It wasn’t until Kelly softened and the tension eased from her face and posture that Nate realized he’d made her believe he wasn’t over the divorce. “Oh. Nate, I’m sorry too. It’s really none of my business, but I want you to be happy, you know?”
“I do, and I appreciate that.”
Nate was saved from having to elaborate further when Aubrey took the chair across from Kelly, barely looking up from his book. Nate nudged the pastry bag at him, and he took it without looking.
“But I’m actually pretty happy being single,” Nate finished, which was also weirdly true. He hadn’t had one of those moments of self-pity in weeks.
She shrugged. “If you say so.”
Fortunately their flight was called for boarding before anyone could choose a more awkward conversation topic. Saved by the buzzer.
They did their pregame meeting in one of Amalie Arena’s conference rooms, throwing around ideas of how to fill the dead air.
“First guy to mention Alex Killorn went to Harvard buys dinner,” Aubrey suggested with a smirk.
Nate cracked up. “You’re on.”
“While I have you here,” Jess interrupted, “there’s something we should talk about.”
Aubrey and Nate locked eyes, then turned to her. Nate knew her serious business voice, and this wasn’t it, not exactly. This was stress, anxiety… maybe something else too.
Kelly straightened in her chair. “What’s going on, boss?”
Jess leaned back and stared up at the ceiling for a moment, drumming her fingers on the armrests. “The thing is, I don’t know.” She lifted her head and regarded each of them in turn. “I’m not going to lie to you—our decision to fire John Plum didn’t go over well with our usual audience. You all know ratings in our traditional market suffered in the wake of that, even though I stand by that decision.”
That sounded ominous. “I thought things were going better,” Nate prompted. Twitter loved them, or at least loved to talk about them, which was almost the same thing.
“They are. We’re actually up a couple points over where we were last year. That’s why I’m cautiously optimistic about the meeting the director of the board called me to. It’s the second week in December.”
Kelly leaned forward over the table. “Any idea what it’s about? Like, did you get a feeling, positive or negative…?”
“I got a notification from our calendar app.” Jess shook her head. “His assistant set it up. She doesn’t know anything either.”
“It might not be bad news.” Aubrey sat forward too. His gaze sharpened from lazy amusement into something focused and intent. “It could be they’re thinking of a time-slot change—more episodes, different format. What’s the guy like?”
Jess sighed. “He’s the kind of guy who takes weeks to make up his mind, but once he does, he’ll never change it.”
“There we go, then,” Aubrey said. “We have two and a half weeks to show him why the network should keep us.”
“So, no pressure,” Kelly deadpanned.
Nate looked at Aubrey, looked at Jess, then shrugged. “We’re professional athletes. Working under pressure is kind of our thing.”
NATE ANDAubrey did, in fact, work best under pressure. That night’s show in Tampa, they found another level to the back-and-forth that had made them a surprise hit on the internet, even if all Aubrey’s goading couldn’t coerce Nate to say the wordHarvard. Instead he managed to needle Nate about official NHL height statistics during intermission while Kelly was setting up to interview one of the Lightning players in the tunnel.
“I’m just saying, NHL height statistics are a little like”—don’t say Grindr, don’t say Grindr—“online dating profiles. Look, here’s yours. It says you’re five eleven.”
Nate gave him a long-suffering look—he wasmaybefive ten if Aubrey were being generous—but Aubrey could see the amusement playing behind his eyes. “And that’s our cue to go to Kelly outside the Bolts’ locker room, where she’ll be interviewing Tyler Johnson about the penalty kill, big saves from Vasilevskiy, and his power-play goal.”
The interview was smooth enough—typical hockey talk, full of buzzwords and rehearsed answers, signifying nothing—but when the video cut back to the two of them in the booth, Aubrey looked at Nate and said flatly, “If that man is five nine, I’m Evgeni Plushenko.”
This time Nate responded without missing a beat. “Maybe the NHL let a Russian judge take his measurements.”
Before Aubrey could recover from Nate making a figure-skating joke live on air, Nate went on, “And now for score updates from around the league,” and he had to scramble to keep up.
He was pretty sure it was a meme before they even left the arena.
The show staff had rooms for the night at the Marriott Waterside, but Aubrey still had that hankering for American Chinese food. He and Nate caught a cab after the game and ended up at Ming Garden, where Aubrey ate his weight in the house special lo mein while Nate put away a respectable amount of barbecue pork, both of them bickering good-naturedly the whole time.
