By the third light, it had my full attention.
"Everything okay?" I asked.
"Hmm?" He looked at me. "Yeah. Work stuff. Naomi wants some files."
"The files can't wait until you're not driving?"
"She's East Coast. Time zone thing."
It was a reasonable answer. Completely reasonable, but I was not, historically, a reasonable person.
"You've got your serious face on," I said.
Adrian squeezed my knee. "I'm thinking about what to make you for dinner."
"Lies. Team dinner anyway."
The phone buzzed. He didn't look.
I reached for the dashboard and adjusted the angle of the phone in its holder. Moved it three millimeters to the left so it sat parallel to the edge of the console.
Better.
Adrian glanced at me. "What was that?"
"Nothing. It was crooked."
"The phone?"
"It was bothering me." I shrugged like it was nothing, but it wasn't. When my brain got loud, my hands got busy—finding order in small things, making the world line up even when I couldn't. "Anyway. You mentioned dinner. I hope the team has enough money. I'm already starving. I could eat an entire moose."
"That seems excessive."
"I'm an excessive person. It's part of my charm."
He smiled, but when we stopped at the next light, he checked his phone again.
I couldn't look away.
***
The Drop was doing its thing.
Bodies crowded the back tables. Pitchers sweated on every surface. Someone had fed the jukebox enough quarters to ensure we'd be listening to classic rock until the death of the universe. The Storm had claimed our usual corner—two booths pushed together, chairs stolen from neighboring tables, enough bodies crammed into the space that personal boundaries had become a collective fiction.
I was wedged between Jake and Heath, across from Evan and Hog. Rhett had shown up halfway through appetizers and slotted himself against Hog's side like a puzzle piece findingits place. Desrosiers was telling a story about a bar fight in Kalamazoo that probably hadn't happened the way he was describing it.
Adrian didn't come. He wasn't ready to be seen as part of the team yet. He'd dropped me off and kissed me in the car—brief, warm, and slightly distracted.
I'd watched him drive away and told myself it was fine.
"—and then the guy's like, 'You think you're tough?' and I'm like, 'Buddy, I'm from Quebec, we're born tough—'"
"You grew up in a Montreal suburb with a lawn," Jake interrupted.
"A tough suburb."
"Your mom drove you to practice in a minivan."
