Page 63 of Triple Play

Blake leans forward and kisses my cheek. “They’ll know what you mean when you ask for one.”

So I pull myself out of the car. Felix doesn’t immediately follow. Inside, he and Blake are continuing whatever discussion, only this time in a low murmur.

All I can catch is Felix’s, “Well, if you think that’s a good idea,” said in a way that he thinks it’s not.

After a minute, Felix hauls himself out. He stretches once he gets out on the pavement, his T-shirt taut across his shoulders. I want to bury myself in his chest—to cling to him and have things be as easy as they were last night when it was just the three of us and the world fell away.

Instead I walk toward the rest stop doors.

The interior of the rest stop smells like sugar syrup. People mill around, most of whom look like they want to be somewhere else. “I’m actually good without a soda,” I say.

Felix pauses walking, letting the stream of people flow around us. “Maybe you should take a breather.”

“Like I said, I’m fine.”

“How long have you had that car?”

“I got Lilac for my sixteenth birthday.” She was five years old when I got her, practically new by shitty teenage first car standards.

“Was that…” Felix glances around as if he’s nervous to ask whatever he’s about to. “You mentioned sleeping in your car when you were nineteen.”

Like I merely passed out one night instead of sleeping there for weeks. “Yeah, that was Lilac.”

“So she’s been with you through thick and thin.”

I blow a strand of hair out of my face. “Mostly thin. I spent that month about a minute away from going back to my parents’ house. But I didn’t. I guess I’m too stubborn.”

“What’d you do instead?”

“Begged a friend to let me sleep on her couch—which she did—then tried out for the club. I showed up to an audition like I would for ballet. But I was young and desperate. Turns out that’s a moneymaker. I guess I figured things out eventually.”

“Huh,” Felix says.

“Huh, what?”

“You said stubborn but that sounds a lot more like determined.”

Before I can stop myself, I grip the front of his T-shirt. Pull him down, or attempt to, even if he barely moves.

“What are you doing?” he breathes, but his face inches closer to mine.

For a moment, we breathe each other’s air. That same want from the club roars back. That as long as he’s here to hold me, everything will be all right. “Kiss me—please.”

For a second, he looks like he might. His green eyes study me. His tongue finds its way to his lower lip. But he places a gentling hand on my shoulder until I lower my heels back to the floor. “We shouldn’t,” he says.

“Shouldn’t isn’t don’t want to.” Even as my face heats. I really have managed to fuck everything up in record time.

“Shira, of course I—” He cuts himself off. “I was a minor-league baseball player whose entire signing bonus went to bailing out the farm. I didn’t have any extra money last year.”

My forehead scrunches. The farm was broke? He always came to the club with an exact amount of cash. We had ATMs, of course, but I never saw him use one. I assumed he was trying to avoid fees, not that he was on a limited budget. I try to recall the amounts he sent me for my hair and nails: money I was always so grateful to have that I didn’t think about what it would have cost him. “If the farm’s in financial trouble, why’d you come see me at the club?”

He runs a thumb over my jaw, a careful scrape of his callus. It’s funny how certain things can feel like a kiss that aren’t one. “You’re really asking me that?” he says. “What I asked you that day in June, nothing’s changed. Or everything has. But if we’re going to do this, we shouldn’t be doing it behind Blake’s back. Especially when—” He stops and shakes his head. “Especially when he loves you the way he does.”

Love. The word hits me. Blake hasn’t said it. Or has he? He carried me over that doorway, asked to meet my family, frowned over every squeak of my car. Let his guard down the way he hasn’t to other people—and all I’ve done is erect bigger walls around myself.

A wave of guilt crashes over me. “Blake’s too good for me.” A truth I’ve been avoiding for the entire time we’ve been dating—that at some point he’s going to realize it too.

Felix shakes his head. “That’s not the problem—it’s not that he’s too good for you. It’s that you are good enough for him and you won’t let yourself believe that.” He ducks down and kisses me, a brief peck to my forehead, something like a platonic kiss between friends, except for the lump it puts in my throat. “I’m going to get an iced tea that’s ninety percent sugar,” he says. “If you want to go hit the bathroom.”

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