Page 59 of The Progressions

“Yeah, that ship had sailed a few weeks before, and I wasn’t going to touch her when she was drunk. I never talked to her again, actually. It was hell to clean the engine bay and I had to change all the filters, too,” he reminisced. “High school was hell in general.”

“You had good luck with girls, though, romantically,” I mentioned, and he nodded to acknowledge that. “You just weren’t good at making friends, and here’s your chance to change things around.”

“Why do I need to do that?” he sighed. “I’m fine how I am.”

“‘Fine,’ like your ankle is ‘fine?’” I asked. “If you’re so ‘fine’ by yourself, then why did you have me come to that lunch at the practice facility last summer? Why were you paying me to help you?” He didn’t answer, so I provided my own response. “Because you wanted to have a friend. You were paying me to be around, because you were lonely.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, it’s not! Listen, I know how it is to be on the outside,” I told him. “With my haircut, the rumors that Cody spread about my malformed female organs, and all those insult couplets I threw around myself, only one girl in the school would talk to me. She played piccolo and she was nice because she was involved in a lot of community service, so she took me on like I was one of her projects. Like, I was the same as painting over graffiti or picking up trash on the side of the road.”

“You couldn’t have been that bad,” he said.

“I was,” I assured him. “And being alone all the time was terrible. When my dad got sick, I really could have used friends, but I didn’t have anybody to turn to. Now, of course, I’m too busy to need anyone, but—”

“Bullshit,” Tyler repeated. “What about Iva?”

“She’s my boss,” I answered.

“That’s it? Because never, not in any of the jobs I’ve ever had, did I go out on a limb for someone like you did for her. You dropped everything to help her out.”

“Well, that’s what you do when…ok, Iva and I have developed more than just a boss and employee relationship.”

“And what about my mother? You two are texting, talking on the phone. I heard her telling you that she wanted to do your hair.”

“I like her a lot,” I admitted.

“And what about me?”

“What about you?” I asked cautiously. I wondered if he would say something regarding last Saturday night on my creaky bed; we had seen each other a few times since, but I hadn’t brought it up, and neither had he.

“I come in here almost every day to play poker and shoot the shit,” he said. “I send you all those funny jokes.”

“Those aren’t very funny.”

“They’re hilarious,” he told me. “Isn’t that a friendly thing?”

“Well…”

“Well, yes, which is why I don’t need to go out to dinner with any of my teammates,” he leaned back and folded his arms, looking smug. “I won,” his posture told me.

“I’m not playing poker anymore until you say that you’ll ask out the wide receiver.” I folded my own arms over my chest. “I’mnot touching those cards. And I’ll tell Iva that you would like the heat turned up at night, too.”

“Please don’t do that. I’m already sleeping naked because it’s so hot. If she sets it any higher, I’m going to have to put ice packs on my body.”

I blinked as I imagined sliding a clear cube around his pecs, outlining every square abdominal muscle, and moving it down—

“Fine,” he sighed. “Fine. You deal, and I’ll text him.” He got out his phone and typed. “Done,” he announced after a moment.

“I want to see,” I told him, and took the phone. “Wait a minute. You wrote, ‘You and your wife should come out with me and Kasia.’ I’m not going.”

“Yeah, if I have to, so do you,” he said. “I know you don’t have class tomorrow night, so it will be the four of us.”

My classes might not have been happening after tomorrow, anyway—but the problem was that the way he’d written his text was misleading. “You didn’t say who I was,” I pointed out.

“I said ‘Kasia.’ They’ll meet you and put your name to your face.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” I started to explain, but the radio on my desk suddenly crackled and then beeped.

---