Page 27 of The Cadence
“I don’t think you should at all. Why would you? Why would you leave a safe, secure house?”
“It doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to you,” I pointed out. “At any time, you could make the decision that you wanted it back and then I’d have to go, and I don’t even have a car to sleep in anymore.”
“Didn’t I just say that I would never, ever let you live like that?”
We were quiet for a moment and I looked at the trees that loomed along the sides of this dark road. Where I’d grown up, I’d been out in the middle of nowhere, but it had been open land. The forests here made it feel so different.
“I don’t actually think that you’d kick me out,” I told him.
“Good. I wouldn’t ever do that, not even to a stranger. Which you aren’t.”
It was exactly what I’d been thinking, too. I’d been trying to convince myself of the fact that I didn’t know him—our closest connection had been on the TV screen as I knelt in front of it to watch his games late at night with the sound turned down! But in spite of what I’d told him and in spite of what I’d repeated to myself, it didn’t really feel like he was a stranger at all. He was the same person who had come in a borrowed truck with a borrowed mower to chop down the grass in my grandma’s front yard. He was the same person who had thrown that jackass down two flights of stairs for being a bully. He was the same Will Bodine, despite the time that had passed, and despite the money and the fame he’d acquired.
I was the same, too, in all the ways that mattered. I hadn’t changed much from the girl who’d walked into high school in shoes that didn’t fit, who didn’t understand how lockers worked, who hadn’t sat in a classroom, and who had certainly never met anyone like him before. And if neither of us had changed, then this was going to end in a disaster, all over again…at least, it would for me.
Chapter 6
“Tell me more. The real stuff, not this boring shit.” She frowned. “You sound like you’re reading to me from Will Bodine’s official Woodsmen bio.”
That made sense because I had been, pretty much. Since the party at Roy’s Tavern, I wasn’t giving out personal information about him, at least not the kind that only I would know. So now, as we sat in this coffee shop, I was being careful. When Kirsten had asked me about Will and had demanded that I spill everything about him, I’d answered with things that were publicly available, like his DOB and where he’d gone to college. I didn’t mention his problem with avocados or anything else that he considered private.
“I won’t tell you a bunch of secrets about him,” I answered her. “That would be a weird thing to do to a friend.”
She switched tactics and got specific instead of making general demands for information. “Does he have kids that no one knows about? A secret girlfriend?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said, “but again, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“The only thing to do in this place is stalk the Woodsmen,” she sighed. “It’s so goddamn boring here compared to how I really live. I’m from The City.”
“I’m from a city, too,” I said, because I had lived for the last few years in Chattanooga.
“No, I’m fromTheCity. New York,” she explained, and when I asked more about that, it turned out she was from a suburb and not the actual city part of The City. “It counts. My grandmother wanted me to visit her so that she and I could get to know each other better but there was a reason that my dad moved away and never came back. It’s so goddamn boring,” she repeated.
“Your grandma seems nice, though.” It was nice that she’d given away free furniture, for example, and it was nice that she’d tried to make a connection for her granddaughter with me.
But Kirsten’s interest really was in the Woodsmen team, and she told me how she was pursuing that: by pursuing the players. She’d been hanging out at the cooler bars where they might have shown up and going to the nicest restaurants where they might have eaten, in order to get closer to them. She’d found out some of their addresses and had been loitering in front of their residences, too. They were all away on their preseason team trip right now, though, so there was no one to follow around.
“I got Will Bodine’s address,” she mentioned. “I’ve been on his street a couple of times.”
“That’s kind of strange,” I said. “I don’t really like that.” I felt a wash of guilt as I spoke, remembering how I had acted at timesin the past. “I don’t think you would like it either, if a stranger kept showing up where you live near the city.”
“It’s close enough that it counts as part of The City. I live very close, very. It’s almost like I’m there—I mean, I am there.”
“Wherever you happen to live, you shouldn’t be bothering the Woodsmen players.”
“They have to expect it,” she informed me. “That’s the price of being famous. They get paid a lot to be entertainers, so they deserve it.”
“Aren’t they athletes?”
“No, they aren’t!” She rolled her eyes. “This is just like when Hollywood people post a hundred videos of themselves asking fans to stop looking and leave them alone.”
“Will definitely doesn’t want fans to stalk him,” I assured her. “He wants to play football and keep his life private.”
“He gets money from endorsements. If people didn’t care who he was, then companies wouldn’t pay him to promote their products.”
Well, that was true. “Still,” I said, “I don’t think you should hang out where the Woodsmen live. That’s just weird.”
She shrugged. “I’m here for a few more weeks before I have to go back to school and I made lists of the players who are taken, the ones who are free, and the ones who are taken but still respond to DMs. So far, there are nineteen who are fully available and seven more who are open for fun.”
