Page 77 of Triple Play

“Picked what?”

“What you wanted to do today.”

He casts a look around the restaurant. “This.”

“This?” Shira asks.

Blake turns to her. “If I’m with you, I don’t really care what else we do.”

Shira kisses him on his cheek, her lipstick leaving a smudge he doesn’t erase. “Just this?” She circles her finger around the rim of her glass. It emits a single, fragile note. “Or was there something else you might want?”

He takes a swallow of bourbon. A drop clings to his lower lip before he flicks it away. “No, not just this.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Shira

We walk back to our room—a cabin, really, standing alone down a short, paved walkway studded with motion-activated lamps. They blink on as we pass them, then flicker off, like we’re being carried along in a bubble of light amid the darkness.

I only had a few sips of bourbon, but I feel drunk: the kind of drunk you can only be on a warm winter evening when the world should be cold and isn’t. Blake and Felix are laughing—their voices ring out over the faint buzz of insects.

“What’s that?” Blake points to something blinking above us in the night sky. “Another satellite?”

“Blake,” Felix says, voice serious, “that’s an airplane.”

Blake cracks up at that, sudden, a laugh like something’s shaken loose within him. “Well, that’s two things I’m bad at, I guess.”

Which sets Felix off laughing as well. “C’mon”—he reaches for both of our hands—“let’s go inside.”

Inside, the cabin is?—

Something. Two bedrooms, a small kitchenette. All of which blur when Blake scoops me up and carries me through the doorway.

“Still practicing?” I ask.

“No.” He kisses my hair. “This time we’re doing this for real.”

Before, I doubted that he could mean it. I told myself that someone like him couldn’t be serious about someone like me, so I held myself away from him, just in case.

Now, I press my ear to his chest, the steady tick of his heart like a countdown clock. Tomorrow, tomorrow, we’ll forget this ever happened. As if we could. Maybe in a different universe, we could all be together—one where Blake and Felix stay on the same team in the same city, where Blake knows about our past and doesn’t care. It feels impossible to even dream about. But we have tonight. Somehow that has to be enough. “We’re still pretty much in Fayetteville, right—like in the south south suburbs?”

Blake laughs. “We’re almost three hours away.”

“Close enough.”

Earlier, we claimed the larger of the two bedrooms. We migrate there now, Blake depositing me on the bed, Felix activating a lamp. A wide uncurtained set of glass doors sits at the opposite end of the room; we reflect in it, like slightly otherworldly versions of ourselves, softened at the edges.

Blake drops on the bed next to me, his hand at my waist.

I pull away, press a reassuring kiss to his cheek. “Give me just a second.” Then I retreat to the en suite bathroom to rinse my breath with a capful of mouthwash, apply a fresh coat of lipstick. I get a flash of doing the same thing back in June, when I was Melody and Felix was John. When my heart beat to see him and I told myself it was all business.

I strip, shimmying out of my dress, leaving it to puddle on the floor. It’s a Tuesday, I realize, and laugh, and adjust my breasts in the wine-red lace of my bra.

When I emerge, Felix’s eyes widen. “That’s some lingerie set.” So he remembers…

“What?” I give a slow twirl. “This ol’ thing?”

He laughs and sits at the edge of the bed. An invitation. A reminder of the last time we did this, under the pulsing lights of that club back room. Now the only noise is our breathing, the hum of the HVAC.

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