"Whatever. The point is, you mentioned his smile with the textured detail that a person uses when they are remembering something that mattered to them emotionally, not professionally."
"You're reading into it."
"I'm reading you. You're an open book. Pun acknowledged and accepted."
I eat more pad see ew. Priya watches me eat more pad see ew with the patient, devastating attention of a woman who has known me since freshman orientation and who is never, in matters of emotional accuracy, wrong.
"He's nineteen," I say.
"I didn't say you were planning a wedding. I said you like him."
"He's a source."
"I know. That's why your face looks like that."
"Like what?"
"Like a man who just realized that the thing he's very good at (professional distance) is failing, and the failure is not a malfunction. It's a feature."
The dinner continues. Priya changes the subject, mercifully, to her sister's wedding planning (a drama of such scope and complexity that it makes the Reapers' playoff push seem straightforward by comparison). I laugh at the appropriate moments. I contribute commentary. I am, outwardly, a normal man having a normal dinner with a normal friend.
Inwardly, I am conducting an audit.
The audit goes like this: When did the professional interest in Jamie Kowalski become something else? Was it the hallway, when our eyes met and his stride hitched? Was it the featurecomment, when he stopped walking to say four words about a Mik Volkov quote? Was it the proprioception conversation, when he talked about hearing the ice and his hands moved and his face became the face of a person instead of a player? Was it the smile?
The audit produces no definitive origin point. The shift was a gradient, not a moment.
But the shift has happened. Priya saw it. Priya, who doesn't know Jamie's jersey number and couldn't find the Reapers' arena on a map, saw it through three mentions and one reference to a smile. If she can see it, other people will see it. And if other people can see it, the line I've been walking (the line between professional interest and personal want, between the journalist and the person) is not as invisible as I believed.
I drive home. My apartment is in East Atlanta, a one-bedroom in a renovated duplex that my landlord rents to me at a below-market rate because I helped her write a rental listing two years ago and she has decided this makes us family. The apartment is small and full of books (shelves on every wall, stacked on the nightstand, piled on the kitchen table) and the first thing I do when I walk in is take off my glasses and set them on the counter.
The glasses come off. The person underneath has just been correctly diagnosed by his best friend with a condition that has no professional remedy.
I like Jamie Kowalski. The liking is not professional. The liking is not appropriate. The liking is not compatible with the career I have spent three years building, the beat I fought for, the reputation I earned through a thousand bylines and zero ethical compromises. Sports journalists who develop feelings for their sources do not remain sports journalists. They become cautionary tales discussed in press boxes and media ethics courses and the kind of anonymous Reddit threads that beginwith "this might be controversial but" and end with "he deserved to lose his credential."
I open my notebook. I write: "The line is the line. The career is the career. The feeling does not get to override the work."
I underline it. The underlining is a physical act of emphasis that I perform knowing, even as the pen presses harder into the paper, that emphasis does not create conviction. I can underline the sentence until the pen tears through the page and the truth underneath will still be the truth: I like him. The liking is growing. And the line, which looked solid from a distance, is becoming harder to see up close.
I close the notebook. I go to the couch. I open my laptop and pull up the draft analysis I'm writing, which contains a section on Jamie Kowalski's skating metrics that is thorough and objective and mentions neither hallways nor smiles nor the specific blue of his eyes that I catalogued in a press conference three weeks ago and have not been able to uncatalogue since.
The section is 1,200 words. Every word is professional. The section is also, in a way that I will not admit to anyone including myself, a love letter written in the language of statistics.
His skating speed ranks third in the league among forwards. His zone entry success rate is 62%, which is elite. His shot generation from the slot is above the 90th percentile for rookies. These are facts. These are numbers. These are the kind of observations that belong in a notebook and not in a man's chest.
I write them in the notebook. The notebook is professional. The chest is a problem.
I close the laptop at midnight. I brush my teeth. I get in bed. I lie in the dark in my East Atlanta apartment surrounded by books and the residue of a conversation with Priya that has rearranged something I was not prepared to have rearranged.
The glasses are on the kitchen counter. The notebook is on the desk. The line is in my head, underlined and urgent.
Journalists do not fall for sources. This is the rule. The rule exists for a reason. The reason is good. The rule protects the work. The work matters.
The work matters.
I close my eyes and try to think about power plays.
I think about a smile in a hallway.