Page 40 of Play Maker

“I’m glad,” she said softly. “Look, I have to go. I have a shift at the center, but call me anytime you need to explore your feelings. Spoiler alert though, I’m never going to be okay with your mom marrying anyone other than Archer Bolme.”

“I understand.” We said goodbye, and I hung up the phone with a smile on my face.

Eva tended to have that effect on me, which was why I’d continued to spend time with her after our first meeting at the shop. A weight lifted from my shoulders knowing she wasn’t upset about me moving in with Adam and the others.

Right on time, the front door to the apartment opened and closed. Adam’s voice reached me through the walls, too muffled to make out specific words. Other voices mixed in, all with the same happy, energetic tone. My roommates were home.

With no warning, Adam burst into my room holding a grease-stained white paper sack. “Time to wake up, Sunshine. We brought breakfast.”

I sat up, thankful I’d worn my full pajamas to bed and equally thankful Adam hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt after his run. Sweat glistened on the ridges of his muscles. One drop trailed down his abs to the low-slung gray shorts he wore.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to focus on the food in his hand.

“Did you bring me something from the Pancake Shack?”

“Biscuits and gravy, but you only get them if you come out here and eat with me.”

He was being careful not to actually enter the room, and I remembered Eva’s words about being reasonable, which had felt a lot like being boring. I could be spontaneous. Fun.

“What if you came in here instead?”

His brows rose, and he gave me a quick nod. “Be right back.”

To my disappointment, he was wearing a shirt when he returned with a second bag, plates, utensils, and napkins. Everything we’d need for breakfast in bed.

Except he didn’t join me on the bed. He set my food next to me, then took the chair at the desk. It didn’t matter. I repeated the mantra a few times until I started to believe it. Instead of pouting, I opened up my bag and dug in.

He’d brought me my favorite meal. Unasked. Who cared if he sat next to me on the bed to eat it?

The soft squishy part of me whisperedI do, but there was nothing I could do about it short of making a fuss. I didn’t do fusses.

Instead, I broached a subject I’d been curious about from the beginning—Mac and Eva’s origin story.

“Tell me how you ended up coming here with Eva.”

He didn’t hesitate. “We grew up together in the Austin suburbs. She’s…shewas…my best friend for a long time. The football player and the cheerleader, right? But it was never like that before. She was just Eva. A force of nature with a fierce need to protect the world.”

How interesting, I’d classified her the same way. “Did she protect you?”

“Yeah. Private school kids can be pricks. Everyone there had money except my family. My dad worked in the administration, so I got to go for free. Eva didn’t give a shit that we weren’t rich. Her family fit right in, but her parents treated her like a possession to be passed back and forth. She spent all her time at our house. That’s how she got into cheerleading. My sisters used to practice tossing her in the air when we were little.”

I imagined a tinier version of Eva laughing uncontrollably on top of a pyramid made of Adam’s family. “That sounds dangerous.”

He snorted. “Oh, it was. They used to practice on me too until I got too big. Then I had to do the throwing. When it came time to pick a college, Eva didn’t care where she went as long as they had a good cheer program. Her family was funding her, but they expected her to finish early with an MRS degree.”

My nose scrunched as I tried to sort out what those letters could mean. “I don’t understand.”

“M-R-S as in a married woman. They sent her to college to find a husband.”

My shock kept me silent for several seconds while I chewed. “Wow. I’m not sure how to respond since she doesn’t seem to have the same aspirations.”

He laughed. “No. She does not. Anyway, we never even considered applying to different schools. TU was my top choice, and they offered me a football scholarship. No brainer. Eva was ecstatic. We came here and just kept doing what we were doing in high school. Until the championship game earlier this year.”

I finished off the last bite of my breakfast and laid back, stuffed. “I thought you and Eva had been involved for longer than a few months.”

“Sexually, no. Emotionally, all my life. She’s always been a constant, like my mom making enchiladas when I come home and the guarantee that at least one guy on any team is going to be a narrow-minded piece of shit.”

“An interesting list,” I mused.

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