Page 10 of ClickBack

“You okay?” Giselle asks.

“I lost. I’m working through it.”

She smiles, but she’s still waiting for something else. Some correction in how I’ve been looking at her. I’ve got questions. I’m trying to fit a daughter and a grandson into what I thought I knew, which turns out to be next to nothing. She has people, years, a whole life I haven’t heard a word about. Meanwhile, I know the sound she makes when she gets a joke before anybody else, and I’ve been trying to get another one out of her since she shook my hand. I don’t want her walking away believing I was interested until I learned who she was.

“Let me get your number.”

Her eyebrows lift. “You need it to file an appeal?”

“I want another shot.”

“You can swipe the card again.”

“That’s not the shot I’m asking for.”

Graves pushes off the machine. “Awards in five.” He leaves before I can tell him I heard.

Giselle watches him go. “You really do have somewhere to be.”

“So do you.”

“Yes. And I’m probably not what you usually go for.”

I lower the phone I’ve started to hold out. She needs to know I’m listening even if I don’t like where she’s taking this.

“You don’t know what I usually go for.”

“That’s kind of the point.”

From the party room, her daughter calls, “Ma, I’m cutting this cake.”

Giselle turns. “You had better not.”

“Then come over here!”

She looks back at me, and I can see the laugh she’s trying to hold. “Give me that.”

She takes my phone, then changes her mind and hands me hers. “Actually, put your number in mine.”

I have to open my contact card to copy it. She notices.

“You don’t know your own number?”

“Changed it recently.”

“It’s like that?”

“Sometimes.”

I save it under Jarrett Simmons. When I give the phone back, I leave the rest to her.

“For the rematch,” she says.

“Sure.”

“That’s all I agreed to.”

She walks away before I can answer. I watch her enter the party room, take the lighter from beside the cake, and put a hand on Zion’s shoulder to keep him out of the frosting while everybody gets into place. His mother starts the song. Giselle joins in, laughing when the boys decide to drag out the last note until somebody loses a lung.