23. Milo #2
Slowly, she smiles. “All right, kid. You’re on.”
The Perimeno-Bowls are not a casual lawn bowls team.
They are a precision-engineered, hormonally fueled execution squad, and we are the thing they execute.
Nancy draws her first two bowls to within an inch of the jack, back to back, like she has magnets embedded in the lawn.
Beverley has a delivery so smooth I want to weep into my warm beer.
Lori bowls left-handed, which I’m now certain is psychological warfare.
Connie hustles around like a flustered aunt right up until she rolls a draw shot through a gap the width of a coaster.
Pat doesn’t speak. Pat hasn’t spoken once.
Pat rolls kill after kill with the flat indifference of a woman who does not require your validation or, apparently, oxygen.
And Maeve—youngest of them, maybe late forties, with a tattoo on her forearm of a uterus flipping the bird—is the heckler.
“Lovely form, sweetheart!” she calls when Eli steps up. “Now try it with your eyes open!”
We are not good.
I’m good—I draw three shots in the first six ends that even Nancy nods at.
Knox bowls like a man operating heavy machinery, every delivery identical, every result a small tragedy for the other team.
Holden tightens up as the gap narrows, which is when he’s dangerous.
Sage’s technique remains a war crime, but she draws one shot close enough in the fourth end that the whole rink stops to acknowledge it.
“YES, GORGEOUS!” Connie screams. “THAT’S MY GIRL!”
Sage curtsies. Then bowls her next one into the ditch.
Micah plays steady and unbothered. Between ends he sits close to Sage, his hand on her knee, her head finding his shoulder like it lives there. And Eli—
Eli sits on Micah’s other side.
A close, deliberate distance. When Micah leans back to say something low to him, Eli leans in to hear it. Then Micah’s hand lifts off Sage’s knee and lands on the back of Eli’s neck. Brief. Easy. The kind of touch that used to be nothing between them and is trying to be nothing again.
And something in my chest does a thing I don’t have a filing system for.
I look away. Pick a bowl up. Put it down. It isn’t even my turn.
It’s just—they look good together. That’s all. Micah’s hand on the back of Eli’s neck, Eli’s hands out of his pockets for the first time all day. It’s nice. It’s a nice thing to look at. I look at nice things. I’m a connoisseur of nice things.
Finally it is my turn again, and I bowl my next shot four feet wide and have absolutely no idea why.
“You all right?” Micah asks me, because Micah notices everything, which is the single most inconvenient thing about him.
“Peak performance,” I say. “Never better.”
He gives me a look that lasts a half-second too long, then lets it go.
We lose 32–6. It’s not close. It’s the lawn bowls equivalent of a sinking ship being struck by a second, angrier ship.
The Perimeno-Bowls celebrate with a coordinated little shimmy and a chant I can’t fully make out but which definitely contains the word “ovaries.” Beverley fans herself and announces a hot flush. Pat raises one fist, then lowers it. The most emotion she’s shown all day.
We buy the drinks.
And the onion rings.
By the time we move inside, Sage has had two beers and a concoction Lori made her that’s described as “mostly juice” and smells like it could strip paint. Her cheeks are flushed, her scarf’s gone crooked, and she’s perched on a barstool between me and Beverley, hanging on every word.
“—and the sweat helps your grip, see,” Beverley’s saying, deadly serious. “My average went up after the change. I’m dominating out there.”
“I love that for you,” Sage breathes.
She’s radiant. She makes my chest hurt in a completely different and much more familiar place than it did out on the green, and I lean into the familiar one because it doesn’t ask me questions.
When we finally leave, Sage hugs every single Perimeno-Bowl goodbye. Connie holds on the longest and murmurs something that makes Sage’s eyes go round and her whole face flush. Beverley tells her to drink water. Pat nods at her. From Pat, I suspect that’s a marriage proposal.
She and Knox should hang out.
Outside, the afternoon’s gone soft and gold, sea mist rolling in off the water and haloing the streetlights. Sage walks between me and Eli, arm hooked through mine, listing gently to one side. Knox and Holden are ahead—Knox unlocking the car, Holden carrying the pink bag.
“That was fun,” she says, tipping her face up to the sky.
“Yeah?”
“I want to come every week. I want to beat the Perimeno-Bowls.”
“Kitten, we’re never beating the Perimeno-Bowls. They’re a different order of being.”
“Not with that attitude.” She turns her head to Eli. “You had fun. Don’t pretend you didn’t.”
Eli startles, like being addressed directly still surprises him. “Yeah. I did.”
“Your bowls got better.”
“They did.”
She’s looking at him head-on now—the loose, fearless stare of a woman two beers and a paint-stripper past her filter. She’s still carrying hurt where he’s concerned. But she’s been setting it down, piece by piece lately, and I’ve watched her do it, and I love her stupidly for the effort it costs.
“I want to trust you again,” she says suddenly, without any buildup or careful framing. She just tosses it out across the parking lot like a bowl she didn’t bother to aim.
Eli stops walking. We all do.
“I want that too,” he says. “More than anything.”
“I need you to show me.” She sways. I steady her with the arm she’s holding. “You’re too good with words, so I don’t want words. I want you to do something.”
“Name it.”
The grin that spreads across her face is the most dangerous thing I’ve seen all day, and let’s not forget I watched Nancy draw a shot through a gap you couldn’t post a letter through.
“Hey, Knoxie?” She crooks her finger at him and he leans down while she whispers in his ear. He nods along, does something weird with his mouth that I think is him smiling, then stands upright.
“I’m driving,” he announces, holding a hand out for my keys.
“What?” I dig in my pocket and drop the keys in his palm. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll find out,” Sage says, and grabs Eli’s hand.
They rush ahead to my car, Sage getting in shotgun and Eli sliding into the back seat while Knox gets behind the wheel.
“You coming?” Sage calls out to the rest of us.
“We’ll ride with Micah,” Holden says, grabbing me by the back of the neck and manhandling me toward the passenger side.
“Rude,” I say, because I have to say something while I’m being dragged along like a shopping cart with a bad wheel. “I have been usurped in my own vehicle by a six-foot-seven tyrant and a drunk girl with a dream.”
“You’ll survive,” Holden says.
“That remains to be seen.”
Micah unlocks the car with a chirp. Holden gets in the back. I take shotgun on principle and immediately twist around to look through the rear window as Knox pulls my car out of the lot with all the ominous calm of a getaway driver in a movie where everyone ends up emotionally compromised.
Sage sticks her hand out the passenger window and waves at us like she’s being driven to prom.
I wave back with both hands. “See you soon, kitten!”
Micah starts the engine and eases out after them. “Any guesses where we’re going?”
“Sex dungeon,” I say.
“No.”
“Kidnapping.”
“No.”
“Sexy kidnapping?”
Holden kicks the back of my seat.
“Ow. Police brutality.”
Micah follows along behind them, and ten minutes later, we’re pulling up outside a little shopfront with a neon sign buzzing in the window.
A tattoo studio.