She doesn’t look up. But she presses back — once — and then she just leaves it there.
“Stan.” Coach Linwood, down the table, lifting the bottle. “Drink?”
“One, Coach. Game tomorrow.”
“Smart man,” Hodge says, like it’s the finest compliment he keeps in stock.
“He’s a smart man,” Coach Linwood agrees.
Somewhere over the rim of the bottle, I catch Aspen’s eye across the table, and she rolls them at me — slow, private, mine — and I grin back, and for the first time in a whole day spent running one long con on a houseful of people I love, I am not performing a single thing.
I’ve known this girl about as long as I’ve known anything.
I never once met her until this afternoon.
I drink my one glass of wine. Her foot stays against mine the whole way through it. And somewhere between the last of the pie and the gold draining out of the windows, I think a thought I don’t run past the room, or Coach, or the bit, or even her. I would run this entire ridiculous, doomed, paperwork-heavy lie a hundred more times, start to finish, contract and all, if every last one of them set me down right here, with her boot against my shoe at a table full of people who are certain they already know how this story ends.
Then I shut it down. Fast.
Because that’s a great deal of feeling for a Thursday.
And because there’s pie.
Chapter 22
Aspen
Twenty minutes in, another glass of wine down, and the wine catches up to me all at once.
It’s been doing this all night — arriving late, in waves. The room has gone soft at the edges. The light through the windows is low. I want, very badly, to blame the warm loose thing under my ribs on the wine.
I’m going to blame it on the wine.
My mother breezes past behind me with a stack of dessert plates balanced on her forearm.
“Stanley, I moved your bag upstairs, sweetheart. The den’s got Pat on the pull-out now, and the Lindbergs aren’t driving home tonight, so I put you in Aspen’s room. There’s a trundle. You two will work it out.” And she’s gone, through the door, the kitchen swallowing her before the sentence has finished landing.
I freeze with my wine halfway to my mouth.
I would have never thought my parents would allow him to stay in my bedroom. I had assumed he’d be forced to stay on thecouch, in the den, the basement, or any one of the other rooms in this house.
I drink my wine.
“Trundle’s mine,” Stanley says, lifting his water an inch toward the room like he’s toasting the arrangement, and the table moves right along, because we are a couple, and couples share rooms, and the only person at this table for whom this is a five-alarm event is me.
The party falls back to its casual chats along the table. Aunt Lisa has her fork in Stanley’s pumpkin pie. It looks like she’s enjoying it.
“Stanley,” she says, turning a forkful over to study the underside of the crust. “This crust.”
“Ma’am.”
“Where does a young man learn a crust like this?”
“My mother, mostly.” Smooth as glass. “Some trial and error.”
Aunt Lisa nods slowly, as though this is a perfectly reasonable thing for him to have said. She eats the bite and considers it with her entire face.
“And the lattice.” Her fork is already going into the next piece. “Do you do that freehand. Or is there a little cutter?”
