Page 104 of Slashed Bonds

The face of a woman offering you a match in a room full of gas.

“Fuck no.” I groan it. “You know she’d ruin these men and enjoy every second.”

Maddie claps.

Actual applause. She sets the phone down to do it properly.

“Exactly! She’d walk them all like fucking dogs! Can you imagine? It’d be the most entertaining thing that’s happened to either of us since the golf cart!”

“We never did the golf cart.”

“We planned the golf cart. That counts.”

She skates, by the way.

They don’t know the extent of how fucking good Maddie is, and it’s going to stay that way until Roz puts her on a sheet and finds out the hard way.

Maddie played wing for a program in the east until she was seventeen, and she was a mean bitch, fast as fuck, and the kind of player who’d let you think she was decorative for two periods.

Then take your knees out in the third.

She doesn’t show her cards.

That’s the whole Maddie doctrine.

Look like the least dangerous thing in the room until the moment it’s useful not to.

Pink is camouflage. I’ve told the roster nothing. Let them find out.

“Scary,” I sigh, and shake my head.

Then I look at her. Properly. For the first time since she walked in and the room went sideways.

She looks good.

Not the pink. The pink’s always there, the pink is the point. Under it. Her face has color that isn’t makeup. The hollows under her eyes that lived there for the whole of our second year at Bellwether are gone.

She’s sitting like a person who actually gets eight hours of fucking sleep.

The scrunchie’s already on Knox’s leash. She did it in the front hall while the men were still arguing about coffee, crouched down in her pink coat and slid it over the clip and told him he looked distinguished, and he let her, which he lets almost no one do.

And there’s a new sticker on my pill organizer.

I haven’t looked, but I’m rather confident there is. I know there is.

She colonizes. It’s how she loves.

“You look good, Maddie.”

“And you look less pale and skinny.”

She says it lightly.

She’s judging me, though.

I know that look. That’s the look that finds fault lines and puts a thumb on them.

“You need to fucking eat.”