Page 176 of Gamebreaker

"For Instagram?"

"For Instagram. For the general public. For posterity."

"Post it," I said.

She lifted her head and looked at me. The dimple appeared.

"Go to sleep, Cam."

I closed my eyes.

Outside, the city held its deep four in the morning quiet. I heard the faint tap of her thumb against her phone screen. I didn't feel the old anxiety. The old urge to calculate and manage and control the story.

She had it.

I heard her exhale against my chest as the post went up. I tightened my arm around her, and I was asleep before I could hear her tell me what she'd typed.

For the first time in twelve years, there were no locked rooms.

23

Don't Screw This Up

Harper

Here is a fact about me that I have never admitted out loud to another living person: I make excellent coffee.

Not good. Excellent. I have an embarrassingly considered opinion about grind size and water temperature and the exact number of seconds the bloom should sit before you pour the rest, and I've kept it classified, because a woman with strong opinions about pour-over ratios is not the brand I've spent years building as Harper DuBose. The brand is witty, relatable, and slightly chaotic. The brand does not include standing at the kitchen counter at 6:15 on a Saturday morning in a sleep shirt, underwear, and a green satin bonnet, weighing coffee beans on a scale.

But I cared. I cared so much.

The morning was doing what mornings do in my apartment in early fall, the light coming in sideways through the kitchen window and landing on the counter in a stripe of pale gold, catching the steam off the kettle. The city was barely awake. The street sounds were still thin and scattered instead of the steady roar they'd become by eight. Somewhere below my window, a delivery truck was being loud and logistical or whatever. A pigeon had taken up residence on the balcony and was voicing its dissatisfaction with the state of the world.

Cam was asleep in my bed.

Cam was asleep in my bed.

My brain kept repeating that sentence every thirty seconds, like a notification I couldn't dismiss. Cameron Russo, team captain, ten-time All-Star, the most infuriating and inconvenient woman I could've had the incredible luck of falling in love with, was asleep in my bed, and I'd woken up at six because my body apparently could not accept the concept of sleeping in on the one morning it actually mattered.

I'd lain there for twenty minutes first, in the early dark, with her arm heavy across my waist and her breath warm against the back of my bonnet. I'd just lain there and memorized it. That miracle of waking up and finding another person still there. I'd gotten very good at waking up alone. I'd made a practice of it. I'd rebuilt my entire morning around the assumption of my own company.

When I'd tried to slide out from under her arm, it had tightened. She hadn't woken up. Some part of her, even asleep, had decided to hold on.

I'd lain back down for five more minutes because of that.

Then I'd needed coffee before I did anything embarrassing, like cry again.

The kettle clicked off. I poured carefully, watching the bloom rise, and let myself have the quiet. My phone was facedown on the counter, buzzing every few seconds, because at four in the morning, I'd posted a photo for my three thousand followers, and apparently, it had found a great many more than three thousand people.

It wasn't a photo of Cam's face. I wasn't ready to share her face with the internet, and I don't think she was either, not yet. It was our hands. Hers and mine, fingers laced together on top of my comforter in the gold light from the string lights. Her long fingers and my rings. And on her wrist, right over that little line of coordinates, a black hair tie, stretched out and a little frayed.

The best thing I almost let fear take from me.

Anyone who'd seen her post five hours earlier knew exactly whose wrist that was.

I hadn't looked at the comments. I was choosing not to look yet. I stood by it.

I finished the pour.