Page 29 of The Perfect Rom-Com

Serghei grunts gruffly from the kitchen door, looking not totally displeased by the attention.

“Oop. Mustn’t forget this.” Jack snatches up the phone I’d left on the table. Sets it in my hand.

Oh right.

I’d forgotten.

Chapter 5

Interstate Bowl is, in a word, busy.

In a series of words, it’s full to the gunwales of polyester shorts and replete with the scent of nacho cheese dip and tobacco. James, one of the many high school employees tasked with keeping up with obsessed middle-aged league members who have decidedly made rolling heavy balls down a glossy surface a major part of their identity, is covered in a cloud of bowling shoe disinfectant beside the jukebox, which is beside the cheap food bar flanked by splitting red-cushioned stools.

I plop my shoes on the floor next to Gloria and sit down.

“He loves you.” Gloria casts her gaze over at Jack, who’s leaning against the bar.

I shake my head. “He dates more women than are in this building.”

“What women? Look around.” Gloria takes in the swaths of males around us. Fair. “And dated. Past tense being the key tense here. I think he’s waiting for you.”

“For what?” I throw out, giving a disbelieving laugh. “I’m right here.”

“Have you forgotten Parker so easily?”

My face warms slightly, internally slapped by surprise at the remark. Of course. Parker. Only the guy I’ve been dating across the world. For two-plus years.

“Jack loves you.”

“He’s paid to love me, nothing more.” I lace up my bowling shoes. They are a smidge too big, given they were a graduating gift to me last year from a teammate and, you guessed it, former student. Actually three whole lanes are made up almost entirely of former and current students.

My idea for the Wednesday Night Hangout came three years ago on a whim. Partly because I knew it’d be good to help them practice their English outside of the classroom and partly because they became friends.

I missed the students when they graduated the class, and they missed me.

Hence, a hangout.

And what started as a social outlet for students in the middle of a cold, dark winter turned quickly into a weekly gathering, which turned quickly into a league. Or rather, a set of leagues. Enough students, both past and present, came to fill up six teams. And before we knew it, we were the Pin Pals.

Which, naturally, Jack resents.

“You actually think that your agent would haul that stupid bowling ball you got him last Christmas on a train forty-five minutes out of the city, put on that T-shirt jersey he complains about to us every week, and throw such pathetic balls that you had to appeal to the team to keep him—which of course everyone did because it’s you—because he’s paid to? He’s not your bodyguard, Bryony. He’s not paid to stick around.”

“Of course he’s not. He sticks around because my brain and hands are now precious cargo to Amelia and the agency, and as such, part of his job is to secretly make sure I don’t go off and ruin everything by becoming an alcoholic or falling in love with a billionaire on a remote island or losing one of my typing hands in a freak bowling accident. Or who knows?” I stand up. “Maybe he’s afraid that if I’m left alone too long, I’ll leak everything to the press.”

Gloria inhales furiously through her nostrils. As she does every time we have this conversation and I refuse to give in.

“But really,” I say, smiling, “we all know it’s because bowling night with my students is reality television on steroids, and he comes for the drama.”

I wiggle between people up to the screen and, before tapping in our names, check the opposing team. Their name is the Striking Pencils. (It was Spitting Vipers, but Lakshmi has a fairly terrifying backstory and now understandable phobia of all things snake, so the team generously switched it to what they called truly intimidating in light of their current lives: English academia.) They’re out Lakshmi and Phuong tonight, but I see already on their two screens Galina, Chen, Miho, Saliha, Abiola, and Abiola’s first wife, Tiwa, as well as Abiola’s second wife he pretends is his sister (don’t get me started), Ayo. Plus Jose.

The next two lanes over are covered up as well.

It’s a full house tonight.

I type in Abdallah. Socorro. Gloria. Fatima (a sweet fifty-five-year-old woman who has lived in America for over twenty-five years and is only now brave enough to seek English classes). Otieno. Eman. Then I move to the next lane and type in Mr. and Mrs. Azarenka (our elderly and slightly terrifying Moldovan couple who refuse for propriety’s sake to be called by their first names). Jack. Me. And the ever-quirky but not-totally-unhandsome newest member to our group, the twenty-five-year-old German student, Albrecht.

He sits next to Gloria, frowning deeply as he watches her reaching for a nacho from the center of the booth. Not going to lie, this happens a lot. He’s the resident Gloria starer.