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“Sure,” I said immediately.
“Great. Could you just walk to the top of the stairs and yell ‘Fishbowl’? Just to let people know the game is starting.” She pointed toward the foyer, where I could now see there was a hallway and a staircase.
“Um.” I glanced at the large wooden clock above the stove. It was really late. Did rock stars—and their families—just have a different internal clock? “Will I… wake people up?”
She waved this away, already opening the door. “All the adults are still up. And the kids will sleep through it. Thanks!”
She dashed across the lawn and I headed toward the stairs, wondering why I had to yell. Wasn’t this why we all had phones?
I was halfway up the stairs, rounding the corner onto the second floor, when I nearly bumped into someone coming down—Russell.
“Oh,” he said, stopping short and taking a step back.
“Sorry,” I said automatically. I blinked at him. Just as I’d taken a shower and changed, it seemed like Russell had done the same. The jeans and T-shirt I’d seen on him all night were gone, replaced with a pair of khaki shorts and a light blue, soft-looking button-down. His hair looked wet and freshly combed, and we were standing close enough that I could tell he smelled like cedar and something else… like the woods after rain.
“I didn’t—I thought that you left?”
“I did!” I said quickly. I didn’t want him to think we’d had that awkward goodbye for nothing. “I absolutely left. But when I was halfway down the driveway, I saw Andy—he’d gotten out again. And then when I brought him back to the house, Chloe told me that there weren’t any more buses to LA tonight and that I should stay here. So… I am.” He was looking at the ground, and I wished I could see his face—to try to understand how he was feeling about this. “Is that… okay?”
“Of course! I said that you could stay, remember? I told you we had the guesthouses.”
“I know,” I said, then crossed my arms over my chest. “And—thank you. I just didn’t want this to be… weird.”
Russell looked down at what I was wearing, and then back up at me. “Nice pants.”
“Oh,” I said, glancing at the writing down my right leg. “Yeah. Chloe kind of… stole my clothes? She’s washing them, I guess, so she gave me these.”
“She does that. I came to visit one time, and she’d replaced all my clothes with a ‘new direction’ she wanted me to try. Consider yourself lucky you just ended up with sweatpants.”
“What did she get you?”
“Leather pants,” he said, his voice grim. “Like… so many. And I never wore them. Think of the cows!”
I could feel myself on the verge of laughter, a beat from tipping over into it. Just like that, I was remembering how easy it had been with him all night, up until the very end. How simple it had seemed for a while.
“So,” Russell said. He looked up the staircase. “Were you…”
“Right,” I said, remembering I’d been sent here on a mission. “Montana wanted me to go upstairs and yell that Fishbowl is starting.”
“Finally!”
“Yeah. But I didn’t want to wake people up. She said it would be okay, but…”
“Don’t worry about it.” Russell crossed in front of me and bounded up the stairs in what seemed like two steps. “Hey! Fishbowl is starting!” he yelled, then walked back down again.
I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, and a second later, there was Chloe, now in a pair of very fluffy-looking slippers. “Hey, Darcy!” she said as she breezed by, not stopping. “The sweater looks great on you.”
She continued down, leaving Russell and me alone. We were standing closer than I’d realized—this landing was not particularly large to begin with, and probably not designed for people to just hang around on it, not going up or down, just stuck between two directions.
And in addition to that, I felt like I was stuck between the two versions of him—the Russell Henrion he’d pretended to be, and the Russell Sanders he actually was, who I didn’t really know at all. I took a breath to say something—I wasn’t sure what yet—when he took a step away from me and gestured to the stairs going down. “After you,” he said, his tone polite.
“Thanks.”
We walked down the stairs, me leading the way, not speaking—but with our feet falling at the same time.
* * *
“Fishbowl!” Wallace stood in front of the couches, looking happier than I’d yet seen him, in my brief experience. “Are you ready to play the best game of all time?”
