Chapter 7

Evelyn's POV:

The alarm went off at seven twenty the way it always did — not as a suggestion but as an execution — and I came up out of sleep with my heart already running and my hand reaching for the nightstand before I knew what day it was.

Brenda's phone. It was always Brenda's phone. She hit it twice, missed on the third swing, and the room dropped back into the low hum of the radiator and Rachel's fan, and for four seconds there was nothing in the world but the dark on the inside of my eyelids.

Then I remembered what I had sent at midnight, and I was awake in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

I pulled the phone under the sheet with me. The reply was already there at the bottom of the screen, patient and smug, as though it had been waiting for hours to see what my face would do. He had written, no punctuation worth mentioning and no explanation attached: want to see my abs under there?

My first thought was that something was wrong with him. My second was that this was a trap — that a wire had been strung low across the floor of the conversation and he was standing at the far end of it holding the spool, waiting to see whether I would walk into it — and I decided that I did not care.

I typed yes and sent it before I could arrange myself into something less hungry.

Then I lay there holding the phone above my face with both hands, watching the three dots rise, disappear, and rise again, and it went on long enough that I began to feel foolish, which was, I suspected, precisely the point.

go back to sleep. in your dreams you can have whatever you want.

I looked at that for a moment. Then I sent him a sticker of a small gray cat lying flat on its back with its paws folded on its chest, because it was the most accurate thing I had. After that I turned the phone face down on my stomach, under the sheet, so I would stop looking at it.

Entrapment. That was what this was. He had asked a question he already knew the answer to, collected my yes, and then shut the door in my face. A menace, and worse than that, a menace with a sense of timing.

And probably no abs at all, I thought, which was the only comfort available to me at seven twenty-two in the morning.

The phone buzzed against my ribs, and I had it in the air again faster than a woman with any self-respect.

It was not his abs. It was him, midair, on an outdoor court with the sun already up and coming off the concrete in a flat white glare, one arm raised and the ball just leaving his fingers. Behind him was a chain-link fence, a row of palms, and past all of it, a strip of water.

The shirt had come untucked and ridden up over his back. It was only his back, but there was nothing to complain about — the reach dragged his shoulders wide, the muscles down either side of the spine stood out, and the whole thing cut in hard toward the waistband of the shorts. Whoever took the picture had known what they would get. Which made me suspect he had too.

playing basketball?

yes.

how's your game?

play me and find out.

I stopped breathing. The room got very quiet around me, and something under my ribs turned over once and settled wrong.

Play him. Twelve hours and half a world away, and I still felt my whole body brace against the words.

The distance was the only reason that sentence was survivable. Because the alternative was a court somewhere, and him throwing me a ball, and finding out in one clean motion that the woman he had been texting for a month was somebody he had never met.

I could see it from here. The arc of the pass. My hands going up. The second before he looked at my face and understood.

can't, I wrote. i'd be too mesmerized by you to move.

That was cheap. It was cheap, and it was effective, and it cost me nothing, and I disliked how easily it came out of my thumbs. I disliked even more that some small part of me had meant it.

I pushed the sheet back and stepped down onto the cold floor, and Rachel's head came up over the edge of her mattress like a groundhog, her hair pushed flat on one side and standing straight up on the other. "Eve," she said, in a voice that had not finished waking up. "Morning."

"Morning." I patted her head twice on the way past, and she made a small satisfied noise and collapsed again.

"What time is it."

"Seven thirty."

"I don't have class until noon," she said into the pillow, with enormous dignity, as if this were a fact she intended to defend in court. "I'm going to sleep until my body says otherwise."

"Your body usually says nine forty and then you scream."

"Nine forty is my body's opinion and I respect it."

Brenda's alarm went off again at seven thirty-four, and this time Chloe sat straight up in bed as though somebody had pulled a string. "Brenda! Every single person in this room is awake except you! What is the actual point of your alarm!"

She took her pillow in both hands and threw it, and it hit Brenda square in the head and bounced onto the floor, and Brenda surfaced from her comforter with a groan and said, entirely unreasonably, "I'm up. I'm basically up."

"You're horizontal."

“Horizontal is a direction,” Brenda said, and then she got a proper look at me — bag open on the chair, one sweater half out of it, the rest of the pile on the floor.

She propped herself up on one elbow with the interest of a woman who could smell a story. “Is that what you’re wearing out?”