Page 46 of Playing His Game

Mo already wanted to guzzle the rest of this stupidly acidic bottle. Instead, he pasted on a smile and clinked his glass against everyone else’s. He made aggressive eye contact with his parents, who believed that doing otherwise during toasts indicated insincerity.

Never mind thatinsincerewas a particularly kind euphemism for every positive emotion his parents had ever displayed.

Still, everything went okay until Adam glanced around the table and asked, “Oh, is this one of those places that don’t do menus?”

Son of a Baptist. Mo had forgotten to warn him about this.

“Oh, we took the liberty of ordering,” Orson said. “More space on the table, nothing in the way of conversation. We come here whenever we’re in town, so we know what’s good.”

“Mo told us you don’t have any food allergies,” Claire continued.

Which was true—Mo had said that. He’d just forgotten that his parents would take that as license to order for both of them.

“Oh,” Adam said after a beat, obviously taken aback. He glanced at Mo, who tried to communicate,Sorry, I forgot to emphasize the extent of their control fetishthrough micro-expressions. “Okay, sure. I can’t wait to try it.”

Claire looked at Mo in triumph. “You see, Moritz? It’s not so difficult to appreciate the care we take for you.”

Mo regretted driving. The glass and a half of wine he could consume tonight would not cushion him from this train wreck in progress. He spoke instead of downing the rest of his glass. “Adam is very gracious.” He even meant it sincerely. Any reasonable person would have fled the table.

“Glad to hear it!” Orson boomed. “Now, Adam. This heater the team’s been on these past few weeks—what’s the secret, hm? It’s great to see so many Ws on the record.”

Translation:Why weren’t you this good before?

Even Adam must’ve understood that dig, because he took another sip of wine before replying. Or maybe, like Mo, he was biting back the disastrous impulse to parrot the blogs and Twitter’s take: the sudden lack of unresolved sexual tension had put Adam in beast mode. Yeah, he probably wasn’t thinking about that.

“Oh, um. I think Coach has us looking at drills differently, and the new video coach is good at breaking things down for us. Once we got some confidence, everything came together.”

Mo could just leave his car here overnight and Uber home, actually. He had nearly grabbed his wine glass when Orson chuckled approvingly and said, “There, you see, Moritz? Teamworkandmodesty.”

Ah, the familiar taste of hypocrisy.

Mo took a healthy swallow of wine. When he’d played hockey, Orson always emphasized that Mo needed to be more selfish, take more shots, not pass so much.

Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Mo. I will give you my eternal soul if you make the ground open up and swallow my parents.

“Maybe it’ll rub off on other people he spends time with,” Mo said sweetly.

Claire’s face pursed like she’d bitten a lemon, but what was she going to say?

The dig went over Orson’s head, but his red cheeks said this wasn’t his first glass of wine. It might not even be the first bottle. “One can hope!”

Mo was half-convinced Adam would make an excuse and drag him into the restroom just to ask what the fuck was going on. He had the look of a man who’d woken up to discover he’d sleepwalked into a pit of vipers. But before either of them could make a shallow excuse and escape for a semi-private breakdown, the servers appeared with their appetizers.

“Oh, wonderful, my favorite.” Claire beamed at the server. “Thank you, Francois.”

Francois set a small covered plate in front of each of them and then removed the tops to reveal the restaurant’s signature appetizer.

“Have you tried escargot before?” she asked conversationally, as Adam’s soul left his body through his eye sockets.

“Uh, no.”

“You’ll love them.” She picked up her tiny fork and speared a snail. “Just so rich and decadent.”

It would serve her right if Adam pulled anExorciston the table. Mo had expected his parents to come out swinging, but he hadn’t anticipated this level of psychological warfare. Deftly, he used his own fork to spear an escargot from Adam’s plate, removed it from the shell, and handed it over. He shouldn’t have to make as much of an ass of himself as Mo’s parents were,ifhe wanted to participate in this ridiculous one-percenter pissing contest.

“It’s okay if you don’t.” Mo glanced at Claire out of the corner of his eye. “They’re an acquired taste.”

Perhaps one day, his parents would acquire some taste too.