He’s quiet for a second. “Well, they’re idiots.” He says it flat, like a fact about the weather. “It’s a bowl, Jasmine. It costs me nothing. Eat your dinner.”
“Where’d you learn to cook?” I ask because I need to put my attention somewhere that isn’t my own throat.
“I’m the oldest of four. Mom worked nights, and so…” He scrapes the pan. “Somebody had to feed the little ones. You figure out quick, a kid’ll eat just about anything if it’s warm and you don’t make a federal case out of what they will and won’t touch.” He glances at me. “So the bowl’s not strange to me. I’ve been keeping food from touching since I was nine.”
“Do you still? Feed them.”
“Dev’s nineteen, feeds himself now, mostly. The girls, I send what I can.” He says it lightly, but what he shared is heavy as fuck. “That’s why you keep trying. That’s why you need this to work. For them.”
I hold onto that. A guy who plays the way he plays, so two girls he isn’t even in the same state with get to stay little a while longer.
I’m starting to understand him more. He’s more than what his paperwork revealed. The watching. The way he clocks every exit and every loud thing in a room. Even the temper that got him thrown out of three states. I bet he learned to see everything because there were three smaller people who needed him to see it first.
I eat the chicken. I eat the rice. I eat every single green bean out of its own little bowl, and it’s the best meal I’ve had in a long time.
Afterwards, he washes the dishes, and I dry, because standing next to him at a sink turns out to be a thing my nervous system can handle.
“What do you do at home right now?” he asks. “If it’s a normal night around this hour. What’s the routine?”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve checked the clock six times and you’re starting to buzz. I figure that whatever you’d be doing at home is the thing that you need to do here.”
Nobody has ever asked me that, and if somebody ever had, I would have been completely embarrassed. But I don’t know, there’s something about the way he’s asking that makes me feel safe to tell him.
“There’s a show,” I say. “A dating one. Twenty-five men, one woman, she hands out roses.”
“Oh, yeah, I think I heard of that one.”
“I’m late to the hype, but I watch it now. I take notes.”
“Notes?”
“On strategy. They all play it terribly. They lead with their feelings in week two, and they trust the wrong people.” I tell him more. “It’s the only place I can watch how this stuff actually works, slowed down where I can see the parts. In real life, it’s too fast or sometimes just too confusing, and I can’t track it. But on the show, they tell you what they’re thinking. There’s a little room where they explain it to a camera.” I look at his face. It’s blank. I can’t read what he’s thinking, so I stop talking. “It’s stupid.”
He’s already walking toward the saddest little couch I’ve ever seen. “Put it on.”
“Are you going to sit on that?”
“Yeah, and so are you.”
“Did you pick that up off the street?”
“Nope,” he laughs. “I got it off of an online marketplace for a steal.”
“I bet.”
He pats the cushion next to him.
“Sit.”
“You don’t have to watch this,” I say.
“Jasmine.” He picks up the remote and holds it out to me grip-first, the way I hand him pens. “I want to know who’s playing the game bad. Walk me through it.”
So I do.
I narrate an entire rose ceremony to a guy who gets his thrills putting people through plexiglass, but he gets it. More importantly, he gets into it. He calls some guy named Brayden a snake forty seconds before Brayden mentions the girlfriend he’s got back home.
