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I go into the kitchen, take out some hummus, veggies, cheese, and a bag of Kettle Chips, pile a load of it onto a plate, and bring it back into the bedroom with two cans of diet soda.
“Mm, that looks great.” She sits up against the pillows, draping the duvet over her, and we eat from the same plate, dipping the chips, cheese, and veggie sticks in the hummus.
As we eat, I rest my hand on the duvet, palm up, and she slides hers into it.
“I’m so glad we won the tournament,” she says.
“Yeah, me too.”
“I’m so sorry that David insulted Victoria. That was a horrible thing to say.”
“She’s heard it all before. But it still got to me.”
“It must have been hard for her.”
“It has,” I say with feeling.
“What was she like at school?” She gives me an apologetic look then. “If you don’t mind talking about it. I don’t mean to pry.”
“No, it’s okay. When I first came to New Zealand, they put me in Year Seven for a couple of months, then moved me up into Year Eight because I found the work too easy. It was tough—everyone had already formed friendship groups, and I was a year younger than most of the guys. But then I met Huxley. His parents were rich, and he had a PlayStation, and I didn’t. We got talking about gaming, and he invited me around to his house to play it. He knew Kai—he’s always known everyone—and he introduced us, saying he knew we’d get on. Which we did, of course.”
“Kai who formed Koru Tech with you?”
“Yeah. With Eoin and Cherry.” I lift her fingers and kiss them. “Anyway, one day Hux and I were walking through the school, and we went around the back of a building and saw a group of guys pushing another boy around. You know what kids are like, it happens a lot, but Hux surprised me by walking right up and pushing one of them over. I ran in to join him, and the two of us were already tall, so the other kids ran off. The boy thanked us and then got upset. Hux—all of twelve but already putting people at ease—asked do you like gaming? And the boy said yeah, and we got talking about one of the games we’d been playing, and I think then he realized that we didn’t care that he was different. And that was it. He became one of our closest friends.”
Her eyes are wide. “That was Victoria?”
“Yeah. She was sixteen when she told us she identified as female. I think it took her a month to pluck up the courage to tell us. Hux’s first words were, ‘About fucking time,’ and I said, ‘What a shock,’ and then we started talking about the rugby, and that was that. Many years later, she told us she loved us for that.”
“Aw,” Sid says.
“She was nervous about announcing it at school, but again, most people had guessed anyway, and I think it was easier than she’d expected. The school was surprisingly supportive and helped where they could. When she went to university, she went as a woman, and I don’t think half the people there realized. She had tough times, of course. It was far from easy for her. But she had sex reassignment surgery at twenty-one, just after she graduated, and from the moment she came home, she was so happy, it was amazing. I completely forget about it now, and I think she does half the time, too. But when arseholes like David mention it, it brings back the times when I had to watch her being unhappy and bullied, and it just makes me mad.”
It’s her turn to kiss my hand. “I’m glad we beat David,” she says. “You didn’t like him even before we played, did you? Why so? Because of Felicity?”
“What do you mean?”
“I wondered if it bothered you that he’s dating her.”
“Why would it bother me?”
She gives me an impatient look. “Because she’s your ex?”
“She’s not my ex.”
It’s her turn to look confused. “What do you mean?”
I shrug. “We had sex, like, four or five times. That doesn’t constitute a relationship. Not in my book, anyway.”
“Mack, we’ve had sex three times,” she points out. Luckily, she’s amused rather than annoyed at what she obviously sees as a male faux pas.
I raise an eyebrow. “I can count, Sid. But when we have sex, we burn with the energy of a thousand suns. It wouldn’t matter if I’d had sex with Felicity a million times, it would never compare to our three.”
Her face pinks—she likes that.
“Besides,” I add, “I wasn’t in love with her.”
She lifts her gaze to mine. I return it for a moment. Then I let my lips curve up a tiny bit.
