Rogue Hearts

by Tamsen Parker

  She smiled. “I get that. There’s been a LOT of that, starting with the blackmail notebook.”

  “That was you, right? Of course, it was.”

  “I broke it, but when the papers were needed, I turned it over to the appropriate authorities. Wasn’t mine to keep, you know?”

  He nodded; she could see the weight of knowledge and secrets in his eyes. “Yeah. I do.”

  He may have said something else, but she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that his voice had started to envelop her, first up close, and then from far away. Then there was silence, until she realized she was sitting with her face on the table, her empty teacup just out of reach.

  “I’m so sorry,” she managed. “That wasn’t nice.”

  He shook it off. “It’s fine. More importantly, I have two bedrooms in this ridiculous monstrosity. One has blackout curtains and a gorgeous bed. The other has, from what I hear, slightly comfortable bunk beds.”

  “The blackout curtains, please,” she said, without thinking about it further.

  He nodded. “The bedroom is this way.” He gestured towards the back of the RV, and she headed towards the closed door that had to be the bedroom in question.

  “Dinner will be ready by the time you wake up,” he said. But she barely heard him; she hadn’t realized how tired she was until she closed her eyes, wrapped up in his scent. Oblivion came, darkness stepped through her brain, carrying images of a tall guy with dirty blonde hair and an accent she couldn’t possibly duplicate.

  The small trailer bedroom looked different in the dark, secrets just beyond her grasp. And way too many feelings surrounded her stomach. He was her conduit to this story. She needed to ignore those feelings and get down to business.

  She stretched out her arms and headed into the small, attached bathroom to splash cold water on her face. Glad she didn’t have to look at herself in the mirror. No makeup, which meant the acne-prone skin and dark circles that made her look like a perpetual teenager would greet her.

  She shook her head, hoping her hair would behave to some degree. She was off camera, but she wanted to make a non-shitty impression. She was professional and she…

  “Lasagna?” His voice came through the bedroom door. “That work?”

  She opened the door, and she stared at him. “You cook?”

  He laughed. “Yes. I do. I like to eat, so,” he shrugged. “I cook. I also have questions.”

  “Fair enough,” she replied. “I mean you need to trust me, right?”

  He nodded. “I do.” And then he gestured to the table. “I figure you can tell me about the Blue Chorus.”

  She swallowed. “What?”

  He smiled back at her. “Over dinner, you tell me the story of the Blue Chorus. I figure it’s you.”

  He’d caught her off guard. Which was expected. But he was a reporter, too; knew his sources and how to work them. How to read the news, and how to find evidence of the skeletons in the closet.

  “So,” she said as she bit into a piece of the garlic bread. “This is kinda amazing, actually.”

  He nodded; this was all his father’s recipe, his father’s family’s contribution to his childhood. “Thank you. Glad you like it.”

  “So, chorus?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. There’s always the story, right? Like there’s a difference between knowing the what, and what I find more interesting. Which is knowing the how.” He also was way too interested in what made her tick.

  “As I told you, I was doing the international desk at the paper, and then suddenly I got a scoop and ended up on the national politics side. Suddenly my career was completely different, and I needed a way to process it. Like, Baum was thrilled, my parents and some of my friends were confused, and I didn’t know which end was up.”

  He knew that feeling, being upside down and confused, all too well. It had been his companion for that past few months. That and the box sitting at the top of his closet. “I get the whole upside-down thing. But why a newsletter? What’s the link there?”

  She shook her head and her eyes brightened. “It was the strangest thing, really. I got this cool newsletter about music, and it turned out the guy behind it was also in politics. And I thought what the hell. I could do my own, highlighting the things that made the transition to national politics easier; the things that stood out to me. And I thought that maybe other people might like it, too. But, I kept it separate because I didn’t want people to read the newsletter or think about the things in it because I was writing it. Or think worse about them or me. Anyway, when I ended up taking over Hockey for Hope…”

  He’d wanted to learn more about that program, and she oversaw it? Or at least held it temporarily? He’d done some research on it: former pros, and any interested experienced parties playing exhibition hockey for rotating charity causes. And he thought it was amazing. He’d even pondered watching a few games when he was up to cover the Pals/Colonials home series and turning them into a feature, contributing his voice for the cause if they wanted. But he needed to keep it cool, or at least try to. “That was interesting. Is interesting. Adam Klein, former team Canada and Max…”

  “Yes,” she said, as if she’d told the story way too many times before, and he had failed to keep his fascination to himself. “They were stuck; Klein had to leave the city and Max was in hiding, so they asked me.”

  He sat back against the bench, smiled up at her. “Really. What? Why? ”

  She took another bite of the lasagna and then stared up at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  He shook his head. “Nope. I’ve been following things generally, but I don’t know the specifics. To be quite honest, I don’t have time. I…”

  The sudden cracking sound broke the silence of the RV, and he put his arm around her. “Down,” he yelled as he fell to the ground, cushioning her around him. She was smaller, tight, nervous under his hold.

  They were silent, her breath against his neck. In the stillness, there was nothing but each other.

  Don’t go there.

  But he couldn’t help himself. She was gorgeous, insightful and brilliant.

  Finally, he’d relaxed; enough time had passed for him to be reassured. “Okay,” he said.

  She got up with him, carefully moving to the darkened front window of the RV, only to see a pile of snow and a large tree branch. He was still tied in knots though.

  “You’re getting threats?”

  It felt weird to admit, but it was happening. “Yeah,” he said, staring out at the window, anywhere but at her. “It’s why I’m here.”

  He turned back to the lasagna, half wondering if he should have kept it in the over or…

  “I’m hungry enough to eat it cold,” she told him, stopping his racing thoughts.

  “I hope you like it,” he managed, suddenly tongue tied again.

  “So, what happened? You were telling me?”

  He shoved himself back to reality; there was a story to tell. “Pals’ game, they lost. I was talking to a few of the players, getting postgame stuff. And as I was leaving the room, heading to the train, he stops me.”

  “He…?”

  “Paul Nunzio. The man, the myth.” He shook his head, remembering that not everybody knew Paul, his heart, his voice and his manner. Not everybody had watched Paul interact with the world for over twenty years. “The Pals longest serving usher, the guy who greets everybody. Everybody. Used to be the guy who greeted everybody as they came into the old barn. In the new one, he just meanders around, saying hi to those who know him.”

  “Ooooh, right. The usher guy you told me about earlier. You didn’t mention his name though.”

  He shook his head, grabbed his glass of water. “Right. So, we have Paul Nunzio, and my stick to sports issue. Now I’ll tell you why, how even, they’re…we’re connected.” He took a swallow and stood. “Be right back.”

  John couldn’t go very far; but as she scarfed down her lasagna, Sophie wondered what he could be bringing her. What could
he have in his possession that would explain why he was the one Nunzio would trust with these files? She found the dude hot, for sure, and intellectually fascinating and stimulating in a way she wouldn’t permit herself to examine until the proverbial later.

  “Alright,” he said, the British crackling in his tones. “Here we go.”

  She looked up and saw him, standing just off to the side of the table, cradling what looked like a binder. He stood there for a minute as he watched him, holding the binder closely before carefully placing it on the table in front of her.

  “The first time I met Paul Nunzio, I was about 8 years old,” he began, as he opened the binder. “He bought me a hot dog when I got lost, kept me company until my father came to get me. Mum had me write him a thank you note. We were…pen pals of a sort. When we went back to England, that became a real thing; I wrote him, and he wrote me back, telling me about the games, things I’d missed. What the snow was like in New Jersey.” He smiled, and the world brightened. “This is a collection of his letters. I kept all of them.”

  She pushed away the plate, even though it was half full, to get to the binder. Reading the years of correspondence would give her the context, would teach her about this man, this Nunzio guy. Or at least his connection to John DiCenza. This walking conundrum who held her attention in a way he shouldn’t.

  The letters were painstakingly neat, the handwriting correct, as if each word was of the utmost importance. Sloped script on yellowing paper. There were newspaper articles about championships, an autograph and a smile. Pictures of a snowy backyard, talk of family and what the air in Newark smelled like. And those two separate puzzle pieces, the principled hockey reporter and the grandfatherly usher were suddenly connected in a story she was enjoying. “What happened after you got on the beat, or how did you get your job?”

  “I didn’t know what I wanted. I ended up going to university and falling in love with the newspaper. But not politics, not the kind of knock down drag out drama that I found everywhere else. I wanted my politics, but I didn’t want my job to be politics, right?”

  She nodded. “You wanted to be informed, but you didn’t want to have to live with it.”

  “Right. That’s when I started writing sports. I could live with that drama. Hell, that sort of drama, knock down drag out rivalry discussion was in my blood. Still is in my blood. Pals. Other sports where it felt like life or death, though it isn’t. I could live with that. When it became politics, when politics became about people, I could live with that too, y’know?”

  She smiled. “Politics was policy, now policy is about who you can harm the most. Separating, division…”

  “The idea that people want to legislate others’ humanity is absolutely bloody fucking stupid at bare minimum. Who people love, where they worship…their bare humanity is not ever and should not be ever in question. Ever. Black lives matter, separation of church and state, punch all the Nazis, no selective immigration bans. Because fuck if my Mum wasn’t the…”

  She smiled. All his energy was about to explode all over her, and she wasn’t the only one. “Okay. I get it. I absolutely get it. You have to stand up. Hell. I mean what happened at that temple in DC—it killed me. It broke my heart. So many instances of hate crimes, so many more than years before. And the thing is we know it’s always been there, sitting below the surface. And we’re just seeing more of it because these people think it’s okay.”

  “It’s awful.” He sighed. “And because I felt so strongly, like I told you, when it came for me to open my mouth, I didn’t hesitate. Waded right into the fray, and I was so annoyed about what happened that I wrote an article about how stupid it was to force people to ‘stick to sports’ when so much was at stake. When, as we said, politics was people, right?” He reached over her shoulder, flipping the page in the binder. “I wrote that article, and he, Nunzio, sent it back to me.”

  She was confused at first; he’d sent it back as if I was a letter he didn’t want or? “Um…”

  He smiled, rested an arm on her shoulder, and pointed to the transparent plastic sheet. “Here,” he said. “He sent it to me with this letter.”

  She nodded, focused in on the scrawl on the newspaper and on the white page above it. “I’m so proud of you,” she read, the loopy scrawl giving her a portrait of a moment in time.

  “You write about our boys with such panache and strength. And those convictions you have make me proud. I remember that hot dog, I remember your dad, and I remember you as a kid. I’m so proud to know the man you’ve become.”

  She blew out a breath and stared up at him. “Wow.”

  He nodded, his hair brushing against her cheek. “Yeah. That was a moment. I stood up because so many couldn’t. And then I wrote the article. And again, we get back to the privilege conversation. I have it, so many don’t. So, I stood up. And Empire bloggers, people I knew from the women’s team, the Pixie family, so many people stood up for me and the way I stood up for everybody who’d put themselves on the line for their beliefs. Stick to sports my arse. My paper stood up for me, which was…”

  She looked up at him, met those green eyes of his. “Unexpected?”

  He nodded. “Papers are cutting back on sports coverage, the by-subscription news blogs are filling that gap, but sportswriters all over are losing their jobs. People are scrambling. I was worried. Didn’t think they’d stick up for a hockey beat guy, you know?”

  She knew all too well; she’d just left a paper that didn’t stand up for its people. Or, well, it did, just demonstrated how fickle their desire to have reporters report the truth. “Yeah. So…”

  He shrugged. “They did, I’m still here and,” He paused, gesturing widely again, “here.”

  Sophie nodded, then desperately attempted to hold back the yawn that wanted to explode out of her. She had so much work to do, so much information to digest; and yet the yawn was more powerful than her will to stay awake.

  “How long do you have?”

  She rubbed her eyes and thought about it. “Three days. Except,” she glanced at her watch and saw the time. What day was it even? “Today’s still Monday, right?”

  “Skin of the teeth, but yeah.” He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. “We…you…I’m going to bed. You might want to as well?”

  She nodded gratefully.

  “Take the bed; you’re still exhausted. And pick a bathroom; you’re fine either way.”

  The word tired seemed an understatement when applying it to him. His phrases slid sideways on his tongue and his eyes lost the will to focus. “Thank you,” she said. “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “It’s no problem.” Hopefully, he understood ‘this’ meant hosting and feeding her, not just giving her the material.

  She gave him as much of a smile as she had the energy to. “Goodnight, John.”

  “Goodnight, Sophie.”

  The sound of his voice saying her name gave her enough warmth for the rest of the night, and probably into next year. But she wouldn’t dwell on that, or dream of him.

  Two: Tuesday

  Coffee had a distinct smell. And despite how exhausted she’d been, Sophie was entirely incapable of sleeping when it was being brewed. No matter how much she wanted to. Which, if she was going to be perfectly honest, was not at all. She stretched, threw a sweatshirt on over the leggings and tee shirt she’d used as pajamas, and opened the door that separated the bedroom from the kitchen. “I smell coffee,” she said.

  “Have it right here. Sleep all right?”

  In the morning light, John still looked gorgeous, but she could recognize the exhausted cast to his features. For a moment, she luxuriated in the fact that she hadn’t woken up more tired than she’d been. She’d had a good night’s sleep. “Like a log.” And then because she couldn’t really explain why, she pushed a little further. “I haven’t slept that well in ages.” She paused, then looked up at him. “What the hell did you do to the bed?”

  Instead of answering in th
e flippant way she expected after he nodded and smirked, he crossed his arms and stared at her. “When’s the last time you slept in one consistently?”

  That was a question she didn’t expect from a guy who looked like he hadn’t slept at all, whether it was because he’d contorted his big body to sleep on the small couch or bunk or had been faced with nightmares when he shut his eyes.

  All the same she tried to remember when her last strong night of sleep was. Was it on Sam’s couch or the five minutes she got when she’d started to close her DC apartment? She wasn’t sure; time had started to move so quickly she wasn’t sure which end was up. “I think…on a friend’s couch because he was out of town; maybe? Or possibly when…I was…” She shook her head. “I’m not sure, actually.”

  There was that smirk again, and the hint of something glorious on his cheeks. “So not recently. I slept like a log without expecting it the first night I got here. I drove like a bat out of hell. I’d been so stressed, I left as soon as I could…”

  Of course, he was stressed; death threats would do that to a person. She could only hope they had been electronic. “Why here? I mean it’s far, true, out of the way, but here?”

  He shook his head. “M’dad’s brother, Steve. Nobody goes camping in the winter, he said, not even here, so you take it.”

  The feeling of foreboding, the nerves that jittered around inside of her as she contemplated the potential. “I…”

  “Parents are fine,” he replied a bit too quickly, half glancing over his shoulder as if he could see through the windows of the Georgetown. “Paul Nunzio is safe as far as I know. Trying not to contact any of them, you know? Don’t want to draw anybody’s attention.”

  She nodded. She knew that feeling all too well; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked to her parents, aside from the five-minute progress report. They couldn’t wait to tape her show and tell everybody from the temple to watch, if they hadn’t already. “Yeah,” she began, “I…”

  Cut off by a yawn.