Page 58 of Base Block

“Maybe.” For now, the demo was over and I got up from the nice chair, which Callum and I had been sharing. There was a dinner to prepare for—not for twenty-six people, as we had originally imagined, but for twelve. That was still a lot of guests but it was much more manageable, especially because two of the group were me and Callum and two were Anara and Demetrious, which left only eight more to satisfy.

Everyone was bringing something, too, but I was making the turkey in the oven that wasn’t a normal size. It was something I hadn’t done before and hadn’t ever watched, and neither had Callum. “I don’t remember having any of that,” he had said when I’d asked about his experience with this type of bird. “Maybe when I was a kid, we had it at one of the places where I fostered. But I don’t remember any holiday too much.”

Our lack of traditions was one reason that I wanted this to be good, so I had consulted a lot of recipe websites and had also talked to Heidi several times. Earlier this week, he and I had posted a video in which we both came up with a list of questions about cooking and shared some of our failures in the kitchen. Some of his were so funny that I had laughed until I had to wipe tears from my eyes, like when he’d talked about the first time he’d tried to make pasta on his own and somehow had missed the step about putting water in the pot before he’d heated it on a burner. It had gone over very well with our viewers, too. I had looked at the comments and answered some of them, and I had deleted all the mean ones about the picture that Sage had posted.

Not that we were ignoring the whole situation completely. He had talked to his lawyer, the one who had worked on his contract with the team, but she hadn’t offered any solutions. Unless the post violated a specific rule of the app, there was nothing much to do. “I don’t like it” or “it’s mean” weren’t valid reasons to force it down. Not only that, we had only my suspicion to go on that Sage was the one who had done it. There was no one to confront and any confrontation would make it a larger issue, the lawyer had warned. She’d had to say that because Callum had wanted to fly to California and talk directly to my former friend, which would have been a disaster.

But cooking a turkey seemed to have been a good idea, because the bird was coming along well. Demitrious and Callum went to organize our drink selection, which we were keeping outside since it was so cold. Anara came with me into the kitchen and I got the feeling that she was going to give me examples of animals who cooked better than I did.

But she didn’t want to discuss the dinner at all. “I have a question.”

I looked up from the thermometer, which I thought I was reading wrong. There was no way this turkey could have been thirteen degrees, not after how long it had been in the oven. “What do you need?” I responded as I shook the metal stick.

She took it from me. “This can’t be right unless your oven is refrigerated.”

“I just burned my knuckles when I tried to pull out the roasting pan, so I don’t think that it is. What do you need?” I repeated.

“You know that I’m getting married,” she said, and I nodded. Yes, of course I did, because she liked to talk about it and I also liked to listen. “I was wondering if you’d want to be in my wedding party. A bridesmaid.”

“What?” I put my singed hand over my mouth and then dropped it to my chest. “Me? Really?”

She nodded. “You and Heidi are the nicest people I’ve ever met and the best friends that I have. Will you be in my wedding?”

“Yes! Yes, I would love to,” I told her. She smiled and I walked around the edge of the counter to hug her, which she stiffly accepted. “Thank you for asking.”

“I know that I annoy you a lot about the dog, but I’m hoping that you can look past it.”

“I only get annoyed because you’re so much better with him than I am,” I said. “He just sat there looking at that loafer and didn’t move an inch toward it, even though I’m sure it was calling his name. But I’ll work hard with him and also on your wedding. What can I do?” I’d never been involved in anything even vaguely bridal before.

As we set out the dishes and silverware, she told me that I didn’t really have to do anything except for one big ask. “I need help picking my dress,” she said. “I have no idea what to wear or what you and Heidi should wear, either.”

I actually rubbed my hands together in excitement. “You came to the right person. My boss Beau is giving his input on a wedding right now, so he has ideas that we can look at. And don’t worry about me, because I’ll lose the weight.”

“What?”

“I’ll lose the extra weight that I put on so that I won’t ruin your pictures.” I imagined what Millie would have said if she had seen my current condition, and it would have been something to do with a hag and something else about a whale-sized ass. Unlike Anara, she wouldn’t have specified the species because she wasn’t aware of those, but she was very aware of human proportions. She had often reminded Damian that it was time for our body inspections.

“That’s a very strange thing to say,” Anara informed me. “Our wedding pictures will be to remember a great day with people we care about, not to talk about how everyone looks.”

Still, I would want to do my best for her and I had a few months. But that effort would have to start after Thanksgiving, because the rest of the guests were arriving and the side dishes they brought were wonderful. It was much, much better than what I could have made in the little oven and almost everyone was nice about the seating, which was a mixture of chairs and trays. In spite of having fewer guests, it was still very crowded in here, which was natural when some of those guests were professional football players and therefore a whole lot bigger than ordinary humans.

My personal football player was behaving differently from what I’d ever seen before. It wasn’t as if he’d been unfriendly or mean to people in my presence, but the group today brought out another side of him. He was friendly, he was welcoming, he was helpful—in other words, he was an amazing host. Damian had always refused to get up when people came to his rental in Calabasas, preferring that they trek through the house to find him so he could acknowledge them with a nod. But Callum was standing at the door, shaking hands and helping with coats, then directing them to drinks and plates. I smiled as I watched him and he looked over at me and saw. When he did, he smiled back.

Anara had insisted on having Maverick out of his kennel and said that she would watch him. He stayed at her side and didn’t jump on anyone or steal their plates of food, which he regularly tried with me. It was chaotic but it did seem to be going ok, and no one had been forced to sit on the edge of the tub. I knew all of our guests from the games, mostly from the family lounge where I had met the other rookies and chatted with their entourages. They were kids, wives, and girlfriends, not hired hangers-on like Sage and I had been.

“Are you filming right now? Are you going to post us?” one guest asked me. I had met her even before the preseason had started, back when we’d taken the stadium tour and she had written her name in the shape of the heart on her nametag. I had first read it as “Naeje” but Jenae had angrily explained that I was starting at the wrong place. Now she was also one of my clients for Beau.

“No, not tonight,” I answered her questions. I hadn’t wanted to bother anybody with that while they were eating.

“I don’t mind,” she told me. “Go ahead.” She assumed a pose, one I’d seen before when she’d texted pictures to me of clothes that she liked so that I could get an idea of her style. Unlike most of our clients, she had put everything on to model it and had changed her makeup for each new look.

“Um, ok.” I leaned closer to her and got out my phone to take a quick picture. “I’m not sure what I’ll use,” I warned.

“Like I’m not making the cut? That’s so rude! You work for me.”

“No, that’s not—ok, sorry,” I said as she walked away. She had also been mad that someone had brought sweet potatoes, because she said that she didn’t eat vegetables and didn’t want to look at them. Her boyfriend, one of the receivers, had stood quietly, nodding in agreement. Neither of them went near that end of the counter.

I checked on Callum and the dog, my two main concerns for the evening. Both of them appeared to be fine so I also checked on the food, which had almost disappeared. Thankfully, the poultry thermometer I’d used had been wrong and the turkey had been thoroughly cooked by the time I took it out, and one of the guys had grown up on a farm and had no problem with carving it in a very expert way. The platter was nearly bare now, and no one was acting uncomfortable and like they were going to be sick. That had happened at one of Damian’s parties when some bad drugs had gone around. Millie had pushed everyone outside to try to make it seem as if they all had just happened to pass out on his lawn, like it was an amazing coincidence and not that they had been inside as a group, doing illegal stuff there.