Rick wiped a hand over his mouth, hiding a smile of his own.
"It's a little funny," I said between peals of laughter. "You look like I suggested you walk naked through Pike Place."
"Glad my decisiveness is so entertaining," he mumbled, crossing his arms over his chest.
I breathed out slowly, finally getting control of myself. "I'm sorry."
He lifted his hand in a gesture of dismissal. "It's fine. As long as you guys aren't going to make me pretend I'm friends with someone, we'll be okay."
"You can absolutely film by yourself." Rick kept tapping his pencil, now that the moment was over. "We can do some voiceover stuff. We'll have to do that anyway. As long as we're getting your thoughts, whether it's through dialogue with someone else or through interviews, we'll be good to go."
I was flipping through the printouts of the houses I'd found for Noah when something occurred to me.
"Doesn't your dad still live in town?" I asked before I thought better of it. "I thought he loved it here."
Every eye in the room swiveled in my direction, and my throat turned to sticky sand.
Well, shit.
Rick's pencil was frozen, hovering over the surface of the paper. "You know his dad?"
I shifted slightly, refusing to meet Noah's steady, unrelenting gaze. "I know he has a dad. Doesn’t everyone?"
What a blatant non-answer, and Rick knew it. He wasn't good at his job for nothing.
When I felt Noah's eyes boring into my profile, I turned and met them head-on.
Sorry, I mouthed. Those eyes closed briefly as he sighed, and that was as good as permission in my book.
"Noah and his dad used to be our next-door neighbors," I told Rick and Marty, who suddenly looked very interested in what I had to say.
"How long ago was this?"
"I was in high school when they moved somewhere else," I said.
Oh, and how complicated that explanation was. For months, I hadn't caught a single glimpse of Noah or his father, and then one day, a For Sale sign popped up in their front yard. At sixteen, it all felt very dramatic. It made me feel like a horrible person; that what I’d done was so bad that they’d moved away. In retrospect, I couldn't really blame his dad even though it had caused more than a few dramatic tears when I thought I'd never see him again.
"Didn't like the neighbors?" Rick asked Noah with a smile.
He was saying it innocently, but it caused my neck to go hot regardless. Noah, to his credit, kept his face completely impassive when he answered. "Neighbors were just fine. The house was too big for us."
I pointed at Rick and Marty. "It's not a big deal, so don't make it one."
Rick held up his hands. "I'd never."
I gave him a look. "Okay, so I'll schedule with a few of these listing agents and make sure Marty is available to film. Do you need to be there, Rick?"
He shook his head. "I'll only be around about half the time. Marty is fine on his own for most of it, and you'll pick up fast what works and what doesn't in my absence. I'll be going back and forth between here and Tampa. We've got a rookie down there that we're filming right now too."
I nodded. "Besides house hunting, do we need anything else off field?"
Rick looked at Noah. "That's up to him. What do you like to do when you're not here?"
Noah folded his hands on the table and shrugged. "I work out. Watch film. Go for runs. Swim if I can."
"So, you work more," Rick supplied.
I smiled again.
Noah grimaced. "Nothing I do is all that interesting, trust me."
"They call you The Machine, right?" I asked.
His eyes sharpened, landing hot and fast on my face. "Yeah."
"Even machines need to be refueled. There has to be something you do, somewhere you that recharges you." I kept my gaze on him. "No one here is going to judge you, no matter what it is. But there has to be something that you keep for yourself, that isn't about football. Everyone has something like that."
"Your brother did?"
"Sure. He had us." I shrugged. "My sisters and I were his life, and it was a part of his life he kept private for a really long time. But once the stadium lights were off, and he’d showered off the sweat, he was back home, picking up toys and watching Disney movies and learning how to braid hair. His family refueled him."
Noah worked his jaw back and forth. The way he looked at me, it felt like it was just him and me in the room as he tried to decide if this was a place he could be honest. "The stars," he said gruffly.
"What about them?" I kept my voice gentle, like he'd spook at any second.
"I like astronomy. I would've minored in it if my dad had agreed." He cleared his throat. "My assistant in Miami will send my telescope as soon as we find a house."
Now this is a surprise, I thought pleasantly. This was the layer we needed to peel back, even if it took us the entire time to show what was underneath. "Where's your favorite place to go? To look at the stars."
"Here?"
"Anywhere. If you could go anywhere to look at the stars, where would it be?"
Noah let out a slow breath, his eyes taking on the hazy look of someone who'd just mentally transported somewhere else. Somewhere they wanted to be very, very badly. "My grandma's cabin in the Black Hills, South Dakota."
Rick nodded at me, just a tiny lift of his chin. Keep going.
"How come?" I asked.
"It's so quiet. So ... open. The mountains are different there than they are here. Less people. Less lights. Less pollution." He closed his eyes, and every line in his face disappeared as he imagined whatever it was that he was seeing in his head. Suddenly, I wanted to be there too, to see what it was like. "The sky is bigger there than anywhere else. It's the one place where I feel small."
Noah opened his eyes, and I felt a strange snapping on my heart. Like someone had pulled a rubber band, tightening that statement into place around the thing that pushed the blood through my body.
Without looking away, I knew there was a three-day window in the practice schedule just before preseason started.
"Does our budget include a weekend in South Dakota, Rick?" I asked, eyes still lasered in on Noah.
He smiled, and I saw his head move from me to Noah and back again.
"It does now," he answered.
Chapter Ten
Noah
"You cannot be serious."
When I tried, unsuccessfully, to duck my head through the opening, her answer was a helpless bout of laughter. It reminded me of a wind chime at my grandma's cabin, the light tinkling sound of the wind moving through the glass. I used to love that wind chime. Now it would remind me of Molly Ward's laughter. The thought made me frown. Which made her laugh even harder.
"This house was built for someone a foot shorter than me, Molly."
"Short people need places to live too," Marty reminded me, half his face hidden behind the ever-present camera.
I glared at him. "Aren't you supposed to be a silent observer?"
He grinned. Or half-grinned. "Everything that doesn't serve the narrative will end up on the cutting room floor anyway. Don't you worry about me, Griffin."
Serve the narrative. That kind of PR jargon made me want to rip through the drywall with my bare hands just so I didn't have to get it stuck in my head.
I leaned toward Molly. "If I start saying things like serve the narrative, punch me in the throat."
She nodded seriously. "Please say it now. I'd like to practice if that's okay."
"Hey. We agreed on a truce."
"Yes, yes," she said lightly. "We did, didn't we?"
It took me a moment to realize that the cameras were on us, like it had been ever since we arrived at the first house of the day. It was about thirty minutes east of Seattle, close to Seward Park. From the outside, it looked promising. Trimmed landscaping and a Frank Lloyd Wright architectural style that appealed to me. A little pricey, for just me, but it was close to the water and had a pool.
Then we walked in and realized it was built for someone probably a foot shorter than me. I'd hit my head on three doorframes already. Each hit took my mood from ambivalent, to annoyed, to fully irritated.