Fire & Ice

by Rachel Spangler

  “Callie,” she said sadly, “what Ella said today—”

  “Was rude and hurtful and—”

  “True. At least from a certain standpoint.”

  “Your standpoint?”

  Max clenched her teeth. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I decide what matters to me, and you just won the wing test, and also I like you in other ways, too.” Callie punctuated that phrase with a coy smile. “So if you don’t want to talk to me, I get it. I can tell it’s hard for you, and I hate that, but please just don’t tell me it doesn’t matter.”

  Max sighed. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Callie echoed. “Pass me the hot wings.”

  “That’s it?” Max asked, sliding the basket across the table.

  “Look, I told you, I’m ready whenever you are. That stands for multiple topics. Otherwise, yeah. It’s wing time.” And then she went back to eating as if nothing had happened.

  Max stared at her, noticing the way her hair fell over her shoulders and how she had a little dab of hot sauce in the corner of her mouth, and how her perfectly smooth skin seemed more flawless than any of the glossy celebrity photos on the walls. Her own heart stopped hammering, her palms stopped sweating, and her jaw unclenched. No one was pushing her. No one was judging her. No one was making assumptions. Callie had called her a friend, and more than that, she’d treated her like one. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had given her the benefit of the doubt. No one in her Rolodex of high-powered sports stars, no one in the wide field of famous sports reporters. No one, period.

  “I fell in love with someone else’s wife.” The words just slipped out of her.

  Callie glanced up, but didn’t speak.

  “I didn’t mean to. I was working on a story about the hardships of being an athlete’s wife. I mean, they are rich and privileged, and so many people would kill to be in their position, but the more I talked to them, the more I learned they didn’t always have an easy road. Loving someone so driven means you have to share them with their passion. You might not even be the thing they love most in the world.”

  Callie nodded.

  “And some athletes with long seasons are on the road more than they are home. Some of them don’t see their spouses for two weeks at a time. Like in baseball or . . . hockey.” Max blew out a slow breath. “That’s how I met Sylvia Garrick.”

  Instead of immediately pushing for more information, Callie pushed the hot wings a little closer to Max, and somehow that was the perfect response.

  “Her husband is kind of a big deal in hockey, and I knew of his reputation as a beast on the ice, but I never met him. In all the time I worked, and then socialized with, and then slept with Sylvia, I never once saw the man. He trained incessantly, and he was always off at preseason camps or traveling for games. On his off days, he always seemed to be traveling to meetings with trainers or doctors not affiliated with the team. I’d seen a lot of driven spouses, but his case seemed extreme, even to me.”

  “And, in your natural desire to find answers, you couldn’t help but go looking for them,” Callie supplied.

  “That’s the thing. I should’ve looked harder, but you know the old maxims about the simplest solution usually being the best one?”

  Callie nodded.

  “Well, Sylvia provided me with an easy answer. We had really bonded during my research phase, and we began to hang out. It was all very innocent at first. She called them ‘girls’ nights’ and we’d do drinks or movies with a diverse group of women, from sports wives to stockbrokers to designers. Maybe it was hubris, but I never thought twice about being included in their ranks, and that was my first mistake.”

  “I would’ve never thought twice about your socializing with other powerful women.”

  “Thanks,” Max said halfheartedly, “but eventually even I realized I didn’t really fit in with anyone but Sylvia. Soon she and I started doing our own outings, and I still can’t point to the moment those outings turned into dates. Maybe it would’ve been easier if it had happened all at once. Maybe some drastic shift would’ve thrown up a red flag, but it happened over months. We hadn’t even slept together the first time she showed me a bruise on her arm and said Victor had flown into one of his rages again.”

  “Again?” Callie asked.

  “She said it so casually, like it happened all the time. I was incensed at the thought of a hulking man tossing around this rail-thin woman who barely looked me in the eye. I told her it was unacceptable and if she wanted to leave, I would help her. She said he would come after her. I protested that I had the money and the connections to keep her safe. I also had access to the press. It was my fatal mistake.”

  “Any good person would have done the same, Max.”

  “But it wasn’t completely altruistic. We slept together for the first time that night. She went on and on about how safe she felt with me. How I was so much better and gentler and giving than anyone she’d ever been with.” Her face burned in shame. “I believed her, and more than that, I let it consume me. I got drunk from being needed. She became my drug of choice, but another month passed and she hadn’t left him.”

  “Why not?”

  “She kept saying she was too scared. I offered for her to move in. I offered to pay for the divorce attorney. I offered to pay for security, but she said he simply had too much power. His name carried more clout than mine. Every time we made love, she would cry afterward because she was stuck with him when she wanted to be with me more than anything.” Her stomach still roiled at the memories, for so many reasons. “Then, one night, she brought me syringes.”

  Callie’s eyebrows shot up. “Syringes?”

  “A handful of them, all used. She said Victor used them all the time and wouldn’t tell her why. Then she showed me another bruise and said he’d given it to her when she asked too many questions.”

  “Steroids?” Callie asked.

  Max felt more than a little relieved that Callie had made the assumption, even though she knew how this story ended. “It makes sense, right? It more than made sense. It was the missing piece. All the meetings with doctors not affiliated with the team, his hulking stature, his violent fits, Sylvia’s fear of him—steroids answered all the questions, and now I was standing there with a handful of used needles. It felt like she’d just handed me a silver bullet. I didn’t even stop to think. I loaded the gun and cocked it.”

  Callie grimaced at the analogy.

  “I’m not proud,” she said quickly. “I wasn’t a good reporter. I didn’t verify. I didn’t run tests.”

  “You had a lot of evidence.”

  “I had only one source.”

  “A source who should’ve been reliable. No one could’ve been closer to him.”

  “That’s what I told myself. She’d been intimate with the subject of my report, but I left out the part where she’d also been intimate with me.” She shook her head. “It was shoddy journalism, but at that point I wasn’t thinking about craft or ethics. I saw someone struggling to get out of a bad situation. It tripped something deep-seated in me.”

  “Because of your own upbringing?”

  She nodded. “I’d fought so hard to get myself out and up, and here was my chance to save someone else, someone I was head over heels for, someone who believed in me. It felt good, better than good. I felt like a hero, and I got off on that. I wanted to win her forever. I settled for the simplest explanation, and I ran with the story.”

  Callie hung her head.

  “Yeah, you know how this ends, right? Within hours of the story breaking, Victor held a press conference and announced to the world that he had type 1 diabetes. He’d been aggressively managing his condition with the help of dieticians, specialists, and whole-health experts, but as his pancreas had deteriorated, he’d recently begun to inject insulin, a fact he’d hidden from the team for fear they would deem him too big a health risk and end his career. He apologized for keeping the secret, but said he’d rather admit defeat than l
et the world think him a cheater.”

  Callie’s face had gone white, and Max suspected her own had turned hot-wing red. They must’ve looked like quite a pair, because the waitress hadn’t come near them in a long time.

  “I immediately printed a retraction, claiming I had been given bad information, but I still refused to reveal my source. After all, Sylvia had never told me he used steroids. I’d made the jump on my own. I hadn’t done the legwork.”

  “But surely she apologized,” Callie said. “Surely she wanted to help you.”

  “She stopped returning my calls,” Max said flatly. “At first I thought she must be trying to protect me. Then I was wracked with worry that Victor had found out she’d been my source and he’d hurt her. I drove myself almost insane with fear for her, but I didn’t want to put her at greater risk by pushing too hard to see her. I still believed everything else she’d told me about him, because . . . because I was an idiot.”

  “You were in love,” Callie corrected.

  “Same difference in this case. It took almost two weeks for the next story to break.”

  “Next story?”

  “Oh yeah, it gets worse, because once my fellow sports reporters smelled blood in the water, they were all willing to eat each other trying to find the source. And they already knew I was the one who’d sounded the false alarm. It took mere days to trace me back to Sylvia. People had seen us together. The other sports wives we’d hung out with were happy to sing. My neighbors reported seeing her at my apartment regularly. Suddenly the whole city knew we’d been sleeping together, and the stories began to spin.”

  “What did you say to your fellow reporters?”

  “Nothing!” she said quickly. “For all I knew, I’d just endangered the woman I loved. Now this man that I still believed to be a domestic abuser not only knew she shared his secret, but knew she’d also been having a lesbian affair. I sat quietly while my reputation swirled down the drain.”

  “You were willing to sacrifice everything you worked for to protect her?”

  “Yes. I already told you, I was stupid.”

  “Some might say admirable.”

  “I slept with another man’s wife and then published a false story in the hopes of rendering him powerless so that I could steal her away from him. Trust me, people called me a lot of things, but the word ‘admirable’ didn’t come up.”

  “Is she still with him?”

  Max snorted. “He divorced her quickly on the grounds of infidelities, plural.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Oh yeah. The court practically swooned as he described how his loving wife had sat stone-cold quiet through his diagnosis and early treatments, only to disappear when it became increasingly clear his time as a professional hockey player was coming to an end.”

  “She knew about the diabetes?”

  “The whole time,” Max said, some of her now-familiar anger beginning to swirl with the shame. “And while Victor jetted off to every specialist across the country, trying to find a way to stay on the ice, Sylvia began contacting every journalist she knew, trying to hedge her bets.”

  “But why?”

  “I’ve wondered that a million times, but I think she was trying to broker a more favorable divorce. She must’ve thought that if she could tarnish his image, he’d be easier to break in court. She also knew he was lying to the team because he loved the game so much. She banked on him loving hockey enough to give her what she wanted. She had to be blackmailing him, but she overplayed her hand, and he came clean. She took an undisclosed settlement when it became clear she’d slept with multiple reporters.”

  “You weren’t the only one,” Callie said flatly.

  “Not by a long shot. I was just the only one dumb enough to take the bait . . . all of it. I mean, as a writer I try to avoid clichés, but ‘hook, line, and sinker’ is a fitting image. I gave her the only thing she ever wanted from me, free press.”

  “She made love with you. You should’ve been able to trust her.”

  “Correction: She let me make love to her. It was always transactional for her. I was falling in love. She was working an angle to get what she needed. I was the only one willing to make the trade. Every one of my colleagues she approached either walked away or managed to get laid without getting emotionally involved. None of them developed feelings or hero complexes.”

  “Which is why they’re covering football while you’re sitting at the Buffalo Curling Club,” she summed up neatly.

  “Demoted, disgraced, and single while Victor has rebounded to an epic hockey season, and Sylvia has rebounded with the filthy rich son of a filthy rich Greek shipping magnate. They both ended up getting what they wanted. I got what I deserved.”

  Callie shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure you did. I mean, I can’t say I agree with the affair part as those things rarely end well, but even if Sylvia hadn’t slept with you, if she’d simply come to you as a friend and shown you bruises and syringes, wouldn’t you have still wanted to help?”

  She sat back, all the fight running out of her slumped shoulders. No one had ever asked her that question. “I don’t know.”

  “Really?” Callie pressed.

  She thought harder. It wasn’t easy to separate out would’ve-beens and hypotheticals.

  “What about this?” Callie tried a different angle. “What if I rolled up my sleeve and showed you bruises right now and said some man in my life was threatening me, or extorting me for money or favors, and I’m so broke that I can’t see a way out?”

  Her stomach roiled immediately. “Are you in trouble?”

  Callie smiled. “No, but I think you just answered my question.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did, with your eyes, with your body, with the fire in your voice. Max, you made a bad mistake, but you are not a bad person.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes completely unbidden. She hadn’t cried for months. Not since she’d realized the woman she’d risked everything for had used her for her press credentials, then left without looking back. Not since she’d realized Sylvia had never cared about her. Not since reporters she’d considered close friends had published detailed reports of her personal failings. Not since it had become clear her name and her reputation and her life’s work meant nothing to anyone anymore. No one, at any point in this whole thing, had ever cared about her own story, or her own heartbreak, her own remorse, at all.

  No one except Callie.

  Callie pulled her car into the curling club parking lot. The ride home had been quiet. Max hadn’t seemed nearly as high-strung as when they’d left, or as despondent as when she’d poured her heart out, but neither had she returned to her normal self. She stared out the window, only occasionally turning so Callie could make out her strong profile under the yellow cones of street lamps. She still had her strong jawline, but the muscles were tight. She still had the same gray eyes, but the focus had left them. She still had broad shoulders, but they carried a more pronounced slope. Callie suspected the self-assured Max she’d been drawn to last week still existed somewhere, only buried under several layers of mental and emotional exhaustion.

  “Thanks for the wings,” Max said as they pulled up next to her car.

  “It’s never a burden for me to eat wings,” she said with forced lightness.

  “Then, thank you for everything else.”

  She unbuckled her seat belt. “It’s what friends do.”

  “I don’t have a lot of friends anymore.”

  “You’ve got at least one.” Callie tried to keep her emotions in check. She wasn’t sure Max could handle any more heavy conversations tonight.

  They both climbed out of the car, and she walked around to meet Max between their two vehicles. “I mean it. I’m here if you ever want to talk, but you don’t owe me or anyone else any other explanations.”

  Max shook her head. “What about Ella and the others?”

  Callie glanced at their cars, all still in the lot. “I’ll deal
with them.”

  “You don’t have to defend me.”

  “I know,” she said, “and I’m not going to break your confidence in me, either.”

  Max shrugged. “Everyone already knows.”

  “No one else knows your side, but it’s not my place to tell it. I’m just saying, I’m the skip. It’s my job to take care of my team, and I will. You just worry about getting back to work.”

  “I’ve been trying to,” Max said. “I thought I had, but—”

  Callie pressed a finger to her lips. “Then go with that. You made a mistake, you faced the consequences, and now you’re moving forward.”

  “Callie, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then don’t say anything.”

  Max opened her mouth, then closed it. The two of them stared at each other for a long, slow minute, both seemingly waiting for a protest that didn’t come.

  Finally, Callie smiled slowly as the first hints of hope, and something more, stirred in her chest. Max mirrored the expression as they stood, mere inches apart, smiling at one another.

  They were going to be okay. She knew it with the same certainty she felt when a perfect shot left her hand. Then she leaned in and kissed Max, a soft, sweet, gentle kiss she refused to let become anything more before she stepped back.

  “I enjoy doing that,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Max nodded as her dark lashes fluttered back open.

  “But I think we both have other things we need to work on before we give in to those impulses again.”

  Max nodded once more. “I take it you’re going back to practice?”

  “Yes, and I think you should probably call it a night.”

  “Agreed.”

  “But you’re not going to disappear for another week.” She purposely didn’t phrase the comment as a question, and Max clearly noticed.

  “Got it, Skip.”

  The hint of lightness in her voice did wonders for Callie’s heart. She stepped back before she had the chance to change her mind, but that didn’t stop her from standing there and watching Max pull away.