Page 17 of Her Rival

"What time is it."

"Three thirty."

"Tea."

She slid the mug across. I sat down. Held it in both hands and didn't drink it.

Brynn watched me. She didn't ask the question. She did the Brynn thing where she lets the question sit in the room and wait for me to be ready. Except she was already setting up for the next round. Brynn never just waits. Brynn waits while doing something. She was already up, pulling bread out of the cupboard, a pan onto the stove.

"Grilled cheese," she said, like she was filing a report. "We're doing this again."

"Bry."

"Don't."

"I'm fine."

"You're a lot of things right now and fine isn't one of them, Dan." She started cutting cheese. "So I'm making you grilled cheese, and you're going to eat it, and we are not going to talk about what happened in that room until you tell me you want to."

"Nothing happened in that room."

She paused with the knife in her hand. Didn't look at me. Kept cutting.

"Okay," she said.

That okay was the worst thing she could have said. That okay was the Brynn version of I am not believing you but I respect you enough to pretend, and you are going to feel that exactly as much as I want you to. I'd been hearing that okay from her for eight years and it had never once not landed.

I drank my tea.

She made the grilled cheese. Put it on a plate in front of me with the chef's-knife smear of butter still on it. Made one for herself too, because Brynn never made anyone eat alone, that was one of the things about her. We sat at the island in her glass palace and ate grilled cheese in the kind of silence that's only available between people who've been listening to each other a long time.

After a while she said, "He liked you. Or he hated you. I couldn't tell which."

I almost laughed. I almost did.

"He didn't know what to make of me," I said. "First-interview jitters."

"Jett doesn't have jitters."

"Everybody has jitters."

"Not him." She picked the crust off her bread, a Brynn thing, a long-standing one, the thing she did when she was thinking out loud. "He walks into a room. He owns it. Has since the day he showed up. I have never in my life seen Jett Sturgill walk into a room and not know what to do with his face. And today he walked into a room and did not know what to do with his face for about two seconds. Then he locked it down, the way he does. And you got the locked-down version, which is honestly worse than the chirping version. I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry."

"He'll be better next time. I'll talk to him."

"Don't."

That came out sharper than I meant. Brynn looked up.

"I mean it," I said, softer. "Don't. I'd rather have him cold and on time than have him there because you made him. Let me work the room myself."

She held my eyes longer than was comfortable.

"Okay," she said. The okay this time was different. Closer to the real one. "But I'm watching, Dan. Just so you know. Whatever's going on in there, with both of you, I am watching."

"There's nothing going on."