Chapter 13
Caleb
Here's a thing I learned growing up with nothing.
When you finally get a good thing, you take it somewhere nice.
You don't keep a girl like Jasmine Dixon eating eggs off a plate on the floor of a bare apartment forever.
At some point, you put on the one shirt you own with actual buttons, and you take her out like she's somebody, because she is.
The problem is that everywhere with people in it is a place where we can't be seen.
So I did what I do. I found the loophole.
There's a casino an hour and a half out of town, off the interstate, the kind of place nobody from the program would ever drive to on a Tuesday, with a steakhouse on the top floor that takes reservations under fake names without blinking, because half the people up there are doing some version of the exact thing we are, just with worse intentions.
“You booked it under what?” she says in the truck, reading the confirmation off my phone.
“Mr. and Mrs. Paperclip.”
She goes quiet. I keep my eyes on the road and let her have the second.
“That is the stupidest thing anyone has ever done for me,” she says finally, and I can hear that she means it as the highest compliment she could ever give.
She got dressed up for this. Not gala dressed up, like the night she walked into a ballroom and stopped my heart, but a quieter version.
She’s wearing a casual little black dress that hangs off one of her shoulders and skims her curves, and she’s wearing her hair down with a little pink lip gloss on her lips.
The way she looks so fucking sexy without trying half as hard as some of these other girls is incredible.
I told her three times in the truck that she looks amazing.
She told me three times to keep my eyes on the road.
The steakhouse is exactly the kind of place I can never normally afford, because I send any extra money I have home to my siblings, but tonight I’ve decided not to think about that.
We’re dining in low light and the good kind of quiet where the tables are far enough apart that nobody's noise lands on anybody else.
A guy in a vest pulls her chair out, and she lets him, and I watch her shoulders come down, because for once we are just two people at a dinner and not a crime waiting to be photographed.
“I already called ahead about the food,” I tell her, once the vest guy leaves. “Nothing on your plate touches anything else on your plate. The kitchen knows. You don't have to negotiate it with a stranger.”
“You called a steakhouse to pre-negotiate my plate?”
“I'm Mr. Paperclip. I take my responsibilities seriously.”
She looks at me across the candle for a second too long, and then she picks up the menu so she doesn't have to keep doing it. “Order me the most expensive thing,” she says, and I think it’s her attempt at a joke.
“Joke's on you. I left my wallet at home. We're doing dishes.”
“I'd help. I'm very organized. I'd run the whole dish pit.”
“I know you would. It's the hottest thing about you.”
And for about forty minutes, it's perfect. It's the most normal night I have ever had in my life. We order too much. She tells me the entire plot of a season of her show with hand gestures. I tell her about the time I caught a puck with my face in juniors and tried to play it cool with blood in my teeth. She laughs a whole real laugh, twice, in public, where anybody could see, and I love it. I think this is the thing normal people have, and I’m considering whether I’m being greedy for wanting more of it.
Then she goes still.
Not the good king of still, but the other one. The one where her whole body decides at once that a room has turned dangerous.
“Don't turn around,” she says, very quietly, behind a sip of water. “Do not turn around.”
“Oh, I’m definitely going to turn around.”
“Caleb Adams.”
“Tell me what I'm not turning around at, then.”
“Four o'clock. By the window. Blue blouse.” Her voice has gone flat and fast. “That's Wendy.”
I do the thing where you look without looking, the old skill, the one you learn reading rooms your whole life. Blue shirt. Window table. Reading glasses pushed up in her hair, laughing at something a heavyset man in a Polo shirt is saying across a plate of shrimp.
“Holy shit. It’s your father’s assistant?” I say, and my stomach drops to my balls. “The one who runs the rink front desk and his damn office? The one who sees both of us every single day.”
“The very same.” Jasmine sets her water down with the exact care of a Marine defusing a bomb.
“I think she may actually live out this way. That's her husband, and it's their anniversary. I saw it on the calendar and didn’t retain it as relevant information. Of course, now it’s the most relevant information in the world.”
“Okay.” My brain's already moving, which it's good at when it's a game and useless at when it's her. “Do you think she’s seen us?”
“No. Her back was to the door when we came in.
If it hadn't been, we'd already be in trouble.” She doesn't look at Wendy again.
She's too smart to look twice. “Caleb, if she spots us, she will not simply see a player having dinner with VCU staff.
She will see Coach Dixon's daughter, in a dress, on a date, with the problem transfer she's assigned to.
By Monday, it isn't a rumor. It's a meeting. It’s you out on your ass and maybe mine too.”
“Then we don't let her see us.”
“We are forty feet from her. There is one door. The path to the one door goes directly past her table.” She lays it out with the precision of a blueprint.
“I have already mapped it. There is no version of standing up and walking out that she doesn't clock. I run escape scenarios in every room I enter. I should have run this one. I got comfortable.”
“Hey.” I catch her eye across the candle.
“You got comfortable because I thought I made you a night where you could. What are the chances that we’d see Wendy of all people an hour outside of campus?
That's not a screw-up. That's just some fucked up luck. Now let me get us out of it, because getting out of rooms is my actual specialty. I’ve got a bad reputation if you remember.
I have left a lot of buildings I wasn't supposed to be in.”
She almost smiles. It's thin, but it's there. “What's the play?”
“The play is I flag our server, I tell him we got a call, a family thing, and can he grab the check and point me at the back way out. Guys who work in casinos understand leaving fast. I’ll give him a twenty.”
“Give him more than that.” She reaches into her purse for some cash. I don’t want to take it, but she’s probably right. We’ll need a little more than twenty bucks if we’re going to quietly get out of here.
I’m already lifting two fingers, easy, like a man with nothing to hide. “You keep your eyes on me, not on her. People feel it when you look at them. Don't give her the chance.”
Our server comes over, young dude, sharp-eyed, the kind who's seen everything up here and judged none of it.
I lean in. “Hey, man. We had a family thing come up.
I need the check fast and quiet, I need you to not say my name loud, and I need the way out that doesn't go past the window side.
There's an extra hundred in it for you.”
He doesn't even blink. “Service hall's behind you, through the double doors by the host stand. It lets out by the elevators. I'll run your card and bring it low.” And because he's a pro and a romantic, “Whoever you're avoiding, good luck.”
“You're my favorite person in Nevada,” I tell him.
“Get in line,” Jasmine murmurs.
Here's where it gets good, which is to say here's where it gets stupid. Because the second our guy walks off, Wendy stands up.
Where the fuck is she going?
Oh, damn, she's headed for the bathroom, and the bathroom, of course, is on our side of the room, which means her route is about to bring her within ten feet of a table where the coach's secret daughter is having a romantic dinner by candlelight with a player.
“She's up,” Jasmine breathes. “She's up, she's coming this way, Caleb, she's”
“Menu,” I say.
“What?”
“Big menu. Up. Now. You're deciding on dessert. You're very into the dessert.”
We both lift the enormous leather menus and put them between our faces and the room, two people who have apparently never been so torn over a creme brulee in their lives, and I watch over the top edge as Wendy comes up the aisle, reading glasses still in her hair, fishing in her purse for something.
Jasmine has gone so still beside me, I can't even hear her breathe.
Wendy's phone rings. She stops. Right there, a table away, she stops to dig it out, and she turns a quarter turn toward us to get the light, and for one entire century, I am certain this is it.
This is the night it all comes apart over a t-bone steak, and then she says, “Hi, baby, no, we're still at dinner,” and keeps walking, phone to her ear, eyes anywhere but on the two adults hiding behind dessert menus like a couple of kids.
She's gone. Bathroom door. Swing and click.
“Up,” I say. “Now. While she's in there.”
Our guy materializes with the card folder like he's been waiting in the wings for his cue, which he has, because he's a professional and an angel.
I sign without looking at the number, which is a thing I have wanted to be able to do my whole life, and turns out I do not enjoy, and I get a hand at the small of Jasmine's back.
“Let’s move.”
We of course don’t go down the main aisle, but through the double doors by the host stand, into the service hall, and through a loud ass kitchen. Jasmine flinches at the light and the noise, and I feel her start to lock up, the bad way, in the exact wrong moment to lock up.
“Eyes on me,” I say, walking backward now, holding both her hands, towing her down the hall like a tug pulling a boat out of a harbor. “Don't look at anything but me, which shouldn’t be hard. I’m ridiculously good-looking,” I jest.
“Who told you that?” she quips back, shaky, but she's looking at me, and she's moving, and that's the whole thing.
The service hall lets out by the elevators exactly like our guy promised, and the elevators open onto the casino floor, and the casino floor is the loudest, brightest, most overstimulating square acre in the entire state.
Ten thousand slot machines screaming little songs.
Lights for miles. People shoulder to shoulder, drunk and delighted and paying attention to absolutely nothing but their own luck.
And it’s the safest place we’ve been all night.
I watch Jasmine figure it out the same second I do. Nobody up here is looking at us. Nobody up here is looking at anything but a wheel, a card, or a screen. The chaos she has spent her whole life avoiding is, for once, a blanket we can pull right over our heads.
“Oh, wow,” she says, over the noise. “Nobody can see us. There's too much to see.”
“Welcome to the one room in America designed so nobody clocks anybody.” I lace my fingers through hers and pull her into the river of people. “Walk like you lost forty bucks and you're okay about it.”
“I don’t know how to do that. I’d never be okay with that.”
I chuckle. “Just try to blend.”
We move through the slots and the noise and the cigarette smell. We’re just two more nobodies in a sea of nobodies, and somewhere in the middle of it, surrounded by every single thing she usually can't stand, she starts to laugh.
Not the careful laugh. Her real one. And she presses the back of her hand to her mouth and laughs into it, helpless, in the middle of a casino, and I stop walking just to watch her do it under all those terrible beautiful lights.
God, she’s gorgeous.
“We almost got caught,” she says, “by Wendy of all people. And we tipped a man a hundred dollars to walk us through a steakhouse kitchen like we’re in the middle of an Ocean’s Eleven movie.
And now we're hiding in the loudest building in the world, and it's working; it's the only thing all night that's actually working.”
“I told you I’m good at this shit.” I tuck a piece of hair behind her ear right there in the open, because up here in the chaos, nobody's paying attention. “How are you doing, though? Real answer.”
“Honestly?” She looks around at all of it, the noise and the light and the crush of strangers, the whole sensory disaster she'd normally have left ten minutes ago.
“I should hate this. I'm waiting to hate it.” She squeezes my hand.
“But…I think I'm having fun. I think this might be the most fun I’ve ever had being terrified.”
“Stick with me, baby,” I smile. “Terrifying dates are my specialty. You’ll never want any other kind now that you’ve had a taste.”
“Okay, Mr. Paperclip,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Take me home before our luck runs out.”
I get her down to the truck through the parking garage, both of us still buzzing, and the second the doors shut, the quiet hits like a wave and she sags into the seat and laughs again, softer now, relaxed.
“Okay,” she says to the windshield. “While I had an amazing time, there’s a new rule. No more rooms with exits I have to map. I don’t know if my heart can take any more terrifying dates with you.”
“Agreed.” I nod. “Next time I find us somewhere with nobody. No Wendy. No window tables. No people at all.” And I mean it, as I sit in the garage with my heart still going.
I’m just happy she wants to go on another date with me.
So, I start actually thinking about it. Somewhere with no walls and no crowd and no VCU connections.
Just her and me and a date that nobody can interrupt.
“You're plotting,” she says, eyes closed, smiling. “I can hear you plotting.”
“Plotting's half the fun.” I start the truck. “Buckle up, Mrs. Paperclip. We've got an hour and a half back home, and I'm going to spend all of it making you tell me the rest of that season.”
“She keeps the wrong guy,” she says immediately. “At the rose ceremony. You're going to be furious.”
“I'm already furious. Start at the beginning.”
And she does, the whole way home, in a truck that smells like a smoky casino we barely escaped. The two of us laugh about the closest call of the year like it was the best night of our lives.
Because it was. Even the part where we almost lost everything. Maybe especially that part.
Turns out the secret is so much better when there's something this damn good inside it worth keeping.