One Good Man
“I don’t know much about the game at all.”
I sat up straighter, the perfect diversion having fallen into my lap. “Nothing?”
Janey shrugged. “I know it’s a long game, and hardly anyone scores.”
I had to bite back a laugh. “Why did Antoine send you to interview me?”
“The other guy was sick.” She raised a brow. “Why? Not used to having someone unfamiliar with your glory and achievements? Sorry to disappoint, but I’m only here to get a little background on you, and talk about your upcoming match against….” She consulted her notes. “Consolat Marseille.”
I burst out laughing. I loved her prickliness. Her refusal to flatter me like so many others—men and women—did was like a goddamn breath of fresh air after breathing in the stench of my own ‘talent’ for so long. I wanted to break off the cocky asshole act I kept up to keep people at a distance. I wanted to talk to this girl. But I couldn’t talk to anyone. Not about the truth.
“Here’s your article,” I said, “Paris Central wins. The End.”
“Thanks to you?” she asked. “The star forward?”
I let a sly grin lift one corner of my mouth. “Do you even know what a forward does?”
“Runs a lot? Tries to kick a ball into a net?”
Another laugh burst out of me. “Yes, that’s true. Forwards do a lot of running. But I’m not just a forward. I’m the center forward. The striker.” I leaned over the table, and dropped my voice an octave. “Strikers do all the scoring.”
Janey shot me a look and then checked her watch. “Three minutes.”
I blinked. “What is three minutes?”
“How long it took you to hit on me, thereby turning this interview into the same as every other interview, where I’m not taken seriously and now just want to leave as soon as possible.”
My smile faltered and I sat back in my chair. She’d been burned before. Of course she had. The way men talked about and to women sometimes made me want to scream. But if it turned me into just another jock to her, so be it.
“You don’t know anything about football and you clearly don’t care, so why are you here at all?”
“That’s a good question,” she said. “I want to cover stories of substance…”
“Ah, I see. A bunch of guys kicking a ball up and down a pitch is beneath you.”
“It’s the story I have to write with the hopes of getting something better.”
“Better…”
Something better than football. A long-buried longing tried to rise up in me but I quelled it with practiced ease.
“You’re quite honest, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Look, I’m sure soccer—”
“Football.”
Her jaw clenched. “I’m sure football is very important to you and to France and to… all of Europe. But there are much bigger things happening in the world right now. Important, awful, history-making things that I’d rather be writing about than a ball game.”
She sat back, as if bracing herself for me to kick her out, not realizing she had put that deep longing of mine into words when I never had before.
“I agree,” I said, and turned my gaze from Janey to the kitchen window where Sophie was laboriously pouring a glass of lemonade from a heavy pitcher. “There are more important things in the world. More important things to do and be.”
“Like a doctor?” Janey asked softly.
My gaze dropped to the tape recorder’s slowly spinning wheels, ready to capture my words and make them real, let them out of this small backyard and share them beyond this American girl.
She leaned closer, into my space. “What happens to your medical studies if Paris Central moves up to Ligue 2?”