to investigate.”
“Probably not, but it’s, like, a four-million-dollar ankle. So who knows?”
He’s giving in. The tension keeping my shoulders stiff and my fists balled subsides, but I try not to move. I don’t want to do anything that might cause him to change his mind.
“I was in the weight room earlier,” he says. “There’ll be a record of me swiping into the building. If anyone questions anything, Quincy should say I heard it happen.”
“No, come on. That’s not—I don’t want you to have to do that.”
He shakes his head. “You’re right about the pressure. It’s a lot for him. It would be a lot for anyone, let alone an eighteen-year-old.”
He’s playing you,a voice whispers in my ear.He’ll let it happen, rat you out, and boom, you’re done.But he sounds sincere. And I know he cares about these kids. I have to trust him.
It’ll be fine. It has to be. “Are you sure?” I ask.
“No. But I don’t see any other way.”
I swallow. “Thank you.” My voice is shaky with relief as I reach into my bra for his phone. His eyes dart to my hand and then away. Which is good, because I need to wipe the boob sweat off the screen before I hand it back to him.
Ben and Igive Quincy a slice of reheated pizza and a half hour to sober up before making sure he stays upright as he limps to the training room. Then we retreat to Ben’s office. The plan is in motion, and there’s no going back now.
Ben shuts the door and begins pacing along an invisible path from wall to wall behind his desk. I wander the rest of the room unfocused and impatient, half looking at the pictures on the walls the same way I look at the diagrams of the female reproductive system hanging in the gynecologist’s office while I wait for my Pap smear.
“I’m freaking out.” I peel off my outermost layer, a thick, bottle-green sweater, and roll up the sleeves on my striped button-down. “It’s making me sweat. I can’t even think straight.”
“You’re sweating because it’s hot in here.” He diverts from his path to unlock the window and crank it open.
I cross the room and rest my forehead against the screen, closing my eyes to savor the bracing air. “Yeah, it is hot in here. I thought it was just me.”
He snorts.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” I turn around and lift my ponytail to cool the back of my neck. His eyes follow my hands. If I concentrate on how refreshing the cold air feels, maybe I’ll forget about the vision in my head: the trainer declaring Quincy’s injury serious, season-ending. A rare type of ankle break he’s only seen at the X Games, one caused exclusively by falls from wheeled objects.
“What did you expect?” he asks. “You crank the heat up to seventy-five degrees every day.” He picks up a rubber ball and tosses it one-handed through the miniature basketball hoop hanging from the back of the door.
Only because you turn it down to sixty-two,I almost say. Actually, sixty-two sounds pretty good right now.
“Oh,” I say. “Oh! Your office is hot.” Every time I’ve goneto his office and left feeling overheated—I thought it was because he made me angry. But it was because of thetemperature.
He doesn’t turn the heat down to spite me, after all.
“Yes,” he says slowly, picking up the ball.
“My office is cold.” I resist the urge to shake him by the shoulders. “Freezing, actually. That’s why I turn the heat up.”
“What? Oh, that explains the cape.”
