Page 14 of Her Rival

So I sat down, crossed my arms, put on the camera smile, the one with all the teeth and none of me behind it, and said, "Hi. Sorry. Long weekend. Where do you want to start?"

Something flickered across Dani's face. Relief, maybe. Or the opposite of relief, the specific dread of realizing the guillotine wasn't going to fall now, which meant it could fall anytime, which was worse. She picked up her pen. Her hand wasn't quite steady, and she knew I could see it, and she let me see it anyway, which I'll admit I didn't expect.

"Thanks for doing this," she said. Her voice was lower than it had been at seventeen. Steadier than her hand.

"Yeah."

Across the table Brynn settled into the chair at the end with her clipboard and her laptop and the air of a woman who'd done the introductions and was going to let the grownups work. Except Brynn never quite stopped working a room she was in, and out of the corner of my eye I could feel her doing the small Brynn read on both of us.

Dani went into her first question. The championship goal, walk her through it. Easing in, soft pitch, the way any reasonable reporter starts, and I respected the craft of it for about half a second before I remembered I wasn't going to give her anything she could use.

So we did the interview.

If you'd watched it through the glass with the sound off, you'd have thought it was going fine. A reporter and a player, a table, a recorder, the logo on the wall. Me leaning back, relaxed, gesturing, doing the loose-limbed thing I do on camera. Her nodding, writing, asking the next one. Brynn down at the end of the table on her laptop, glancing up every couple minutes, doing the casual chaperone thing she had to do at a feature she'd booked and didn't want to crash.

With the sound on you'd have heard me give Dani Hartley nothing.

"Walk me through the championship goal," she said. Soft pitch, the way any reasonable reporter opens.

"Rhett won it off the boards, found me backdoor, I put it where the goalie wasn't." I gave her the camera version, the forty-second one I'd handed Kimmel, bow on top. "Skill, mostly. Some say generational. I'm too humble to confirm."

"Some say." She wrote nothing down. "Who says."

"Posterity. The banner they'll hang someday. A couple of beat guys who owe me money." It was a line that killed at the Hideout. She didn't laugh. She looked at me like a woman who'd been handed a decoy and was deciding whether it was worth the chase.

"You've used that one before."

"I use all the good ones before. It's what makes them good."

She asked about Rhett and I gave her the version with a shine on it and no fingerprints, the captain's-a-warrior, honor-to-share-the-ice stuff I'd hand any reporter. She wrote some of it down. I could tell which sentences bored her by the speed of the pen.

"Mm." She made a mark in the margin I'd have bet the house wasn't a quote. "Let's try one you haven't. What was it like, growing up where you grew up?"

Four questions in, and her hand was already on the one door I keep locked. Casual. Like she didn't know exactly which door it was. Like she hadn't spent a year of high school standing on the other side of it.

I shut it so smooth she probably couldn't tell I'd done it on purpose. "Aw, you know. Hockey was always the thing. Skated before I could walk."

"You skated before you could walk."

"Practically."

"You were fourteen." She said it to her notebook. Not a gotcha. Just the fact, set down quiet between us, so I'd know she was holding it.

"Huh. Must've misremembered."

"Must have."

That was the part that kept catching me, the whole forty-five minutes. She knew. Every dodge I made, she knew it was a dodge, because she'd known the kid I was dodging away from. I'd never done this interview, the lie-about-myself interview, in front of somebody who could check my work. It was like lying to a teacher who's already holding the answer key. Letting you do it anyway. Watching. Marking nothing down.

The other thing that kept catching me, which I'd have died before admitting to anyone in that room or any room, was that Ashley Hartley had grown into a woman.

Not the way a teenager grows into the version of themselves you've been picturing for nine years. The opposite. She'd grown out of the seventeen-year-old I'd kept her frozen as, and into someone else entirely. The face was the same face. The hair was darker, longer, pinned back in a way that meant she'd thought about it that morning. She'd put earrings in. She'd put on a sweater the color of a deep evening sky, sleeves rolled to her elbows because the room ran warm. Her forearms were a thing I had no right to be noticing. The soft shape where her wrist turned. The tendon working when she wrote. I caught my eyes on her hand a second too long when she paused to flip a page, and felt the click of my own brain registering it before I could shut it off.

I shut it off.

I shut it off so hard I had to physically reset my posture in the chair, which is a tell anyone in the room who knew me, which was Brynn, would catch.

I was sitting across from the worst thing that ever happened to me at seventeen, and my body had taken one half second to clock that the worst thing had become a beautiful woman. That was not a thing I was going to permit. Not for a fraction of a second. That kind of register was reserved for women I hadn't spent eight years cutting out of my life with a dull knife. Ashley Hartley did not get to be on the receiving end of any flicker of any part of me. Ever again. On principle.