I stared at the screen until the words blurred.
Jace had been hard.
I had seen it. Not because I was looking for it. Because the room had shrunk to the space between his breath and mine, and every reaction in him had become impossible to miss. The panic afterward had been just as clear. He had wanted to run from me, from himself, from the shape of the thought neither of us had spoken.
I should have been relieved.
Instead, I sat in my office with my hands folded on the desk, my body still too aware of his, and understood with brutal clarity that I was not managing this.
I was waiting for it to happen.
Olivia called as I was driving home.
I almost let it go to voicemail, which told me enough about the man I was becoming to make my stomach turn. I answered through the car speakers.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hi. Bad time?”
“No. I’m on my way home.”
“You sound tired.”
“I am.”
She was quiet for a second. “Long practice?”
“Complicated practice.”
“That means Holloway.”
I kept my eyes on the road. “Among other things.”
“I saw a clip from media yesterday. He looks younger than I expected.”
“He’s twenty-three.”
“I know, but there’s twenty-three and then there’s still figuring out how to be in his own skin.” Her voice softened. Olivia was good at that, seeing people from a distance and naming things cleanly. “Is he difficult, or is he struggling?”
The question hit too close.
“Both,” I said.
“That sounds honest.”
I turned into our neighborhood. “How’s Dallas?”
“Fine. Meetings were endless. The hotel gym is terrible, but the room service has decent soup, so I’m surviving.”
Comfortable. Polite. Familiar.
We used to talk for an hour about nothing. Early in my playing days, I would call her from hotel rooms and she would describe whatever office disaster she had navigated that day, and I would tell her which rookie had lost his passport or which veteran refused to eat anything green. There had been ease once. Interest. A life we shared even when we were in different cities.
Now we exchanged updates like people maintaining a calendar.
“You home tonight?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
