Page 13 of Her Rival

JETT

I was two minutes late to the interview on purpose. Being two minutes late was a small free way of telling the universe I didn't want to be somewhere, and I'd been telling the universe that about this all weekend.

I came down the concourse from the locker room hallway, still smelling like the shower I'd taken too fast, hair wet, in the team polo Brynn had texted me at nine that morning to please for the love of god wear something that isn't a hoodie, this is a real magazine. The media room sat halfway down the long glass wall that ran the inside of the arena, the one with the team logo etched into it like a brand on a steer. Through the glass I could already see Brynn inside, fussing with the chairs, doing the Brynn thing of straightening them and re-straightening them and then shoving one out of alignment on purpose so she didn't look like she'd been fussing.

I'd forgotten Brynn was going to be there.

Made sense she would be. She was the team's community relations coordinator, and a national magazine cover story was about the most community-relations thing that could happen to the Vipers, and she'd been running point on the whole feature for a month. She'd told me as much at the bar Saturday night. I'd registered it the way I registered everything Brynn told me, which was about seventy percent.

I pushed through the glass door already running my mouth.

"Sorry, sorry, blame Coach, he kept us on the ice an extra fifteen because Moose lipped off about something, you know how he gets." I was working the charm before I was even fully in the room. "Bry, you look very impressive with the clipboard, by the way. Very career-woman of you. Where do you want me?"

"Sit anywhere, Sturgill, you absolute disaster." Brynn was grinning, that quick warm flash of hers, leaning back against the table. "Get in here. I want to introduce you."

I came around the table.

There was a woman sitting on the far side of it with her back angled half to the door, going through a notebook. Dark hair, navy something on her shoulders. She looked up as I came around.

The floor of the world dropped about a foot and came back up wrong.

I knew her face before I knew anything else. Knew it in my body, the way you know a stair that isn't there in the dark. That lurch. That drop. Nine years older and it didn't matter at all, because the bones of a face don't change, and I'd spent a significant and humiliating portion of my adolescence memorizing this one.

Ashley Hartley.

She was sitting in the media room at Caldwell Arena with a notebook in her lap and Ashley Hartley's eyes looking back at me out of Ashley Hartley's face. My mouth was still half-open from the joke I'd been making. And somewhere very far away Brynn was saying, oblivious and delighted, "This is my best friend in the world. I've been telling you about her for, what, a year and a half? Dani. Dani, Jett. Jett, Dani. Try not to make her hate you in the first five minutes."

And the second thing hit, right behind the first, and it was somehow worse.

Brynn's Dani.

Brynn's Dani. The fast-talking nightmare best friend Brynn had described to me at the bar three nights ago. The mystery friend she'd flown in for the championship. Brynn's Dani had a face on her, and the face was Ashley Hartley.

Brynn's Dani was Ashley.

The two facts slammed into each other in my chest, and the wreckage produced a third, the one that actually took the air out of me. She'd been at the championship. Eight months ago. She'd been in the building when I won the championship. She'd been Brynn's mystery friend up in the owner's box that night, the one Brynn kept pointing at across the ice, the one I never went up to meet because I'd been a little busy winning a championship.

She had watched me. From up there. She'd watched the whole thing.

She'd been in my life for a year and a half through Brynn and I'd never connected the two. Because why would I. The universe is not in the habit of telling you who your best friend's best friend is. And she had known the whole time.

She had known exactly who I was.

And she'd let Brynn fly her in for that game. She'd come into this city last March, sat in the owner's box, watched me lift the trophy, and said nothing.

All of that happened in about three seconds.

I know it was three seconds because Brynn kept watching me with the expectant look she got when she introduced people. The smile not quite slipping yet. Just starting to do the small thing it did when something wasn't landing the way she'd expected. She knew my reactions. Two and a half years she'd known me, almost, two of them this close, and she knew the difference between the version of me that walked into a room and the version I was supposed to walk into a room as. She was looking at me like she was running a check on a piece of equipment that didn't quite sound right.

Here's the thing I'll never fully be able to explain. Not to Rhett later. Not to anybody.

I had every right, in that second, to burn it down. I could have said we've met. I could have said funny story, Bry, sit down for this one. I could have stood up and walked straight to Coach's office and said get me a different writer, that one and I have history, ask her about homecoming. I had the match and the gasoline both, right there in my hand. And the woman across the table knew it. I could see that she knew it. She was sitting so still she might have been holding her breath, waiting to find out what I'd do with the thing I was holding.

I sat down.

I don't know why. I've turned it over a thousand times. The honest version, the one I didn't understand until much later, is this. To light the match I'd have had to tell Brynn. With Brynn in the room I couldn't say one true word about Ashley Hartley without saying all the others. And the others meant a kid in a too-big suit, six miles home in dress shoes, the boy who flinched. Brynn would've done the thing Brynn does, which is love me harder once she knows. Which was the precise thing I'd spent eight years and a hell of a lot of money making sure nobody in this life ever got to do. I'd built a man Brynn loved like a brother. I was not going to hand her the boy he came from. Not for the pleasure of watching the woman across the table squirm.

The squirming wasn't worth the cost.