A slap on the face

Clara's POV 

I arrived ten minutes early and sat in the third row of the bleachers.

The community centre court was smaller than Bryan's gymnasium, scuffed floors, faded three-point lines, a scoreboard with a broken digit that perpetually read 8 regardless of what anyone scored.

 A handful of other parents and observers dotted the bleachers. I had worn jeans again, and a soft navy top, and my hair down, and I had told myself twice in the car that this was nothing. It was just a friendly invitation, something to make me smile, like the message said.

Cameron came through the side door at exactly three o'clock with nine fourth-graders trailing behind him like a comet tail, all noise and elbows and mismatched trainers, arguing already about who was going to be on whose team. He was in grey sweats and a white t-shirt and he had a basketball tucked under one arm, and he was laughing at something one of the kids had said before he'd even crossed the half-court line.

I felt it the moment I saw him, that pull, it was low and warm and deeply inconvenient.

I looked at the scoreboard instead. It said 8 

He was extraordinary with them.

That was the thing I hadn't been prepared for — not just that he was patient, which he was, but that he was genuinely, effortlessly present with each of them in a way that seemed almost impossible to manufacture. He crouched down to a small girl's eye level when she couldn't get her dribble right, adjusted her wrist angle with two gentle fingers, and waited while she tried again, and when she got it, just three clean bounces in a row — he said there she is, like he'd known all along she had it in her and had simply been waiting for her to find it herself.

He challenged the ones who were coasting. A boy near the back kept looking at his phone in his pocket and Cameron called his name from across the court, "Marcus. You're bored because you're not working hard enough. Let's fix that." And Marcus, rather than sulking, actually grinned and picked up his effort like a dare had been issued.

He made them run drills that were slightly too hard for them and then stood back and watched them rise to meet it, calling out corrections and encouragement in the same easy breath, no, plant your left foot yes, exactly like that, see? You've had that in you the whole time.

I watched him and I felt something loosen in my chest that had been wound tight since morning.

And then because I am apparently incapable of giving myself a single uncomplicated hour, I noticed the way his t-shirt moved across his shoulders when he demonstrated a layup. The particular way he caught a badly thrown pass one-handed without looking, the unconscious, athletic grace of it. The line of his jaw when he turned his head. The sound of his laugh was low and real.

Stop it, Clara.

I pressed my hands together in my lap.

Stop looking at him like that. You are a married woman or rather an about to be divorced woman sitting in a community centre on a Tuesday afternoon and you are not , you are absolutely not….he looked up then, as if he'd felt me staring, and found me in the bleachers immediately, as though he'd known exactly where I was the entire time. He smiled. I smiled back before I could stop myself.

Idiot, I thought, and meant it warmly.

* * *

"You came," he said as he jogged to where I sat immediately after the game ended.

"I said I would."

"You look.." He paused, and his eyes moved over my face with that unhurried attention I was already beginning to recognise as his. "Better than last night. Whatever that means."

Something shifted in my chest. The fact that he'd thought about me… that he'd sent the message without even knowing how badly I would need it… pressed warm against my ribs.

"I'm okay," I said. "Thank you for this. For the invitation."

He nodded, rolling the basketball slowly between his palms. "What did you think?"

"Of the kids?" I looked out at the now-empty court. "They adore you. It's obvious." I paused. "But it's more than that. You see them. Each of them individually.”

He was quiet for a moment. "I was that kid," he said. "The one nobody waited for." He said it without self-pity, just as fact. "I had a coach when I was ten who had the patience to wait. Changed everything for me. I figure I owe the universe a few hours a week."

I looked at him. "You were an only child?"

"Yeah." A small smile. "Just me and my mom. She worked two jobs most of my childhood, I spent a lot of time alone, or at the court. The court was the only place I felt like I made sense." He tilted his head. "Kids like that, the quiet ones, the uncertain ones, I can spot them from across the room. I know what they need."

"To be seen," I said softly.

He turned and looked at me. "To be seen," he agreed.

The words sat between us for a moment, carrying more weight than their syllables accounted for. I felt them land somewhere deep and specific. I looked down at my hands.

"You're good at it," I said. "Seeing people."

"I try." A pause. "Some people make it easy."

I didn't ask him what he meant by that. I didn't need to.

We talked for a while longer, easily, the way we had the night before, conversation finding its own current and following it without effort. It made me forget what Joe told me, made me forget about my pains. He made me laugh twice, and each time he watched it happen with an expression of open, uncomplicated pleasure, like my laughing was something he had set out to accomplish and was privately satisfied by.

Gosh, I was so drawn to him that it frightened me.

I thought, involuntarily, about the last time I had wanted anyone.

*****

Two years ago.

Joe had come home from a deal that had collapsed, a contract worth more money than I could conceptualise, gone in a single afternoon and he had been drinking since before he landed. I heard it in his voice before I heard his key in the lock. 

He had come to me that night or come to the body of me, the available, convenient fact of me and I had let him because it had been so long and because some humiliated, hungry part of me was grateful for even that.

 He had not kissed me, he had not even looked at me with anything that resembled tenderness. He had turned me over and driven into me with the focused, mechanical urgency of a man working something out of his system, all force and rhythm and not a single soft word, and I had closed my eyes and held onto the headboard and told myself it was enough.

It lasted eleven minutes.

When it was over he had rolled away and been asleep in four minutes flat, and I had lain in the dark beside him feeling simultaneously like a woman and like furniture, and I had not known which feeling was more accurate.

In the morning he hadn't mentioned it. I hadn't either. Neither of us ever did.

That was two years ago, two years.

And now I was sitting here with warmth pooling low in my stomach over a man in grey sweats who had waited patiently for a nine-year-old to find her dribble, and I was thinking about Joe's voice this morning; you're not sexy, you've never been sexy, you're boring in bed and I was thinking: but what if he's right? Joe was the only man I had ever been with. The only reference point I had. What if the problem wasn't his cruelty, what if the problem was me, what if I genuinely was the thing he said I was…

"Hey." Cameron's voice jolted me back to reality.

I looked up.

He was watching me with that careful, unhurried attention and whatever he saw in my face made his expression shift into something gentler.

"Where did you go just now?" he asked softly.

"Nowhere good," I admitted.

He nodded slowly. 

I looked at him.

At the line of his jaw and the steadiness in his dark eyes and the way he was turned toward me with his whole body, entirely present, entirely focused, as though there was nowhere else he needed to be and nothing more important than this.

I leaned in and I kissed him.

Cameron Tucker sat perfectly motionless, his eyes open, his expression unreadable just like the face of a man who had just had the floor shift beneath him and was very carefully deciding what to do about it.

Then he said, quietly, with a tone I could not entirely decode:

"What the hell was that, Clara?"