Page 96 of Playing His Game

Adam flipped him the bird and snuggled back into his nest. “Thought you were going to read to me.”

“Right, right, of course, my liege, right away,” he grumbled, but it was followed by the sounds of turning paper. Then, Mo’s soft voice started to read.

“Assassins’ Guild?” he asked after only a minute. “Murphy, what kind of book have you gotten me into?”

“You picked it.”

“From your shelf!”

“And it’s good.”

Mo flipped through a few pages. “A Death novel? What the fuck?”

“Death’s a character. Grim Reaper-y. Now shut up and keep reading.”

“Fine, fine. I won’t even sass you about not being able to do both of those things at once.” He went back to it.

Between one page and the next, before Death made his appearance, Adam fell asleep.

14

Mo never considered himself the nurturing type. Where would he have learned it?

But at some point, he must’ve picked up something from someone, or else the skills he cultivated putting cars back together translated into fussing over humans, because he found himself at Adam’s whenever Jorts wasn’t there to play guard dog.

Mads didn’t text him. Mo couldn’t tell if that made everything better or worse.

Adam had good days and bad days, or more accurately, he had good hours and bad hours. Sometimes, he could sit up straight and keep his eyes open long enough to teach Mo how to play cribbage—of course he loved old-man math games—and sometimes, he could only lie flat on his back with his eyes closed and the lights off, and didn’t even have the focus to listen to Mo read.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” he’d asked snippily during one of his more miserable moments, laid out with a cold compress over his eyes while Mo watched a TikTok of someone reassembling the transmission of a classic Thunderbird.

Mo didn’t bother to hit Pause, or even look up. He only had one AirPod in; it wasn’t like he needed to focus. “Not really.”

But the moment the words escaped him, they took on some sort of life. They plagued him at inopportune moments. Not when he was reading to Adam or trying to find a recipe he could tolerate that would also fill his protein needs, or when he was fighting for his life not to get skunked at cribbage by a man who had actual brain damage, but when Adam was resting or showering. Or when the Canyons came back into town and the looming specter of Jorts banished Mo from the house.

There was nothing objectively wrong with Mo’s place. He just didn’t want to be in it.

“Am I boring?” he asked Sage during one of their weekly catch-up calls. “Like, is that what happened? Did I skip the rest of my twenties and all of my thirties and now I’m a middle-aged sad sack with no hobbies?”

“You literally just yapped at me for ten minutes about Formula One.”

Did following that count as a hobby?

“I don’t think you’re a sad sack. Ithinkyou’re being intentionally dishonest with yourself, but considering how bad you screwed the pooch, I don’t blame you.”

“Hey!” Mo protested, stung. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He suspected he knew exactly what they meant, but he didn’t want to admit it to himself.

“Girl, don’t play dumb with me.” They reached for one of the makeup products next to their phone. They leaned toward the mirror to apply the lipstick. “You spent four months fucking the same guy while pretending to date him in order to escape your parents’ wrath and wait out the year before your big payout. Now you’re like, ‘Sage, is it ethical to let Adam’s parents get attached to me? Sage, I know I said I was strictly into this guy’s dick, but I miss him when his bodyguard kicks me out of his house where I’ve been playing Florence Nightingale for days on end even though dick is strictly off the table. Sage, is it gay if I don’t want to go out to clubs anymore?’” They made a noise of frustration. “It’s not gay, Mo. It’s giving monogamy.”

So there went the last shreds of his self-delusion. “You’re really in the right line of work. Anyone ever told you that?”

“Thank you.” They pursed their lips and checked their reflection. Makeup on point as always. “Now start over from the top, and this time, do yourself a favor and stop avoiding looking at the truth head-on. And be quick about it because I have a date.”

Mo gaped. “Excuse me, when were you going to tell me that?”

“I was waiting for your inevitable Adam-related breakdown, but if I do that, I’m going to be late and this man isfine. You seemed like you wanted a little nudge. This is a shove into the deep end. Sink or swim, baby.”