The first quarter dragged until I spotted him getting ready, and I reached out and grabbed Ed’s arm without meaning to. This was going to be spectacular. I prepared myself to be thrilled and stunned by sacks, forced fumbles, and tackles that resulted in negative yards. I tensed and waited.
“He was fine,” Ed told me a few minutes later as the Woodsmen offense came back out on the field. “He did his job.”
I nodded. “He did a great job,” I said, but then I looked more closely at my companion. With his own background in football, I knew that he could better interpret the action on the field. “What did you really think?” I asked.
“I think he did very well,” he said loyally and then he frowned at me, an expression which wasn’t usual for him. “Don’t tell him that he should have done better.”
“What? I wouldn’t! I would never.”
“Yeah, but don’t act disappointed, either. Sometimes you make a face when you’re not happy, like when you saw the new gym floor.”
I had ordered the new flooring in the color Charcoal and they’d installed Haze, which had also been fine…and I thought that I had hidden my disappointment. I’d been called out about that particular facial expression in the past, mostly by my dad before he also called me a bitch. I hadn’t thought that I made it anymore. “I’m not going to do that in front of Ronan. How could I be disappointed? He’s playing at the highest level of his sport and I’m nothing but thrilled.”
Ed seemed satisfied but honestly, it had shaken me to hear his warning. I was proud of what Ronan had achieved. I really was—so why was I wishing that he’d hurried the QB more or batted down the ball a few times? He was a Woodsmen and he was living the dream. And if I acted differently, then I really was a bitch.
The rest of the game went well. The Woodsmen won and he continued to play solid defense. Instead of going to the lounge afterwards where the rest of the friends and families waited, I said goodbye to Ed and went in the other direction, towards the building where I worked.
I let myself in with my card and walked down the silent hall to the Office of Special Projects. My desk looked oddly empty without Polyphemus’s presence but he was at my apartment now, permanently. The other odd thing was that Mr. Gowan’s door was closed, and he usually left it open when he wasn’t at work. That meant it was open most of the time, because his cousin-in-law Annie Whitaker-Gassman had been worried about his financial situation, but judging by the amount he traveled? He was flush.
I sat in my chair and looked at my screen but I didn’t bother to wake up my computer. I was still thinking about what Ed had said, how he’d been worried that I would make Ronan upset about his performance tonight. I wouldn’t have done that! I had high standards for myself, which made sense. Everyone should have had them. But I didn’t make other people feel bad about their own achievements. I did not do that. I didn’t.
I had made my dad miserable, of course, and he had mostly hated me for it. There were many reasons for his feelings but one of the biggest was how I’d always harangued him about complying with my standards, which he thought were much too stringent—
I turned and looked at Mr. Gowan’s door because I was sure that I’d just heard something coming from that direction, a noise like a thump. “Hello?” I called. But there was only silence and I returned to brooding. I wasn’t going to harangue Ronan, no matter what Ed thought. I understood that he was protective of his friend and it didn’t hurt my feelings that he thought he’d need to guard him from me. It didn’t.
I looked at the blank screen and imagined the awful things I might have said. “Ronan, I was disappointed by your stats tonight. You didn’t make the most of your minutes. Do you want to play more? Do you want to be a starter? Do you want a bigger paycheck? Why aren’t you doing your best?”
I’d heard things like that before. “Cate, are you going to stay in this bed crying or are you going to get up and get back to normal? Are you a baby? Do you have a backbone? Are you going to let this ruin your life?” They’d all been questions that I was asking in my own mind, of course, because my dad hadn’t cared. I’d been a bitch, a bitch to myself, but it had worked. At the end of the summer, I had gotten up and I had kept going.
But—
I heard it again, another thump from Mr. Gowan’s office. Either he was in there or it was an intruder who was after the drapes,because there was nothing else worth stealing—oh, there was his nice monitor (on which I’d seen him watching porn more than once). What kind of dumb thief would break in here, the Woodsmen stadium complex, for that?
No one would, which meant I was hearing Mr. Gowan himself. I got up and moved fast (just as fast as I went on the treadmill) through the door and down the hallway. Once I was outside, I pulled one of the same tricks that I had as a kid. When my dad had invited a woman over, I was obviously not allowed in the room. Usually, he’d told me to sit in his truck until they were done (as I’d gotten older, I’d had more of an understanding of what was happening inside but I’d tried not to think about it). He had usually parked around the corner or across the parking lot so I couldn’t see the company he was keeping, maybe out of some vestige of understanding that his behavior was inappropriate.
Anyway, I’d always been curious about his latest girlfriend/companion. After some trial and error, I’d discovered that the best way to spy was by getting low and remaining absolutely still. Even if you weren’t hidden by something, most people didn’t bother to look down. I had rarely been caught by my dad or spotted by the woman he was hurrying out the motel door when I’d gotten out of the truck to watch them.
I spied now, almost out of instinct: I crouched and made myself small next to a large, orange concrete block with directional signs pointing to various places around this huge campus. With my orange Wilder jersey, I blended right in and I’d acted not a moment too soon. I watched Mr. Gowan stride purposefullyfrom the building, not looking right or left and definitely not down, so he didn’t notice me. What was he doing here? Yes, he’d been in his office, but he wouldn’t have been working in his off-hours. He didn’t even work during the actual workday.
Judas Priest. I remembered how, weeks before, Ronan had asked me if my boss was sleeping in the building and if that was why he’d wanted the throw blanket and drapes. Was he? I stood and trailed after him, and there were enough people milling around the employee parking lot that I blended in. But I didn’t learn anything. Mr. Gowan continued to the executives’ lot and I watched him get into his car and drive off, all my questions unanswered.
“Cate!” Kiya called to me. She waved as she walked over, with Taylor, Myles, and Taylor’s friend (her hook-up friend) trailing behind her. “Ronan played great!”
I nodded and Myles repeated it and also mentioned that he was happy to see his old teammate in Woodsmen orange. I thought it was pretty big of him to say all that, since he’d also wanted it so much for himself. Victoria joined us and they discussed their plans for where to go next before they said goodbye and took off. I was glad to see Kiya with Myles again and as I walked back to the stadium, I remembered a secret dream I’d had as a kid that I would be a bridesmaid someday. That was in a period in which I knew not one other girl so it had seemed impossible, but if Kiya or my other lunch friends decided to get married…
I waited in the family lounge for Ronan and he took a little longer tonight to join me. “Hey,” he said as he finally came outof the locker room. “I was talking to Herb and Buzz, the actual guys.”
“What did they ask you?”
“They were interested in my journey here from the Junior Woodsmen so I gave that team a big plug. People really should be watching them play. Maybe if the bleachers were covered,” he suggested, and I thought that was a great idea. A pricey one, though.
I introduced him to Calla, the woman I’d been talking with as we’d waited, and Ronan nodded at me approvingly as we moved toward the door. “Told you that you could make friends,” he said.
“We just talked for a minute because she’s nice,” I answered. Then he had to stop outside and sign a lot of autographs, which was gratifying, before we continued to the parking lot.
“You coming over? I want to talk to you about something,” he said, which sounded ominous enough except…what could it have been?
Bad news, according to him. He explained when I arrived at his house and we were sitting at his kitchen table. “They set the date. My brother and his fiancée set a wedding date,” he clarified. “And he did it on a Woodsmen bye week, so that I’d be free.”
