Well Played

by Jen DeLuca

  “Yeah.” I sighed and let my head drop onto the table. The more I talked about it, the worse I felt. Who did I want to be behind the words?

  “Should I call Daniel?” I looked up to see Simon coming out of the bedroom again, dressed in old clothes suitable for painting and carrying a pair of battered running shoes.

  “What?” The thought horrified me. “No. Why?”

  He sat down on the couch and started putting his shoes on. “We can revoke their contract. Tell him we don’t need them this year. I don’t like that they were jerking you around like that.” His voice was casual, but the way he kept his eyes down, focused hard on his shoelaces, told me what a hard thing this was for him to offer. This Faire was one of the most important things in Simon’s life, and the Dueling Kilts was a long-term act. Firing them for no reason wouldn’t go over well; word traveled fast on the Faire circuit. But Simon was willing to risk our Faire’s reputation for the sake of standing up to someone who had broken my heart. I’d known Simon for most of my life, and he’d always been a friend, but it wasn’t until this moment that I realized just how good a friend he was.

  “No,” I said. My heart wasn’t broken. It was just a little bruised. I wasn’t down for the count yet. “It’s okay.” I took my laptop back and snapped it closed. “I can handle this.”

  “You sure?” Emily raised her eyebrows.

  “Yep. I have a plan.”

  Twelve

  Having a plan, I soon realized, and implementing said plan were two different things. I didn’t want to tip my hand too early, so once I got home from Emily’s I sent Dex—Daniel, whoever—a quick text. Sorry. Faire prep in overdrive around here, so I’m crazy busy. Talk to you soon! I even included a smiley-face emoji so he wouldn’t get suspicious. His answer came back relatively quickly—I can only imagine! Hope they’re not overworking you!—and was easy enough to respond to with a couple happy-looking emojis without saying too much.

  I couldn’t put my plan into action until Friday, when Faire was about to begin, so I had to spend the week going about my life as though nothing had happened. I wasn’t sure how long I could stay neutrally pleasant when Dex—Daniel?—emailed or texted, but he made it easy on me by going dark most of the week. I got a couple good morning/good night texts, and I responded so he wouldn’t suspect that my perspective on his messages had changed, but other than that I didn’t hear much from him.

  That, to me, was a tick in the “It’s Definitely Daniel” column. Dex wouldn’t have anything to hide. In fact, he’d be looking forward to seeing me again with this new, richer relationship. Daniel, however, would most likely be filled with anxiety, knowing that the jig was about to be up.

  But what jig? Wasn’t that the question, as Emily had said? Now that I was all but assured that Daniel was the one on the other side of the screen, I still didn’t know why.

  The week seemed to take about a thousand years. Emily and I exchanged a lot of texts that week too. She offered more than once to help me face the MacLeans to figure all this out, and while the show of support warmed my heart, I ultimately told her that I needed to do this alone. This whole thing was so bizarre, and had the potential for so much humiliation, that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to go through with confronting anyone if I had an audience.

  Okay, if you’re sure, she’d finally texted on Thursday night. But you need to tell me EVERYTHING Saturday morning!

  I promise, I responded. Wouldn’t that be a fun way to kick off Faire season? But she meant well, and there was the very real danger of me needing a shoulder to cry on.

  Thursday night my tavern wench costume came out of its trunk and I hung it over the front of my wardrobe. All my accessories were together—I’d put them all away at the end of last summer, where else would they be? I’d gotten a new pair of boots a few weeks ago, and I’d worn them enough that they were broken in and comfortable. (I’d made the mistake once of wearing a brand-new pair of shoes the first day of Faire. When I spent that first night putting Band-Aids on all of my blisters, I vowed to never do that again.)

  The last thing I did was get my dragonfly necklace out of my jewelry box. I looked from its sparkly crystal eyes to my wench’s costume and frowned. Simon had been right—the two really didn’t match. Emily and I had talked about getting new costumes, and she’d even pinged me to look at a few contenders on our shared Pinterest board sometime in the spring. With everything else going on, it hadn’t been a top priority for either one of us, but rather something we’d get to when we had time. And then we’d run out of time, and here I was with the same costume as always.

  “So much for change.” But I tucked the dragonfly into my belt pouch anyway, along with the hair ties and pins for my hair. Let Simon complain about it once I put it on. I didn’t care.

  One of the best things about work was that the office closed at noon on Fridays in the summer, but that Friday even those few hours crawled by at an excruciating pace. But then finally, finally, it was time to clock out, and I could get ready. At home, I switched my office scrubs for a soft pink sundress and kitten-heeled sandals and took extra care with my hair, styling it so it fell in soft waves around my shoulders. I stepped back and looked at myself in the full-length mirror and nodded solemnly. I looked good, and that was important for this plan. My phone chimed with a text, and my pulse spiked as I looked down at it. But I’d been expecting this text. It was time. I scooped up Benedick and gave him a kiss before I left. I needed luck to pull this off.

  My hands shook on the steering wheel, and I took a few calming breaths when I reached the parking lot of the hotel. I slicked on my favorite pink lip gloss and checked my hair one more time in the rearview mirror before I got out of the car. My heels clicked on the pavement, then on the tiles of the lobby, and those clicks sounded like the stride of a powerful woman, which gave me confidence. I needed confidence right now.

  I walked toward the check-in desk and waved at Julian, who was on the evening shift. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and waved it at me in a salute. There was that everyone-knowing-everyone advantage to living in a small town again. Julian and I had been in every class together since preschool, and I’d long since forgiven him for putting glue in my hair in the first grade. And now he’d grown up and gotten married, and he and his husband had stayed here in Willow Creek, where Julian worked at the hotel. He was our point of contact for the block of rooms we got here for the Faire performers, so we’d been emailing back and forth a lot lately.

  He also knew when the performers had arrived and checked in to the hotel. So he could text me and let me know. And then I could come over here. That had been the first part of the plan.

  The second part of the plan was waiting in the lobby, leaning on the check-in desk, scrolling through his phone. Black jeans, black T-shirt, black baseball cap covering a shock of red hair. My heels clicked their way toward Daniel, and my heart thudded harder with each step.

  He looked up as I approached, and the molecules inside my body shifted when his eyes met mine. Part two of this plan was getting Daniel to admit that he’d been the one writing to me all this time, and that he wasn’t doing it as some kind of mouthpiece for Dex. Until this moment I hadn’t been sure how I’d wanted this conversation to go. Somewhere, down in the deepest part of my primitive lizard brain, I’d known that it hadn’t been Dex that I’d been getting to know all these months, and even more importantly, I hadn’t wanted it to be.

  I wanted it to be Daniel.

  But one step at a time.

  “Stacey, hey.” Daniel’s voice was light, casual, and it gave me pause. This wasn’t the attitude of someone who knew that he was caught.

  “Hi, Daniel.” My voice matched his for casualness, and I have myself a mental high-five. “What are you hanging out in the lobby for?”

  “Oh. Some kind of mix-up with the rooms. The guy said he was working on it.” He glanced down at his phone,
then over at Julian, who busied himself at his monitor, pointedly not looking at us.

  “Hmmm.” I nodded, as though I hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing. “That’s weird.” It wasn’t weird. Julian was stalling Daniel, just as I’d asked him to. “But I’m glad to see you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  “To me?” His eyes lit up with interest as he stowed his phone in his back pocket. He was still acting way too casual, and I wanted more than anything to trip him up.

  “Sure,” I said. “After all these months, you know. All those emails, all the things we’ve said to each other. It’s nice to finally see you face to face.”

  “Me? No.” There was a glimmer of something in his eyes, but he blinked it away fast. He was good. But he couldn’t hide the flush that crept up the back of his neck, which I saw as he turned his head to the side, away from me, to study the terrible artwork on the far wall. “No,” he said again. “You mean Dex.”

  “Do I?” My eyes narrowed as I studied him. Even though I was confronting him with the truth, he was still denying it. He still wanted to nudge me toward his cousin. Was he just Dex’s mouthpiece after all?

  “Well, yeah. You’ve been . . .” He glanced up at the ceiling now, and he swallowed hard. The casualness was gone from his expression, and he was starting to struggle. “You’ve been communicating with Dex. At least, that’s what he . . .”

  “You know what, you’re right.” I shook my head with a hollow chuckle. “Silly me. Do you know where he . . . Never mind.” I dug in my bag now for my phone. “I have his number. I can just call him.”

  “No!” Daniel took a step toward me, his hands raised, his eyes wide, and I knew I had him. Better yet, he knew I had him. But he still tried to keep up the pretense. “No, don’t. I . . . uh, I think he’s driving. You should probably . . .”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s fine. Let me just . . .” I pulled up my contacts and hit the green button next to Dex’s name. That green button I’d never had the nerve to hit, all these months. Then I watched the blood drain from Daniel’s face as his back pocket began to ring.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Well? Aren’t you going to answer it?”

  He pressed his lips together hard before making a sigh of defeat. Then he pulled his phone out of his back pocket, still ringing, my name on the display. He hit the red button on his phone at the same time I did on mine.

  “I think we need to talk.” All the playfulness was gone from my voice, and he nodded.

  “I think we should.” His voice was hushed, defeated.

  “Why don’t you finish checking in,” I said. I glanced over at Julian, who winked at me and brandished a key card like it was a winning ace. “I think everything’s straightened out now. I’ll be in the bar; you can meet me there.”

  “Okay.” Daniel had the look of someone who realized he’d been set up, but knew that he didn’t have the right to complain. “Yeah. I’m gonna need a beer.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The hotel wasn’t anything fancy: one of those low-budget chain affairs, but it had a little restaurant connected to it. Not even a restaurant: more of a glorified bar with a burgers-and-sandwiches menu, but the important thing was that it had Guinness on tap. That was part three of the plan.

  The clicking of my heels faded into the general noise of the bar, and I settled myself on a stool where I had a good view of the entrance. I ordered a glass of rosé for me and a pint of Guinness for him. And then I waited. Now that I knew that Daniel was the man on the other end of the phone, I knew his drink order. He’d told me weeks ago. He hadn’t been referring to this particular night, and he’d been making me believe he was someone else, but I knew his plans. I knew his routines. I knew him.

  I just wasn’t a hundred percent certain who he actually was, or how much of what he told me was the real him. So the Guinness was a test.

  It didn’t take him long; I was only a few sips into my wine before he walked through the door, and I sucked in a breath. I’d been so busy analyzing his expression in the lobby, looking for truth in his eyes, that I hadn’t really looked at him.

  I did now.

  He looked tired. Which, of course, made sense because he’d probably been driving the better part of the day, and all of our drama aside, his mind was probably on the first day of Faire tomorrow. His face was pale, made paler by that uniform of black T-shirt and black jeans he always wore, and there was the shadow of a couple days’ stubble on his cheeks. He was so different from his cousin, the kind of guy who spent quality time in the gym counting reps. There was nothing about Daniel that was showy, except maybe his hair. His build spoke of subtle, lean strength born from years of hauling around equipment and living on the road. Arms that didn’t advertise their muscles, but they would be there when needed. The kind of guy who could catch me if I fell.

  The more I looked at him, the more I remembered all the words we’d shared over the months. And the more I fell.

  I really, really hoped he would be there to catch me.

  He’d taken off the baseball cap, and his red-gold hair hung low over his brow. He shook it out of his eyes, scanning the bar for an empty seat, and since I was watching him, I saw the moment when he found me. I waved, my fingers wiggling in his direction, and while a smile played around his lips, his expression was wary as he approached, his long legs eating up the distance between us in a few strides. What kind of recalibration was his brain making? Was he mentally cataloging our emails, working on getting his story straight? Was the Guinness thing even true?

  He settled on the stool next to me and slid a hand toward the glass of Guinness. “You remembered.”

  I blew out a breath. That, almost more than the ringing phone in the lobby, was all the confirmation I needed. He was the one. “Darkest beer you can find at the closest bar. That was you, right?”

  “That’s me.” He lifted the pint glass, took a sip, and closed his eyes in pleasure. “Oh, that’s perfect.” He set the glass down and he turned to me. Neither of us spoke at first; his eyes ate me up like I was an appetizer. I’d forgotten how his eyes were almost translucent, like the smoothest sea glass. “It’s so good to see you,” he finally said. “I mean, really see you.” His voice was hushed, reverent, and I almost forgot how angry and betrayed I’d felt all week. Because despite everything, it was good to see him too. After all these months of nothing but words on screens, his physical closeness was almost too much to take.

  But then I remembered that sad, sick feeling of being lied to. Of being deceived for months. Happy to see each other or not, we had to clear the air first. That was my plan. Clear the air, then kissing. Hopefully.

  “So.” I pushed my wineglass away. “First things first. Has it been you? This whole time?”

  “Yes.” He answered immediately, and I respected that. No more lying. “I run the Kilts’ fanpage. That first message from you that came in . . . I thought it was for me. So I wrote you back. I didn’t realize until you wrote again that . . . that you thought I was Dex.” He blinked hard, his mouth twisted, and my immediate instinct was to soothe him. Someone in distress made me itchy, and nothing eased that itch like saying and doing whatever I could to make that distress go away. But I resisted the urge. I was the one who’d been deceived here. Wasn’t I in distress too?

  “And you never thought to correct me?” I blew out a frustrated breath. “What were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t.” He gave a helpless shrug of his shoulders. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Uh-uh.” I narrowed my eyes and crossed my arms over my chest. “Try again, buddy. I’m gonna need a better answer than that.”

  “I don’t know if I have one.” He took another sip from his glass, his eyes trained on the bottles above the bar. He wasn’t avoiding my eyes, though. He was thinking. “You were talking to me,” he finally said, his eyes still focused elsewhere.
“Noticing me. I mean, sure, you thought I was someone else. And I knew I should come clean. But if I did, it would all stop. So I didn’t.”

  “But you said . . . A few weeks back, you said there were things you needed to say, that you were afraid to say. That you needed to say them in person. So”—I waved a hand, indicating the space between us—“here we are. In the same room. Breathing the same air. What did you need to say?”

  I watched the tip of his tongue peek out to lick a drop of beer from his lower lip. Heat surged through me in a wave. I wanted to lean in. I wanted to nibble on his lower lip. I wondered how he’d taste, all dark beer and warm skin. But no. We weren’t anywhere near nibbling yet.

  A slightly shuddering sigh escaped him. “You’re right.” This whole conversation he’d been looking down at the bar, or up at the bottles that lined the top shelves, almost everywhere but at me. But now he pushed away his glass too—no distractions—and turned on his stool to face me. “You’re right,” he said again. “I did say that. And the conversation I was afraid of is the one we’re having right now. Stacey, I . . .” His voice caught, and he spared one sidelong glance at his beer, but turned back to me. “I still remember the first day I saw you, here at this Faire. I don’t remember what you said, but I remember your smile, and as far as I was concerned, that was it. You were it. But I’m . . . you know, me.” There was that awkward laugh again.

  “And what’s wrong with you?” I asked gently. A little defensively, even. Despite my anger, a protective feeling for Daniel had started to bloom in my chest, and I didn’t want anyone saying anything mean about him. Even Daniel himself.

  “Nothing,” he said quickly. “I mean, my self-esteem is fine and all. But put me next to my cousin—any of them—and it’s no contest.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but closed it again. Okay, he had a point. If the members of the Dueling Kilts resembled varsity football stars, Daniel was the AV club geek of the group. Not necessarily unattractive on his own, but not the one that your eye fell on first when he was in a group.