Page 133 of Puck You Both

Wall, meanwhile, has been silent in the doorway with his thumbs going ham across his phone screen, with what I assume is team business until he looks up and delivers a finding. "We post at nine-fourteen."

I blink. "Why nine-fourteen?"

"It's a strategically boring time. Too late for the evening cycle, too early for the night-shift bloggers. And Tuesday is the least-screenshotted day of the week." He pockets the phone. "Which is today. It's almost like we planned this."

I fight a chuckle. "And how do you know all that?"

Wall shrugs. "Just googled."

Theo takes the photo. Fourteen times, from three angles, until he lands one and shows us: the cup, the three toothbrushes, the terrible yellow light, a slice of cheesehead in the mirror. And in the bottom of the frame, on the edge of the sink, Wall’s watch, where it lives every night he stays over.

My first instinct is to move it and tell Theo to take the picture again, because one glance at that watch, and any halfway-motivated stranger is able to put two and two together. Then I remember that’s the entire point.

The watch stays.

An hour later, we sit on the couch with our phones, one draft loaded on each, no caption, three thumbs over three buttons while the clock crawls toward nine-fourteen, because Theo has demanded perfect synchronization.

"On my mark," Theo says. "This is the hottest thing that has ever happened in this apartment."

"Is it? Is it, really?" Wall asks, and Theo goes briefly and violently pink.

Nine-thirteen. My thumb waits over the button, and I go looking for the fear.

I know where it lives. I've been managing it my whole life, the cold drop behind the sternum, deny, contain, control, the second after words when the outcome stops being mine. I braced against it in a video room, and in a diner, and in a hallway with a reporter's mic a foot from my face, and on the edge of my own bed with my father's radio playing in another state.

I go looking for it, and find that it's not there.

I check again, thoroughly. Nothing. Just a living room quiet where the wall used to be, because the wall's been coming down for months, one person at a time, and the men on this couch dismantled the first of it before I ever agreed to anything, and my father drove a truck through the middle of it with a trumpet joke.

There's no one left that I'm afraid of. No one that matters.

Brave. Terrifyingly.

"Mark," Theo says.

Three taps.

Somewhere out there, the internet inhales.

Theo breaks first, obviously, whooping, standing on the couch, already narrating the moment for future retellings. Wall reaches past him, collects all three phones, and sets them face-down on the coffee table in one line, and none of us reaches for them again all night.

My hands remain steady.

Chapter 26

THEO

I MAKE IT four hours, and I’m proud of myself.

The phones went face-down at nine-fifteen and I lasted until one in the morning, and if anyone ever asks, I slept the whole night through, peacefully, and nobody can prove otherwise.

The better men are asleep in Patrick's bed. I'm sitting on the edge of the tub with my phone, hiding, three feet from the cup that started it. If I'm going to spiral, I might as well do it at the scene of the crime.

Okay. Damage report. How bad can it—

Oh.

Oh wow.