Chapter 120: The Call

Adrian stayed in the Corolla another minute after Jenna vanished inside, because his legs had apparently decided the door could wait.

He knew what a kiss meant. That wasn’t the confusing part. The confusing part was that Jenna wasn’t his girlfriend, he already had one, and she’d just asked him, in writing, whether Jenna got home safe.

He typed an answer, deleted the word ’inside,’ and put it back, because the deletion looked worse than the word.

Adrian: Yes. She’s inside.

He didn’t tell her. He didn’t know how to explain something he hadn’t finished understanding, and ’Jenna kissed me’ came with no instructions. If Rose asked, he wouldn’t lie. That was the extent of the plan, and he was aware it wasn’t a plan.

He loved Rose. Nothing about that had moved. But he couldn’t file the kiss under nothing, either, because Jenna didn’t do things by accident. She’d once returned a sandwich for being ’emotionally dishonest.’ She was too proud to kiss him to be kind and too practical to create a problem without a reason.

He thought about calling her. She’d hurried inside before he could find a single word, and a woman who ran from the conversation wasn’t going to answer the phone for it. He drove home, ate a bowl of cereal, then a second as penance, and told himself the subject was closed. It lasted until he lay down and the ceiling started asking.

Jenna: Rules doc is updated. Section four is new. Can we meet at 2? The light dies at 5 and I refuse to film under your lamp again.

Rose: 2 works. I’ll bring the sketchbook.

He read Jenna’s message twice. No embarrassment, no regret, not a single apologetic emoji. Embarrassed people made typos. He couldn’t tell whether that made things better or worse.

Jenna was at his door at 1:57 with a clipboard, a tripod, and the posture of a woman who’d prepared evidence. Rose came up a minute later in the indigo jacket, with the look of a cat who’d been told there would be a quiz.

"Section four," Jenna said, before hello. "The judge can’t also be a contestant."

"I’m a contestant."

"Then you can’t judge."

"I wasn’t going to judge."

"You were going to narrate," Rose said. "It’s worse."

Jenna contested every suggestion he made, with the calm of a woman who’d cited her sources in advance.

"Two rounds," he said.

"Three. The first is a warm-up."

"A warm-up is a round."

"A warm-up is a round with an excuse."

Rose watched from the couch with her sketchbook closed, entertained at someone else’s expense. Then she stood. "The printouts. I left them on my kitchen table."

"Of course you did," Jenna said.

"Two minutes," Rose said, and the door clicked shut behind her.

Then it was two people in his living room and the sound of his refrigerator. Adrian had been rehearsing a sentence since three a.m. It began with ’About last night’ and fell apart in the middle.

He opened his mouth. Jenna turned from the tripod and held his eyes for exactly one second. "Did you remember the extra rules?" she asked. "From the noodle place?"

It was a perfectly ordinary question, delivered with a perfectly ordinary face. That was what made it infuriating. He’d have known what to do with a blush.

"I remembered," he said. "Jenna, about—"

The door opened and Rose walked in with the printouts, and the moment folded itself away.

They filmed at three, the phone back on its calculus textbooks. Rose had chosen a portrait of a woman in a green dress for Jenna, eleven buttons, hands you had to count. Jenna had chosen a blue circle on cream for Adrian, title Untitled (Sky). Adrian had chosen a bowl of fruit for Rose, because it seemed like mercy.

A circle, Adrian had decided, was easy. A circle was a bicycle wheel with nothing to hide behind. He had five minutes, a marker, and a conviction that lasted about fifty seconds.

His came out an eggplant.

"That’s not a circle," Jenna said, with open delight. "That’s a plum with a grudge."

"It’s blue."

"It’s a blue plum."

"The original is a circle," Rose said, holding up the card. "He didn’t miss by much. He missed by all of it."

Jenna enjoyed that for a full minute. Then Rose held Jenna’s green-dress attempt beside the original. "This is a tall man in a curtain."

"It’s an interpretation."

"It has seven buttons."

"I was saving the other four."

They stopped recording twice because someone laughed at the wrong moment. The first was Rose. The second, to Adrian’s private satisfaction, was Jenna.

Rose laughed beside him, easy, her shoulder against his arm, and every time she did, the thing he hadn’t said got a little heavier. He’d never noticed that silence had weight until it was his.

Rose recreated his fruit bowl in ninety seconds, then spent three minutes explaining everything he’d overlooked.

"The pear is the point," Rose said.

"I chose it for the bowl."

"The bowl is furniture."

"I defended the bowl with a straight face. That’s the rule."

"And lost."

When they finished, there was enough usable footage for another episode and a list of ideas on Jenna’s clipboard, two of them underlined twice.

"A live version," Jenna said. "Viewers send paintings. We pick one. Chat votes on whose attempt is worst."

"Worst," Rose repeated, with real interest. "Yes."

A live show gave people a reason to come back instead of watching once and drifting off. He could see the value. He could also see the list: a better camera, a stable upload, someone to moderate, and a host who didn’t flinch when strangers typed ’plum.’

"We wait," he said. "Until there’s an audience to show up."

He braced for a fight. Jenna looked at the list, then at the camera, then at him. "Build up to it," she said. "Fine."

It was the first time she’d agreed to wait for anything. He counted it as progress and kept it to himself.

Rose kissed his cheek at the door and told him not to buy anything with a screen. He felt it all the way down the stairs, like a coin he hadn’t earned.

He left at half past four for the hardware store. A clamp for the mic stand, fourteen dollars, the kind of errand nobody had opinions about.

The road to the store was four lanes of people who all had somewhere to be. He drove it the way he did everything: carefully, and a little annoyed.

His phone lit up in the cupholder. Jenna. He glanced down, read her name, and brought his eyes back up.

The car ahead stopped harder than the light justified. He hit the brake and swerved. The curb took the front tire and wouldn’t give it back, and the barrier came up like a wall someone had been saving.

The seat belt caught his chest like a hand. Everything went white, then loud, then very quiet. A high ringing filled the silence and, under it, the traffic slowly remembered itself.

The airbag sagged in his lap like a punctured balloon. He sat very still with both hands on the wheel, doing inventory. Arms. Legs. Neck. His forehead hurt, a bright, specific pain, and when he touched it his fingers came back red.

He got the door open on the second try and stood up carefully, the way you stand on a boat. The front of the Corolla had folded like paper, and one headlight lay in pieces across the asphalt. It had carried him through every bad week of his life and apparently drew the line at a barrier.

His brain began, helpfully, to count. Insurance. Deductible. A tow. He’d reached four hundred dollars before it occurred to him to check whether he was hurt.

His phone had slid onto the passenger seat. When he reached across for it, the screen showed four missed calls from Rose and Jenna’s name pulsing across the top, still ringing.

He answered, because his thumb had decided before he did. "Hey. I’m busy, I’ll call you back—"

"You’re not busy." Her voice had gone flat. "What happened?"

"I had an accident." He kept his voice level, eyes on the shattered headlight. "I’m fine. The car isn’t."

"Where are you?" The confidence had drained from her voice so fast he could hear the gap. "Don’t walk around if you’re dizzy. Sit down. Are you bleeding?"

"A little."

"A little how?"

"Forehead."

"Adrian."

"They bleed," he said. "It’s what they do."

He gave her the cross street. "Don’t move," Jenna said. "I’m coming."

The line clicked off, and the screen lit again with a different name: Rose.

Adrian looked at the Corolla, at the blood on his fingers, at the two names that had taken turns on his phone. He’d spent most of a day trying to decide what a kiss meant. Standing beside a folded bumper with a pulse in his forehead, it seemed absurdly small.

He answered.

"Rose," he muttered.