“Me too. I mean, I’ll be…no, I can’t really imagine how I would feel if I make it. I know how it will be if I don’t,” he told me. “It will be the same as what happened in college when I didn’t hear my name during the draft. Nobody around me said anything, that I should have made it or that they were sorry that no team picked me, or maybe that I had it coming because I wasn’t as good as I thought. They just pretended like they hadn’t noticed and then I figured out a way to keep playing. Nobody mentions it in the Juniors’ locker room when a guy comes back instead of moving up.” He smiled. “Like it’s a curse or something.”
“Do you look down on those guys? The ones who try out and don’t make it?”
“What?” He stopped smiling. “No. I always think, ‘Good for you. You tried it, you shot your shot.’” He pointed the bottle at me. “I see what you did there.”
“No one would be disappointed if you’re not on the roster.”
“I would be. Not you, though?”
I shook my head. “I would be sorry because you put in a lot of work, but that will also make you a better player for the Juniors. Things don’t always work out, sometimes because we mess up but sometimes because the situation just sucks. When I was trying to get an internship for the summer after my junior year of college, I found out that one of the other candidates had an aunt who was the head of the human relations department at the company. Obviously, he got the position and I was upset, but it didn’t have anything to do with my lack of qualifications. That could happen here.”
“If the nephew of some Woodsmen HR lady plays my position, I’m going to be pretty pissed off,” he said. “I get what you mean. We can control some things, but suckage is going to happen.”
“Suckage is going to happen, at times.” I really hoped that it wouldn’t happen this time.
“You know what the minimum salary is for rookies, right? I don’t earn that in five years with the Juniors. Can you imagine?”
No. I shook my head again. Maybe I’d earn that kind of money someday, if I ended up running my own department, but I couldn’t really imagine having it to spend.
Ronan sat up and sniffed. “Do you have something on the stove?”
We ended up going out, because what I’d had on the stove wasn’t fit for humans or animals, not even giant mice. At some point, I’d unknowingly added a lot of cumin to the pot. Pizza was looking good to both of us, and I drove the truck/SUV while he leaned the seat back and enjoyed the smooth ride of the vehicle he’d rebuilt.
We encountered a wrinkle once we got to the restaurant and walked in. He stopped and I ran into his back, then he turned and said, “You’re not going to like this.”
“What?” I peeked around him and saw what he meant. “Judas Priest. What is he doing?” Because there was Channing, Kiya’s Cado, and he was with a woman. But that woman wasn’t Kiya and when I asked Ronan, he knew that his friend didn’t have any sisters.
“Maybe it’s his cousin. Anyway, you said they broke up,” he reminded me.
“I said that Ithoughtthey broke up, but no one really knows because Kiya won’t discuss it. She won’t even tell Taylor and they’re best friends.” I stared at the back of the woman’s head and at that moment, Channing looked over and saw us. I watched him swallow.
“Come on,” Ronan told me. “Let’s order our food and then we’ll say hi to him. We don’t know that he’s doing anything wrong.”
No, he might not have been. If Channing and Kiya had split, then he was perfectly welcome to have dinner with as manywomen as he wanted. That was how life worked, and I had just been talking about how things could suck. It was also none of my business.
“Come on.” This time, Ronan took my hand to pull me along with him as we went to the counter, and I ordered absently enough that I wasn’t sure what I’d even gotten. Was I supposed to let Kiya know what was going on here tonight in the pizza restaurant? I’d never been in this position before, in the middle of a friend and her boyfriend. I’d never really had friends like this and I didn’t want to make the wrong decision.
“I don’t know what to do,” I muttered, and Ronan heard me.
“Let’s talk to Chan and see what’s up,” he said. He took my hand again and we walked there together.
The woman at that table was very nice. She smiled and said hello to both of us, and asked how we knew her date. She and Ronan talked for a minute but I had nothing to add and neither did Kiya’s former Cado. Channing sat staring at his glass of red wine and I stared at him, and neither of us said a word. When their conversation petered out, we found a table and Ronan took the side of the booth that faced them, so I had to stop watching.
“He didn’t admit to anything,” I noted.
“I didn’t really expect a full confession, did you? We don’t know that he has anything to confess.”
“He was acting plenty guilty.”
“Yeah, he was,” he agreed. “Are you going to tell Kiya?”
“Tell her what? Her ex was out with someone, or her boyfriend is cheating? She’ll be upset either way and probably blame me for it, because that’s what people do. They blame others for the failures in their lives.”
“That’s true. When our neighbor’s kids came to live with us, they were incredibly pissed,” he said. “The older boy took it out on my brother, but I made him stop. After that, he went back to focusing on the drug trade.”
“How did you make him stop?”
“I held him by his ankles over the side of a bridge. I wasn’t my full height and weight yet, but I’d been playing football and wrestling, so I was pretty strong and he was skinny like a worm. Lucky for him, he wasn’t slippery like a worm. That could have gone very wrong.”
