Page 30 of The Progressions

“Generous of you,” he said, and smiled. He did look a lot more relaxed, now. “I always do this. I always have a hard time separating out parts of my brain,” he explained. “I want to focus on the game and then I’m thinking about my mom, and all the shit with Shay. The quarterback doesn’t want my hands on the ball, anyway.”

“That’s not true.”

“You have no idea what’s happening in our locker room.”

“So tell me,” I suggested, and he talked for a while. Mostly, he shared little things that the other guys had done, like not holding an elevator or like messing with the stuff in his locker.

“It sounds like stupid kid pranks,” I said. “Why do you think they’re doing those things?”

“Who the fuck knows? I’m going to be late to the stadium. I’ll be back after lunch,” he mentioned, and I took that to mean that he’d be back to see me. Was that right? Then he paused, looked down at my face, and reached for my chin. “Hold still,” he directed, and he used his other cuff to wipe around my eyes. “You had a bunch of crap there. It’s better now.”

“That was on purpose. It was a morning-after, smokey eye.”

“It was crumbly shit all over the place. You’re better without it.”

Maybe he was right. I watched his yellow car pull away and thought of what I might have said to Iva about him, if we’d been watching out the window together. “Tyler Hennessy is in a hurry this morning,” I could have remarked. Then I might have continued, “It’s because he spent so long hanging out with me.”

Chapter 7

“The best? No,” he said, shaking his head firmly. “I think you’re cheating.”

“I don’t have to cheat.” I swept the paperclips from our bets off the desk and into my lap. “I am the best, and the pot is mine. Again.”

Tyler shook his head more. “You’re card counting. Or maybe they’re marked. Is that it?”

“You’re going to have to come to terms with me being a superior player. My dad started teaching me when I was young because he said that poker is a skill everyone should have.” I swept up the cards, too, my winning hand and his losing one. “What time is she getting here?”

He checked his phone for the time and took the deck from my hand. “I have a couple hours.” The house was all ready for his mom, the ramp installed and his belongings moved upstairs to one of the smaller bedrooms. He had taken care of Shay Galton’s stuff because I refused to touch all the piles of underwear andthe tiny clothes. Despite her fears about the cold weather here, there wasn’t any winter stuff, I had noticed. She would have to go shopping. I looked down now at my own outfit, the mustard dress which had been Iva’s before she’d given it away. Was it really that bad? I had never worried much about clothes, except to make sure that all the embarrassing parts of myself were covered by them.

He made a big deal of examining the cards, studying the backs, holding them up to the light, and thumbing the corners. “They look clean,” he told me.

“You’re a sore loser.” He wasn’t that bad at poker, though. We’d started playing together when he’d come by and had found me practicing my shuffling, which had always been my dad’s specialty. Now, of course, he wasn’t up to it, so I liked to try to replicate his tricks.

Tyler leaned back in his chair, which he’d carried in a few days before so he could sit more comfortably. As the summer days were beginning to shorten into fall, it was much more comfortable in terms of the temperature, too. “On my way in here, I saw that guy creeping around again,” he mentioned.

He couldn’t have meant Cody, because that creepy guy had done his water delivery yesterday…then I thought that I understood. I jumped up and looked into the parking lot, but I only saw Oren standing around—there was no sign of the other man, the one who had been harassing me by screaming insults. “I didn’t even hear him,” I said. “After he got arrested, I thought he was done bothering me!”

“What?” He stood up, too. “He got arrested for bothering you and he’s still working here?”

“Not Oren,” I corrected. “I mean that guy who was standing next to his car and yelling that I was a whore. It turned out that he had warrants out of Ohio, so they shipped his mean ass back there. I thought so, anyway.”

“Someone was yelling that you were a whore? Was it because of what Shay did?”

“He’s gone, now.” And the vast, vast majority of harassment had stopped. I was still locking the office door, but I wasn’t getting jumpy at every noise anymore, or dreading every time I had to check my phone. Things between me and Shay Galton’s followers had settled down.

“You didn’t tell me that someone was coming here,” Tyler stated. “You never said that.”

“I didn’t care too much,” I answered, but he looked plenty angry.

“You should have told me.”

I hadn’t wanted to stir the pot, though, because unlike others? I didn’t enjoy it. His relationship with Shay Galton seemed to have settled down as well, and I wanted everything to stay peaceful. It was better for me that they were getting along, for sure. For sure! And it was better for the Woodsmen to have him calm and focused on the game.

Tyler wasn’t talking about his girlfriend unless I asked, and I didn’t do that very often because I didn’t care what that woman did. No, I didn’t care too much, but I was still looking at hersocial media. She was now involved in an all-out war with the other influencer, the one she’d accused of copying her posts. Those were similar, Iva and I had decided, but only because both women were so pretty and had such great bodies, and because both of them enjoyed nudity so much.

“Let me see your phone.”

“No,” I told him. “I already deleted everything mean.”

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