Page 87 of Triple Play

We eat breakfast at a different restaurant than where we ate dinner. This one has a sea of tables—almost all of them empty—and a wall on one side made entirely of glass that looks down on the curving green of a golf course. Not a place for the three of us to do anything but eat.

Shira’s hair is piled up in a haphazard knot. She keeps yawning and demanding coffee and frowning because what the server brings is too weak and in too short a supply. Every time my phone buzzes with a message—Brayden, telling me he stopped for coffee, Brayden, complaining that there’s nothing good on the radio, Brayden, wondering if he’s going to make the major league roster out of spring training—Shira jumps.

“Sorry,” I say, after I answer his seventh message in ten minutes.

“I didn’t realize you were that close.”

Close. A funny word for it, especially when Brayden’s approach feels like watching Lilac’s temperature gauge tick up yesterday—like I’m bracing for oncoming disaster. “You ever have someone you talk a lot with but don’t say anything to?” I ask. “It’s like that.”

Shira smiles at me, tight, sympathetic, from across the table. Next to me, Felix drops his hand on my knee. I shouldn’t enjoy that—enjoying this will make things harder when we stop. “All right, enough,” I say. “Let’s eat.”

We eat, talk about nothing in particular—traffic, weather, the best golf courses in Florida.

Where Felix is staying during spring training. “I got one of those week-to-week places,” he says.

“Why?”

He shrugs. “It’ll make it easier if the team cuts me and I gotta move somewhere else.”

“My rental has a spare bedroom.” Three, in fact, though I planned to give Shira one in case she wanted extra space.

“Yeah?” Felix says. “You good with being roommates?” Like he knows us living together will turn into a six-week dry hump of an entirely different kind.

“Think about it,” I say. “No pressure either way.”

Something about that makes Felix laugh, big. “That easy, huh?”

It occurs to me Shira might mind—it’s one thing to know I’m into men in front of her. Another if she’s worried about me going behind her back. “Unless Shira objects. For, uh, any reason.”

“In that case, let me go hit the head and leave you to have that conversation.” Felix’s smile tilts on conversation, like it’s something he’s amused by.

He’s barely gone before Shira says, “It’s cool.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Blake, I love you”—she smiles around the word like she’s still getting used to saying it—“and I trust you.”

“What if…” I begin, then take another sip of—yes, Shira is correct, not very good—coffee for courage. “What if last night repeats itself?”

“What, you slip and just fall in bed together?” She shrugs. “That’s fine.”

“You don’t have to put up with me screwing around.”

“Hey.” She leans over the table, motions for me to do the same. “There’s a pretty big distance between screwing around and dating someone else I know about. Like a continent’s worth of difference.”

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to go along with things. I don’t want to be one of those couples that keeps secrets from each other.”

Something goes tight in Shira’s smile. “You wouldn’t be. In fact, I might make you call me up and tell me all about it.”

As if that’s something she wants—something she’s as eager to do as I am. “Really?” I ask in case I’m somehow misunderstanding.

“When I said I loved all of you, that includes the parts you’re unsure about.”

Relief blooms in my belly, the kind that can only come from someone saying what you didn’t know you needed to hear. “How did I get so lucky?”

Her smile relaxes into something bright. “Funny, I was thinking the exact same thing.”

Felix comes back a few minutes later. He eyes both of us before sliding back into his chair. “So, what’s the verdict?”

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