Page 36 of Full Contact

Our off-day split into a morning of obligations and an afternoon free. By one o’clock I’d eaten lunch and was back in my room with several open hours and no plans worth defending. Mark sent a text.

Mark: Filming the courtyard episode at three today. Approval clock starts tomorrow when Priya delivers.

Trier: I’ll watch it tomorrow night.

Mark: That’s well inside seventy-two hours. Who are you and what have you done with my talent’s agent?

Trier: Road trips are boring. I have openings.

That should have been the end of it. Instead, over the next hour, I learned that his broadcast guest had expected to be entertained from the moment he landed Sunday, and that his lunch had been interrupted twice by the same person with the same question. Then he told me his friend Felix didn’t like the shirt he planned to wear that evening.

Trier: Wear the shirt Felix hates.

Mark: He doesn’t hate it. He says it’s “a lot of shirt.”

Trier: Then it’s the right amount of you.

There was a pause before his reply, longer than his usual pace.

Mark: Wearing the shirt.

I got up and stretched. The air conditioner cycled on under the window as I crossed to the desk. I took a photograph of the chair the hotel had supplied, a hard, narrow thing with a seat pitched slightly forward.

Trier: Look at this.

Mark: Are you collecting evidence for an appeal?

Trier: I have professional experience with chairs. I bought one specifically for a cat. I know what good design looks like, and this isn’t it.

Mark: That’s a travel matter. File it with Leah. I’d hate to overstep.

Trier: Leah has real problems to deal with.

Mark: And I don’t?

Trier: You have a guest, a shirt, and a lunch thief. You needed the chair interruption.

Mark: I did, actually.

At seven p.m., Anna’s photograph hit the group thread: Peaches in the window bed, one paw over the edge, the evening light coming up the courtyard wall behind her. Medication done, dinner eaten, all quiet.

Mark answered in the thread before I did.

Mark: The paw is a choice.

Kelsey: She knows her photographic angles. Unlike some Chicago defensemen I could name.

Mark: I have footage that supports both halves of that statement.

Kelsey: We should talk.

I read the exchange twice. Adding Mark had taken seconds, one evening in a hotel room. Now he was simply part of the conversation, answering Anna and sparring with Kelsey, comfortable among people he’d never met.

I liked seeing his name there.

***

Two days later, at the last stop of the trip, I was down to one clean shirt and a decision about which day deserved it.