Game Night

Malik was still staring at the board when I started stacking the train cards.

“I had the line,” he said. “I had it from the first ticket.”

“You had it until Joanna cut you off at the river,” Theo said. He was already sweeping the little plastic engines into the tin. One rolled under the edge of the cheese plate. He fished it out and ate the cheese that came with it.

“Don’t eat the casualties,” I said.

“It was a good engine. Deserved a send-off.”

Joanna laughed and pushed the pretzel bowl toward Malik. He didn’t take any. The table was a mess of the usual Friday: the big board still marked with our routes, a bowl of olives going soft, two bags of chips we hadn’t opened, the pitcher of lemonade sweating a ring into the wood. Four years of this. Same chairs. Same argument about who shuffled badly.

“You blocked me on purpose,” Malik said.

“I always block you on purpose,” Joanna said. “That’s the game.”

“It’s not the game when you do it with that face.”

“What face?”

“The one that says you know something I don’t.”

Theo snorted. I watched Malik fold his tickets, square them, and then refuse to put them in the box. He did that when he lost. Gentle about everything else, but a game with trains turned him into a man who needed a recount.

“Rematch next week,” I said. “You can have the long route and nobody will touch it.”

“Don’t promise him that,” Joanna said. “He’ll believe you.”

She reached under her chair and came up with a small black box. It hit the table between the pretzels and the lemonade with a soft slap.

“What’s that?” Theo asked.

“A joke,” she said. “I saw it at the register. Questions. Supposed to ruin friendships. I thought we’d earned it.”

Malik looked at the box, then at her. Something passed between them that I couldn’t read, and then he shrugged and poured himself another glass.

“If it ruins us, you’re buying the replacement friends,” he said.

“Deal.”

She opened the box and fanned the cards. They were cream, with black type, the kind of thing that looks harmless until it isn’t. She shuffled once, badly, and set the deck in the middle.

“Rules are on the lid,” she said. “Draw, answer, no skipping, no lying. Except lying is fine if you’re funny.”

“That’s not what the lid says,” Malik said.

“The lid is a coward.”

Theo drew first. He read the card, frowned, and turned it so we could see. *What’s the worst thing you’ve ever named a pet?*

“That’s not even a question about us,” he said.

“Answer it,” Joanna said.

“We don’t have a pet.”

“Worst name you’ve ever given anything, then. A plant. A truck. Go.”

He thought about it longer than the card deserved. “I had a city tree I kept calling Margaret because the crew tagged it wrong and I didn’t want to correct the paperwork. She got cut down in March. I still feel bad.”

“That’s not funny,” I said.

“You said funny was optional.”

Joanna clapped once. “Malik.”

He drew. *If you could only eat one snack for the rest of your life, what would it be, and who would you refuse to share it with?*

“Olives,” he said. “And I would refuse Joanna, because she takes the good ones and leaves me the pits like a warning.”

“I do not.”

“You did it twenty minutes ago.”

I took a card. *What’s a rule in this house you’ve broken and never confessed?*

The lemonade was too sweet. I drank some anyway.

“I unplug the router when Theo is on a losing streak online,” I said. “I tell him it’s the building.”

Theo stared at me. “That’s been you?”

“Three times. Maybe four.”

Joanna put her face in her hands and laughed so hard the chips rattled. Malik’s sulk cracked. For a minute it was only that: the four of us, the Friday mess, a deck that hadn’t asked for anything we couldn’t hand over.

Then Joanna drew again, and the type on the card was smaller.

She read it out. *When did you last want someone in this room, and not say so?*

The laugh died in the middle of her mouth. She looked at Malik. He looked at the olives.

“Pass,” she said.

“You made the rules,” Theo said. He wasn’t smiling now.

“The rules allow a joke.”

“So joke.”

She tapped the card against the table. “Last Tuesday. Malik came in from a trip with his collar undone and I wanted him so badly I burned the toast. I said so. Doesn’t count.”

“Cheat,” Malik said, soft.

“Your turn to catch me, then.”

He didn’t draw. He nudged the deck toward Theo.

Theo took a card. I watched his thumb stop on the edge of it. He read it once to himself. His ears went red, which they did when he was about to lose a bluff and knew it.

“Out loud,” Joanna said.

He cleared his throat. “*Who at this table have you thought about when you shouldn’t have, and what were they doing?*”

Nobody reached for a chip. The overhead light made a hard square on the board where the trains had been.

Theo set the card down face up so we could all see he’d read it right.

“I can’t make that funny,” he said.

“Then don’t,” I said.

He looked at me first. That was the part that tilted the room. Not the card. The look, checking whether I was going to let him be honest in front of them, the way we’d half-promised each other in the dark months ago and then never finished.

“Joanna,” he said. “Last month. She was on our steps with a bag of limes, laughing at something Malik said from the car, and her hair was up, and I thought about taking the clip out. I thought about it again in the kitchen while I put the limes away. I didn’t tell you until now, Gwen. I meant to.”

The floor didn’t move. My stomach did.

Joanna’s mouth opened and closed. Malik sat very still, one hand around his glass.

“All right,” I said. My voice came out level. I was proud of that and irritated by it. “All right.”

“Your turn,” Joanna said to me, too quick.

I drew. *What have you and your partner started saying and never finished?*

I put the card down without reading it aloud. “Later.”

“That’s a skip,” Malik said.

“It’s a delay.”

Joanna reached for the deck herself. She didn’t wait for a turn. She turned the next card over, read it, and didn’t laugh.

The room got smaller. The pitcher clicked as the ice shifted.

“Read it,” Theo said.

She did. “*Tell the table a true thing about your marriage that would change how they sit with you.*”

She set it beside Theo’s card. Her fingers stayed on it.

“Before we moved here,” she said, “Malik and I were in the lifestyle. Years. Parties, sometimes. Mostly people we knew. We liked it. We were careful, and we were good at it, and we stopped when we bought the house next door because we wanted a street where we could leave the door unlocked and not explain ourselves.” She glanced at Malik. He nodded once. “I bought this deck on purpose. The joke was the box.”

Nobody spoke. A pretzel broke under someone’s elbow. Mine, I think.

Malik put his glass down. When he talked, it was the voice he used when a game was over and he was done pretending the score didn’t matter.

“We’ve wondered about the four of us for a year,” he said. “Not as a dare. As a want. We didn’t say it because Friday is the best part of the week, and we didn’t want to be the reason it stopped.”

Theo’s hand lay flat on the table near mine.

I looked at him. He looked back. The unfinished talk sat between us as clearly as the cards: his side of the bed, the dark, my voice saying *if it was them, would you*, his voice saying *I’d want to know you wanted it too*, and then the neighbor’s car alarm and neither of us picking it up again.

“We’d want to go slow,” I said.

It was the sentence we owed each other.

Theo leaned across the corner of the table. His hand came up into my hair and his mouth found mine. I kissed him back. Four years of Fridays, and this was the first time he’d kissed me like the room was allowed to see it.

I got a hand on his wrist. His other hand covered mine on the table, fingers closing, holding. Joanna made a small sound. Malik didn’t. I felt Theo smile against my mouth and didn’t care that they were watching. The kiss wasn’t long. It was enough to change the chair I was sitting in.

When we parted, his forehead rested against mine for a second. My thumb was still on his wrist. His hand was still on mine.

Joanna drew the next card. Her voice was steady when she read it out.

“*If everyone at this table said yes, what would you do with your mouth first?*”