Page 40 of Play the Game
No, not like afucking date.
Me
How first thing are we talking about? So first thing that you’re still doing whatever it is you do in your pajamas with a candle burning before anyone else gets in?
Evan
Okay, let’s make a deal. Because you sent me a cherry slushie, which is actually the best thing I’ve ever tasted, if you tell me why your whole family thinks you can’t cook when you can actually make bagels from scratch, I’ll tell you what I do in my pajamas at five in the morning.
Me
Deal.
Evan
Happy Thanksgiving, Cooper.
Me
Happy Thanksgiving, Rhodes.
I put my phone down and sit back on the couch, my eyes still fixed on the text thread. For some reason, I hate the idea that she’s spending Thanksgiving with her parents, who are obviously not her favorite people, as much as I like the fact that the snacks I sent helped her get through her first time using the at-home blood pressure cuff. I kind of wish I was there in person to help her, and I’m not sure what to think about that.
In the couple of weeks since the doctor’s appointment, we’ve settled into something resembling a routine. Evan gets to work at ungodly early hours, and I sometimes get there early enough to earn a dirty look and a slammed door in my face when I catch a glimpse of her still in her pajamas doing whatever mysterious work she does before seven a.m. I bring her a bagel and seltzers if she’s running low and meet her outside the bathroom with Jolly Ranchers when she gets sick.
We’ve managed to work together with the same low-level animosity and competition that has always been the hallmark of our working relationship, but now it’s laced through with something else. Some kind of awareness of our current situation that shows up in glances that last just a little too long, a brush of hands, a kind of knowing that hums between us as we go about our days.
And then there are the texts.
We text constantly. First thing in the morning, during the day when we’re listening to Austin drone on about something ridiculous in a meeting, and late at night when we should probably be sleeping. It started as a way for me to check on her when I thought just showing up at her apartment at random times would be weird, and it’s turned into a long thread of messages about nothing and everything. Things we would never say in person. Stories we would never tell.
Two people, tied together by situation and circumstance, saying to each otherThis is me.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it. Didn’t like her.
I’m not in the business of lying to myself.
It’s some fucked up kind of whiplash to go fromThis person is making my life a living helltoI think I kind of like her,and it’s messing with my head, maybe even more than the fact that, in about six months, I’m going to be a parent. I’ve been so focused on making sure Evan has everything she needs that I haven’t spent much time thinking about the baby of it all. No need to rush that particular train.
At the knock on my apartment door, I push myself up off the couch, wondering who it could possibly be. Everyone who lives in this brownstone—meaning my brothers, Jo, Amelia, and Hannah—would just walk in. My parents are at their house getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner, and my grandma who lives next door texted all of us earlier that she was having Thanksgiving brunch with my grandfather and not to bother her. My grandfather who has been dead for six years. It says a whole lot about my family that not one single person questioned it.
When I pull open the door, a guy who can’t be more than twenty is standing there, alone, slim cardboard box in his hand. “Are you Cooper Wyles?” he asks.
“Uh, yeah, who are you?”
He shoves the box in my hand, mutters “Happy Thanksgiving,” and without another word, turns and trots down the stairs and straight out the front door of the brownstone.
“What the fuck?” I mutter, staring down at the package. There’s no address and no return label, so obviously I take a minute to contemplate the possibility that I’m holding a bomb or something. But I don’t do criminal law, and I do have a sister-in-law who loves sending weird presents when the mood strikes even though she lives right upstairs, so whatever this is, it’s probably from her.
Opening the flap on the box, I pull out a long black cylinder with a loop of ribbon hanging out of the plastic top, obviously meant for opening the thing. Dropping the box on the table by the door, I tug the loop. When it doesn’t budge, I give it a hard yank, and a deafeningpopechoes through my apartment as the plastic top explodes off and a spring comes shooting out of the cylinder in a cloud of confetti and rainbow glitter.
“What the fuck?” I yelp, blinking sparkles from my field of vision. Glancing down at the cylinder still in my hand, I see a message written on the flat top of the spring. Squinting through the glitter that is definitely in my eyes, I can just made out the words.
Congratulations on accidentally impregnating your worst enemy. Your super sperm is to be commended.
“I’m going to kill them,” I mumble, because this has my older brothers written all over it. Shaking my head, a waterfall of glitter and confetti comes raining down onto my arms, my clothes, and the floor, and I notice for the first time that the confetti is penis shaped. I’m covered in rainbow glitter and a million tiny pink dicks.
“You guy are dead!” I bellow out into the stairwell, and I’manswered by a chorus of hysterical laughter as all three of my brothers come bursting into my apartment.
