Page 55 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
No one spoke. It was the kind of silence that had weight—not awkward, but deliberate. As though giving our responses room to settle within us.
Marc stared at me. A steady gaze.
There was none of that familiar defensiveness in his face. None of the polite dismissal I’d gotten used to over the years.
He gave me a nod of understanding.
Just once. Small. Genuine.
And that was infinitely more dangerous.
“My turn.” Glamma plucked a card with the satisfied air of a woman who’d been waiting for this one specifically. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d stacked the deck. “If your partner makes a mistake during the event, how do you respond?”
“Fix it. Then debrief afterward.” Marc.
“Reassurance first. Fix it after.” Me.
Silence. Our eyes met across the table.
How were we going to make this work?
Every answer we had was the complete opposite of each other.
Marc raised an eyebrow. “Reassurance before correction doesn’t solve the problem.”
“And correction before reassurance creates a new one.” I crossed my arms. “If you swoop in and just fix someone’s mistake in front of a crowd, you’ve embarrassed them. You’ve made them smaller. Now they’relesscapable of doing the thing correctly, not more, because they’re managing shame on top ofthe original problem. You reassure, you move on, you debrief privately afterward.”
He opened his mouth.
Shut it.
“That’s a valid point,” he finally said.
I stared at him. “Did you just agree with me?”
“I acknowledged the validity of your reasoning. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“They’re adjacent.”
“They’re related.”
“Same thing!” I sputtered. He was so infuriating.
“Not the same thing.” The corner of his mouth quirked—barely. Enough to make me wonder if he was baiting me.
“Well,” Goldie announced to the room, setting down her pen, “this is basically foreplay for enemies.”
A strangled sound escaped my throat.
Marc grunted.
Martha’s expression went carefully neutral. Gladys looked skyward as though asking for help from a higher power. Glamma was practically vibrating with delight.
“Okay, last two,” Martha said, and slid the next question closer to herself. “What’s something people misunderstand about you?”
Marc was quiet for a moment. Far longer than the other questions. “That I’m cold.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. Because my immediate impulse was to say “are you kidding me?”and then the memory of Ruby Night surfaced. Nora, the diner waitress with tired eyes. Her two kids. The way Marc handled that situation with a care so matter-of-fact it almost read as ordinary.
