We eat.
And this is the thing I can’t adequately explain, thething that has been happening for two weeks but that I’m feeling tonight without the glass between me and it: dinner at this table is the best part of the day.
The food and the noise and Jack’s tangential stories. Tristan’s satisfaction and Archer across the table, who ate the bread first, who I kissed today, who has said nothing about the encounter and somehow that’s the right call. Ryan at the end of the table who looks at me at intervals with the expression I’ve noted a hundred times.
I eat the slow-cooked meal and I am not managing myself tonight.
I notice this.
I’m just here.
After dinner Jack produces a pack of cards. This is, I discover, a recurring thing. They play cards after dinner when there’s nothing urgent. It’s a loose and mostly structureless game that seems to have rules which are a combination of standard and invented and entirely dependent on who’s winning and who’s decided to change them.
“This is not a real game,” I say, within about ten minutes.
“It’s a real game,” Jack insists.
“Which game is it?”
“Our game.”
“Which real game is it based on?”
He pauses. “Several.”
“This is chaos with a deck of cards.”
“This is tradition,” Tristan says, and he’s holding a completely inexplicable hand and looks entirely comfortable about it.
“How do you win?”
“Most points,” Archer replies.
“How do you get points?”
“Winning rounds.”
“How do you win rounds?”
“Best hand.”
“What constitutes the best hand?”
Archer looks at his cards. “It’s contextual.”
I stare at him. He looks back with an unbothered expression. His mouth does something at the corner.
I kissed that mouth today.
I play the cards.
I lose the round spectacularly, which is apparently very funny. I argue that the system is rigged, which Jack refutes with statistics I cannot verify, and somewhere in the argument about the statistics I am laughing. I just let it happen, and it sounds strange to my own ears, my real laugh, unfamiliar from the inside.
The pack reacts to it.
I deal the next hand.
“She’s going to win this round,” Jack says.
