Chapter 24
WALL
MY PLAN HAS five phases, and I've run it twice. Once on paper, once standing alone in my living room, pointing at where everyone will sit.
Phase one, dinner. Phase two, announcement. Phase three, absorption. Phase four, dessert, which arrives on a schedule the guests don't know about. Phase five, eviction by eleven.
I control the information, the venue, the seating, and the timing, and if I keep repeating that to myself, it might stay true for one more hour.
The doorbell goes twenty-five minutes early.
Becker's on my doormat in a nice shirt, holding a… whiteboard?
A full-size whiteboard, with an eraser clipped to the rail, and a face that has visibly not slept since the coat check. His left eye is doing a small independent project, and there’s no Kane in sight.
"Don't ask," he says, carrying the whiteboard past me into my hallway.
I wasn’t going to.
"You look rested," I say instead.
He looks over his shoulder and shoots daggers at me.
"I have been keeping your secret for four days.
" He props the whiteboard against my hallway wall, adjusts it, and stands back the way Jinx stands back from candles.
"Do you realize the lengths I had to go to?
I left the group chat twice. I told Kane I had a dentist thing. I don't have a dentist thing, Wall."
"One more hour, man."
"One more hour," he repeats, breathing in through his nose the way an app once taught him, and goes to stand in the corner of my kitchen, facing the wall, doing the exhale part.
The rest of them arrive in waves, and every wave says some version of the same thing at my door, which is that I've never hosted anything, which is true, and also my preferred state of affairs. But a man who’s about to hand his team the biggest news of his life wants them on his own ice for it.
Also, the seating chart doesn't work in a restaurant.
Ace and Devon arrive with wine. Groover and Mateo come in right behind them, Mateo already mid-spiel about how unusual tonight is as a data point, and an outlier of this size implies an occasion, and Groover kisses him on the mouth without breaking stride.
Jinx hands me a candle at the door. "In case there's a moment."
"There's no moment."
He shrugs. "Then it's just a candle."
Petrov brings a potted plant with a bow on it. He presents it with both hands and ceremony. "For the funeral. Or party. Signals unclear."
"It's just a dinner, Petrov."
"I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive."
Washington and Leila show up last. Leila stops in front of me for one moment on her way in. She doesn't say anything, but does some private arithmetic that visibly comes out even, and pats me once on the arm.
Dinner itself goes fine, I think. At least that’s what the rate at which the food disappears suggests, and the conversation stays in safe zones while the entire table quietly monitors me, checking my face between bites like I'm a scoreboard about to update, except for Kane. Kane is monitoring Becker instead, who’s at the far end, not eating, doing his nose-breathing.
I break at 8:25, which is five minutes ahead of schedule, because the pressure gauge says waiting five more minutes costs more than it buys.
I stand up and tap my glass once, purely for the sake of form, because they all cease talking before my ass has fully left the seat.
My pulse is a disgrace, but my hands are steady, and so is my voice. This is the most ready I’ll ever be.
I clear my throat. Here goes nothing. "I'm seeing someone. It's serious." I let them have a single second. Then, "It's Grze?kowiak." The name comes out clean, both halves. The app would be proud. "And Moreau."
I sit down and resume eating.
The silence holds for three entire seconds.
Then Petrov jumps to his feet so fast his chair goes up with him.
"I CALLED IT!" He points at me, then at the ceiling, then at everyone. "SOMEBODY PULL UP THE CHAT!"
The chat does get pulled up, and immediately, while a million questions get sent my way, merging into one incoherent blob of a sound with a question mark at the end by everyone but Becker, who’s already casting his phone to my television with shaking hands, tears forming, sworn duty overriding collapse, because archives are sacred, and there it is, four feet wide, on my own TV, in my own living room, timestamped months ago:
Petrov: Maybe Wall has two companions.
Becker: WOULD YOU STOP MOCKING MY INVESTIGATION????
Groover: Petrov, you can't just say words.
Petrov: I am observant. Put me down on $50.
Becker: You are BANKRUPT. Easiest $50 of my life. Logged and pinned.
A sharp “Ha!” shoots out of Petrov, and he’s pointing violently at the TV, in case someone has missed the giant letters on the screen, while the rest of the room morphs into one living, breathing and moving organism.
Wallets come out. Ace pays cash. Groover pays cash. Devon pays and demands a receipt on principle. Kane attempts a bank transfer and is refused, because Petrov wants it, quote, "in paper, for framing."
He collects the pile, straightens it, and bows to the table like the ovation is his due, which, fine, it is. "For months, I am mocked," he roars. "Tonight, there is only one word." He raises his cash. "VINDICATED."
Becker, released from four days of hell, has meanwhile gone to pieces. Big ones. He's crying into his hands with relief while Kane pats him on the back.
"I kept it!" Becker keeps saying. "Four days. I kept it. Ask him. Wall! Tell them what I kept."
"He kept it."
"I KEPT IT," he howls, and then his grief pivots into grievance, and he points at me. "Four days! I aged like unrefrigerated milk, and this man ate a normal dinner just now. In front of me! Chewing!"
"The chewing is standard."
"You're seeing two people!" The finger relocates from me to the ceiling, to God. "You don't get to be the calm one!"
Ace leans back with his arm across Devon's chair, grinning like he’s four and watching a sibling get in trouble. "We do them one at a time in this family, Wall."
"Some of us had to do it via PR," Groover points out.
"I did it on a hot mic," Kane says, still patting Becker, "and somehow you win?"
"Nobody's winning," I say, and they make a collective sound that means everybody heard the lie. Becker stands, wipes his face with one sleeve, and walks to the hallway with a newfound purpose I’d rather not learn, but am sure I’m about to anyway.
He comes back wheeling the whiteboard. "Gentlemen. The standings."
The standings go up in aggressive columns. My place is going to smell like marker for a week and there's nothing I can do about any of it.
"Ace,” Becker starts. “One boyfriend." Tap. "Groover. One boyfriend." Tap. "Kane. One boyfriend, acquired via felony broadcasting." He draws a bracket, and the bracket gets its own box, and the box gets underlined twice. "Wall—" he taps it twice "—said 'hold my Gatorade' and acquired two."
"The final boss of one-upping," Petrov chimes in, from behind the cash he’s arranged into a hand fan.
"Eight years!" Becker's marker is conducting now. "Eight years of 'intent matters' and 'these walls are very thin' and the whole time— Waaaait. When did this even start? What's the timeline? I need the timeline. Actually, hold on, I'm making an axis—"
"No axis," I say.
"One axis—"
Washington stands up.
He doesn't tap anything. He just rises, glass in hand, and gets everyone’s attention like he always does.
Becker caps his marker mid-axis and even Snooze, resurrected by the earlier commotion and briefed by Hammer in a whisper I'd pay to have not heard ("Wall's dating two enemy guys, pass it on"), sits up straight.
Jinx lights the candle. Apparently there's a moment.
"Eight years," Washington says, "I've watched you take care of everyone in this team and ask for nothing." He looks at me the whole time, and my jaw sets up its defensive perimeter, and holds, barely. "Took two whole guys to return the favor. Sounds about right."
Everybody drinks to that, except me, because my throat's too tight right now for liquids to go down right, and nobody looks at me directly, a mercy I suspect Washington ordered in advance somehow.
"'Two whole guys' goes on a shirt," Becker says, already typing.
That's when the doorbell rings one more time and half the idiots in my living room morph into cartoon characters, looking around the table wide-eyed, two of them using their fingers to count, and the underlying conclusion seems to be, ‘But, but… We’re all already in.’
Phase four, then. On time to the minute, because I texted one of them the schedule, and one of them respects schedules.
Every face swings to me as I get up, cross my living room through a silence with popcorn in it, and open the door on Patrick and Theo, holding bakery boxes.
"We brought bribes," Theo announces to nineteen people, into a quiet you could develop film in. Then he spots the whiteboard across the room, and his face lights up like a slot machine paying out. "Are those standings? Why don't I have a column? I'm half the standings!"
That does it. It takes them ninety seconds to absorb him, and I time it. He's got Snooze holding boxes, Jinx blessing him, or the dessert, unclear, and then the crowd parts on its own instinct and Theo and Becker are face to face.
The two of them go still, both at once, two apex predators recognizing the silhouette. Becker looks at Theo. Theo looks at Becker. Something passes between them that I can only describe as a merger.
"Know any good print shops?" Becker asks.
"Ohh, I know plenty.”
"There are two of them now," Kane whispers at my shoulder.
"We’ll get used to it," I lie.
Patrick's entry is quieter, which was always going to be the harder route.
Loud, they trust on sight. Calm, they investigate.
Devon and Mateo get to him before his coat's fully off, and they run him like a two-man forecheck, Mateo opening with methodology ("This is purely for my own curiosity, I want to state that up front.
I have four questions, the fourth has parts"), Devon closing with the three-second stare he does before verdicts.
I can't hear all of it from where I'm being held hostage refereeing merch concepts, but I catch fragments. The word "intentions." The phrase "cross-cultural." At one point Patrick says something with a completely straight face that makes Devon cackle and slap the counter, and Mateo writes it down.
Theo materializes at my elbow with a donut in each hand, watching with me. "He's doing the thing where he answers the real question instead of the asked one," he says, around dough. "Gets 'em every time."
"It barely works on the press."
"It worked on you."
Oh.
By the window, Washington is waiting, and the crowd delivers Patrick to him.
The two of them stand apart from the noise with the city behind them, and the conversation runs long, and quiet, and I watch it the whole time over the rim of a glass while pretending to listen to Becker's t-shirt sizing survey.
Whatever Washington asks him, Patrick answers without a glance for help.
Whatever Patrick answers, Washington ends it with a handshake and keeps his hand a moment, saying one more thing, and Patrick nods once.
"He's approved," Washington announces on his way back to the couch. "Also, the locker room has a standing pierogi order now. First batch arrives Thursday."
"You negotiated food?" Becker asks.
"I vetted thoroughly."
The rest of the night stops being phases and becomes a party in my apartment, which is a sentence I've never produced before. Devon comes back from the bathroom at some point with his eyebrows up.
"Hey, so, quick question. Why is there a throne in your bedroom?"
Theo inhales half a donut and has to be struck on the back by two people. Patrick, across the room, develops a deep interest in my one piece of wall art.
Heat creeps up my neck. "It's a reading chair."
He squints. "You don't own books."
"I…read reports."
Devon looks at me, then at the donut situation, then back at me, and elects, visibly, to bank it rather than spend it. I make a note to fear that account.
They start peeling off around eleven, phase five arriving of its own accord, everyone carrying containers of leftovers they've been instructed to return. Washington and Leila go first. At the door, Leila kisses my cheek and says, "I’m impressed."
Becker leaves last, backwards, still talking, whiteboard under one arm, and we can hear him in the hallway all the way to the elevator. The second the doors slide closed behind him, three phones ping at once.
I check mine.
Becker changed the group name to: WOLVES PACK (+2 STRAYS).
Becker added: P.G.
Becker added: Theodore.
Three seconds later, Leila produces the first record of a new era.
Leila Washington: I have known since the diner photo. I want that on the record.
Theo, reading over my shoulder from inside the blanket he's annexed, lets out a low whistle. "Since the diner. That's like day one. That woman should run a government."
"She does," I say. "You just joined it."
My apartment falls into post-crowd quiet, warm and wrecked, marker fumes and candle smoke lingering in the air, and the three of us end up at the window, drinks in hand, and my chest is doing a thing I've stopped bothering to deny, because from right about this moment, I don’t have to anymore.
The team knows. The team knows, and the standings say I won, and nobody left, and nothing broke except a serving bowl I didn't like anyway.
Which is when Theo, scrolling one-handed, goes still. He turns the phone around without a word.
A social media account. Few followers, fake name. A photo from the gala, the three of us in the frame, standing in the orbit I spent all night avoiding, and a caption doing a lot of work with very few characters.
three's company? :eyes_emoji: :ice_hockey_emoji:
The numbers under it are small.
"Okay," Theo says, quiet now. "So we, what? Lawyer up? Log off? Start a rumor that it's a fantasy football league?"
Patrick's watching the city, not the phone. The lights go all the way to the lake, and somewhere out there, tonight, a few hundred strangers are apparently deciding what we are ahead of us.
"Or we decide what the truth looks like," he says, "before someone decides for us."
Theo's shoulder settles in against mine on one side. Patrick's stays where it is on the other, one inch away, close enough I can feel his heat.
There's no phase six in my plan.
Good thing I'm not the one running this one.