Page 41 of Lessons in Forgiving
Henry shrugged. “You can handle yourself.” His tone had dropped, and despite the noise—the commotion of a blowout party around us—I could pick up the softness in it. The fact I could hear him at all was a miracle. But it was like my ears filtered the pitch of his voice and drowned out everything else.
Like his voice was in my head, not coming out of his mouth.
“Next time you need me to beat someone up for you, give me a call, Paula,” Henry added playfully. He wasn’t joking. “But I know you can handle yourself just fine. Point in question.” His hand waved to the exit, which Jack was approaching now. Taking the last step, there wasn’t a lingering look back before he slipped through the door. “Are you okay, though?”
My eyes slid back to Henry. “Of course,” I said, even if I wasn’t quite sure. “Turns out he’s an asshole! Not surprised, few men aren’t.”
If Henry hadn’t broken up with me when I’d needed him most, I’d probably have gone as far as saying he was one of those few.
CHAPTER 17
NOW
After that, I managed to get back on track, remembered why I joined Henry on his night out in the first place, and actually managed some decent material. Most likely because the Jack incident, followed by the vastly different Henry-interaction, sobered me up enough to focus on the bigger picture again.
I needed to impress.
This profile had to show Eddie that he’d made a mistake (which he admitted to rarely), by benching me for a year. And more than that, it had to show whichever bigger press had expressed interest, that they were right to do so.
Which meant I was vigorously working on increasing my document’s word count at theHBPoffice. With the amount of time I’d been spending with Henry, it wasn’t hard. Noting down the conversations I hadn’t recorded with him, then the ones with his friends and teammates on Saturday, went down like butter. Easy.
Who would’ve thought that the real challenge was transcribing our post-run gym interview. Not for Eddie anymore, who’d been happy enough with the stuff I’d shared, after my butchered first attempt. But for me, to make sense of my notes later on, when I’d begin drafting the profile.
I was locked in, focused. My headphones were blocking out any distracting noise, which was usually very prominent at thePost. And yet I couldn’t concentrate.
PAULA:
This is what you usually do? Fifteen minutes of a light jog?
HENRY:
Yeah. Followed by an hour of weight training, and then another half an hour cooldown in the off season. Well, for about a year now, anyway. I changed it up around that time, put more of my focus on running.
The transcript made it sound like a normal, coherent conversation, but through my headphones, Henry’s words were paired with his heavy breathing, panting.
I could almostseethe way his chest heaved, the way his throat worked—all through a few minutes of audio I must’ve been so immersed in, I didn’t notice anything else around me.
Before I could get the next words down, or stop what was about to happen, Riley snatched one of the headphones out of my ear and plugged it into her own, hands on my desk, and leaning forward to get a better look at my screen, presumably.
I jumped. I gasped. And the moment I needed to recover was enough time for Riley’s eyes to triple in size. Her head snapped in my direction.
What is this?she mouthed, shellshocked by what she thought she’d discovered. A million things were going through her mind, and by the sheen of red on her dark skin, none of them were holy.
Another one of Henry’s huffs rang through the recording, and I finally turned the thing off.
“Paula!” she gasped. “I did not think you were the kind to—” Her eyes scanned my transcript again, hoping to find clues that would support her theory. “To get him off for information—”
“Dios mío!” I screeched. But she’d already said enough for me to glance around the office, scared someone had overheard her. When no heads turned our way, and no one peeked out from behind their screen, I turned back to her. “No. No, of course not!”
Riley’s perfectly trimmed eyebrows rose.
“Why is he all hot and bothered then?” She wiggled the little earpiece between us like a friendly reminder.
“He’s not—” I hesitated. It felt wrong to say it out loud. “That. He’s out of breath. Because we were at the gym.”Running five-minute miles.“And this was right after his cardio—”
“Cardio. Of course.”
I groaned, falling back into my chair, arms slack at my sides and kind of hoping a bolt of lightning would take me out.
