Chapter 11:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

He showed up in a matching costume. I looked at him, then down at myself, then back at him.

I stared at him in my doorway for a full three seconds.

“I thought you were wearing your own costume,” I said.

He shrugged. “I am. It just happens to match yours.”

He did not look remotely apologetic about this.

“How did you even know what I was wearing?”

“I asked Piper what the theme was. She told me what you’d probably wear.” A pause. “Turns out she was right about one thing.”

The irony of Piper helping Beckham coordinate with me was not lost on either of us.

Dо𝘄𝗇lo𝗮𝘥𝘢𝘣𝘭𝗲 р𝗗𝘍ѕ 𝗼𝗇 𝘨𝗮𝗅𝗇o𝘃e𝗹𝘀.𝖼om

In the car, he drove with one hand on the wheel and reached over to run his fingers through my hair, which was a thing I was going to have to think about later — the casualness of it, the way it assumed a familiarity that we had not officially established. I didn’t move away.

The party was already at full volume when we arrived. Piper lived in the kind of house where the music was felt before it was heard. Beckham’s teammates were clustered near the kitchen, still running on game energy, spilling their celebration into the room.

“There you are!” Keegan — the tall blond one from the stands, now dressed as Superman, cape and all — spotted Beckham and moved through the crowd. Then he saw me, and whatever he was about to say got visibly rerouted. “And Lennox.”

Behind Keegan, Piper had materialized. Black corset, cat ears, a drink she was using as a prop. She looked at me and then at Beckham and then at the matching costumes, and the math she did in her head was visible and not pleasant.

Good, I thought.

“You know Lennox,” Beckham said, which was not exactly an introduction.

“Of course,” Keegan said, with the enthusiasm of someone who had been given a gift. “Beckham wouldn’t stop talking about your axel — said he’d never seen someone make something that hard look that–”

“Keegan,” Beckham said.

“What? She should know. He literally would not change the subject.”

I looked at Beckham. He was studying the ceiling with sudden great interest.

“Technically,” I said, “I already knew he was paying attention.”

The group laughed. Beckham looked back down from the ceiling and caught my eye, and there was something there that was not quite the usual confidence — something caught off-guard, just for a moment, before he recovered it.

Keegan was still going. “He practically gave us a breakdown of your technique. Edge work, jump mechanics–”

“Keegan.”

“I’m just saying she could probably teach the team something.”

“She absolutely could,” I said.

Beckham leaned close to my ear.

“Should we find somewhere to be less publicly embarrassed?” he murmured. “There’s a whole house upstairs.”

We made our way through the party without announcing it. In the hallway at the top of the stairs I paused in front of the first door.

“Whose room is this?” I asked.

“Piper’s, probably.”

I opened the door.

“We should use this one,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment with something that might have been surprise and was definitely appreciation.

Inside, he dimmed the lights but not all the way.

“I want to be able to see you,” he said, which landed differently than it would have this morning — before I knew what it meant for him to actually pay attention to something.

He reached for the buttons of my costume and I let him.

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