Page 19 of Puck Daddies
“On time,” he says. “Ms. Delaney snapped at me anyway. Twins tried to make me tell them a fight story, and I told them about pancakes instead.”
“Brave choice.”
“Educational.” He glances at the hall. “She texted a bee.”
“I got one too,” I say, before I can stop myself. Then I add, “Probably thinking of Aunt Bea’s wall. Habit.”
“Yeah,” he says. He thumbs-up his own thought. “Probably.”
We let the captions run. A commercial about mattresses thinks it knows what tired looks like. The afternoon pushes its way across the floorboards toward the couch. In a minute, I’ll stand up and shower and set something out for dinner we may or may not be hungry for. In a minute, he’ll get up and go look in on the guest room like a guard who walks the perimeter.
For now, we sit where we can hear the soft of the apartment and pretend we’re not listening for the sound of Meg’s key in the lock. We both know we are. Neither of us says it.
8
OLIVER
Sticky’s opensearly for us when we ask. The manager flips the sign and keeps the TV on mute. Me, Rocco, and Hudson take the back booth where the sight lines cover the room. It’s team-only. No girlfriends. No fans. No media. Just the team.
We don’t talk until the mugs hit the table and the server walks away. I lower my voice. “She looked better this morning.”
Hudson keeps his eyes on the steam. “Brave face.”
“Brave face,” Rocco repeats.
“She lookedbetter. We helped. That’s a fact.”
Hudson shifts in the booth. “We also made a choice that can’t be a pattern.”
“I’m not saying pattern. I’m saying the four of us worked. It wasn’t chaos. It wasn’t a fight. It was clear, careful, fun. That matters.”
Rocco rubs his thumb over the rim of his mug. “We have a season to worry about.”
“I know,” I admit. “I’m not proposing we live in her bed. I’m saying we talk about reality instead of pretending it didn’t happen. We clicked. It helped her. It helped us. We can put rules around it and protect the season.”
Hudson lifts his eyes. “Rules?”
“Communication. Consent every step. Aftercare. No jealousy bs. Limited public stuff. We can make this work.”
Rocco shakes his head once, not hard. “We’re not a college house drafting a chore chart.”
“No. We’re three men who don’t want to break a friendship and also want to help our friend. We don’t want to tank a season. We don’t want to hurt her. Rules keep people safe. We already use them everywhere else. Why not here?”
Hudson’s mouth twitches. “You love a rule.”
“I love sleep and winning and not lying to myself. The other night wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a thing that happened to us. She asked. We said yes. It worked.” I let that soak in. “If we act like it didn’t, we’re going to make messy choices by default. I’d rather make clean ones on purpose.”
The food arrives. It buys us a minute. We eat. I let them think while I cut my pancakes into quarters. Hudson eats fast and then slows down, thinking. Rocco takes apart his sandwich and reconstructs it because the egg slid.
Hudson breaks first. “If we set rules, I can stay on the rails.” He doesn’t look at me when he says it. He doesn’t need to. “I don’t want to hurt her by doing a dumb thing on a bad day.”
Rocco exhales. “And I don’t want to turn the whole thing into a secret that rots everything else.”
“So we talk tonight. House meeting. We call it Operation Un-Boring because she said the word out loud. Tactics, not secrets.”
Hudson stabs a piece of bacon and points it at me. “No, we treat it like a fire code. Clear exits. Clear capacity. Clear hours.”
“Fine. A fire code.”
