Page 64 of Ruthless Edge

White tablecloths. Actual cloth napkins folded into something architectural. Windows the full length of the far wall looking out over a lake and gardens that are doing their best despite it being March, and the whole room is filled with soft music and soft conversation.

I look down at my jeans. My jacket. My binder, which I'm still holding.

"We're not dressed for this," I say.

Knox looks at me. "You look great. Besides, it’s a hotel, and it’s not even evening. They’re used to casually dressed people."

He says it the way he'd say the sky is blue, like it’s just a fact, stated, moving on. I studied him as he sits, looking over the menus, and tell myself that's just Knox being Knox, which is true, and also not the point.

The point is that his moves keep working on me.

The drive. The music, both of us shouting the wrong lyrics and laughing about it. Him opening the car door, then the hotel door, then this door. The ballroom manager and Knox's quiet, relentless, extremely funny defense of me, redirecting every condescending answer back to where it belonged. The woman who owns the hotel and the thing he said that wasn't quite a joke.

This feels like a date.

I order the salmon. He orders the steak. He gets a water, and I get a water. I keep telling myself that this isn’t a date, but can’t shake that it just keeps feeling more like one.

What happens next is the part I was not braced for, which is that lunch is genuinely, annoyingly, unreasonably good.

Without the event to talk about, without other people around us, without anything to structure the conversation around, I expected it to get awkward. It doesn't. Knox asks about my roommates. He tells me more about the road trip with his brothers and teammates, and just how hard the guys got shut down by a group of women in a bookshop they rolled up to. Drunk. I ask about hockey and he answers in terms I can follow, then asks me something about psychology and actually wants to know, not just to have something to ask.

He remembers things.

That's the part that keeps catching me. I mention something offhand about my Tuesdays being brutal this semester and he says isn't that the day you have back-to-back labs, which I told him once, in passing, in a meeting that was about something else. He asks if I've heard the new Hacksack Blues single and when I say I have he wants to know what I think of the bridge and then argues with my interpretation for five minutes, which is one of my preferred ways to spend five minutes.

I keep forgetting to be careful.

I'll be in the middle of laughing at something and catch myself and remember that I'm supposed to be wary of this. I have reasons. Years of them. And then Knox says something and I'm laughing again and the reasons go out the window.

There's a boy I thought I knew freshman year. A marketing major with an incredible smile. He asked questions and remembered answers and stayed late after studying and showed up with the right coffee order without being asked. I spent a long time after that gala convincing myself I'd invented him, that the version I remembered was the one I wanted him to be and not who he actually was. The only way the rest of it made sense was if that version wasn't real.

Sitting here is making that harder to hold on to. Making it harder not to want to ask him what happened at the gala. But I don’t ask, because he already gave me the answer three years ago.

I'm thinking about this, watching Knox steal a roll from the bread basket and argue that bread calories don't count when you've driven two hours, when my phone lights up on the table.

Owen.

I reach for it.

Knox reaches across the table and turns it to silent, then places it face-down.

I stare at him.

"You can call him back later," Knox says.

"That's my phone."

"It'll go to voicemail. Besides, it’s rude to answer a call during dinner."

"Yeah, but⁠—"

"Or not," he says, and something in his voice has shifted. Still casual on the surface, but under it something tighter. "How are things going with Owen, anyway?"

I should be more annoyed about the phone. I won’t forget him doing that. Maybe in the future I’ll return the favor. But right now, I look at Knox's face and see something I wasn't expecting, a kind of held-still quality to it, like he asked a question and is being very careful not to show how much he wants the answer.

So I say, "I'm mostly just using him for sex at this point, honestly."

The change in Knox's face is immediate and not at all what I was prepared for.