Chapter 21: : Part 2 – Chapter 20

“— if you go rook g5— ”

“— then the bishop— ”

“— but that pawn— ”

“— in g7— ”

“— no, if you want to keep your king safe— ”

“— there’s this thing called that— ”

“Um . . . hey, guys?”

Nolan and I turn to Tanu with two aggressive, annoyed, simultaneous, “

?”

She leans in, hands on the doorframe, more skeptical than intimidated. Her hair is up in a messy bun, and an oversized koala onesie hangs from her tall frame. She’s wearing glasses, which means she took out her contacts for the day, which means that . . .

“It’s eleven forty. You’ve been in the same position since two and seem to be doing great, but in case you decide that the heroic feats of a midcentury Ukrainian Grandmaster are not nourishing enough, there’s chicken potpie in the fridge.”

Nolan scowls. “Why didn’t you guys call us for dinner?”

“We did. Three times. Each time, you both just grunted. I recorded it and mixed it with Dragostea for TikTok. Wanna see it?”

“Goodnight, Tanu,” he says. She knows him well enough to scurry away when he stands. “Let’s eat.”

“Wait.” I stop him with a tug of his shirt. “We need to finish this— ”

“You need to . Come on.”

When I told Darcy that I’d be spending part of December and January at Nolan’s house in upstate New York (yes, he owns one; yes, I did mutter “Eat the rich” when he informed me), she gave me a skeptical look and asked, “Is it wise, to go to a cabin in the woods with the Kingkiller?” It’s been weeks, and I’m still not sure what the answer is. I sit on the kitchen counter and observe Nolan as he eats standing up, businesslike, brisk, as though shoveling coal into a furnace, mind clearly still on the game we were analyzing.

It’s awe inspiring, his discipline.

He wakes up earlier, falls asleep later, works harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. The rigors he puts himself through, the single- minded, indefatigable stubbornness as he stares at the engines, dissecting, retracing, combining, projecting. He’s tireless, unshakable. Driven in an indomitable, near- obsessive way. This iron- hard tenacity of his is an oddly attractive quality.

Not that he needs more of those.

He has five other seconds: Tanu and Emil, who are staying at the house, and three other male GMs in their thirties, experts on openings and pawn structure, who come and go a few times a week. Nolan trains with all of us— problems to solve, Koch games to analyze, his own old games to run through software and mine for weaknesses— but his time with the others seems almost like an afterthought. Brief interludes in the sea of his days, which are spent with me.

It’s because there are things they don’t see. Combinations and tactics that elude them and seem to click only in my and Nolan’s heads. “Let’s just go watch while the grownups work,” Emil said one night, after it became clear that no one could keep up with us.

But there’s something else, too. I pad barefoot across the hardwood floor first thing in the morning, knowing I’ll find him in the breakfast nook, ready to tell him about whatever revelation I had during my sleep; his eyes scan every room he enters, quiet only when they settle on me, and sometimes I have the urge to lean forward to flatten the curls growing on the nape of his neck.

We still don’t play against each other. We study, analyze, dissect, reenact other people’s chess, but we never play a match that’s ours. And yet . . . Something is happening, but I don’t know what. This thing between us is layered, complicated, fractured unlike anything I’ve experienced before. It lacks the coziness of a friendship, the ease of a hookup, the distance of everything else.

Maybe Nolan should just be some guy: not a rival, not a friend, not more than a friend, just some guy who plays good chess. Some guy who’s in my head and acts as though I live in his own.

“Can I borrow your car tomorrow?” I ask. We’re about one hour from Paterson. I’ve been visiting home once a week or so. Christmas, New Year’s. Whenever Mom needs me—which, with the new meds we’ve been able to afford, is not a lot. She thinks I’m making good money and sparing myself the commute by taking night shifts at the senior center, and . . . well. The money part, at least, is true. Nolan pays his seconds well.

“Sure. Where are you going?”

“Home for the day. Darcy’s birthday.”

He reaches for a dinner roll. “Can I come?”

“Don’t you have to, like, analyze Capablanca’s first- grade macaroni art?”

He shrugs. “It’s my free day.”

“And you want to spend it at a thirteen- year- old’s birthday dinner.”

“Will there be meat loaf?”

“I’m sure Mom can scrounge up some.” I scan his face. His handsome, ever-so-familiar face. “Don’t you want to spend your free day with Tanil?”

He looks pained. “Not you, too, with the ship name. Besides, my room is next to theirs. They won’t miss me at all.”

Emil and Tanu are on again—as all non-hearing-impaired individuals on the East Coast no doubt know by now. “They loud.”

“That, or they have sex to whale noises.”

I laugh. “Still. You could . . . go skiing? Wear cuff links? Be positively ? Whatever it is that you rich people with vacation homes do.”

He gives me a dirty look, but he does come over, and my sisters are as happy to see him as they’d be Jungkook. I think about the interview I saw of him years ago, how stern and guarded he seemed, and I can barely recognize the open- smiled boy who gives Darcy a PetSmart gift card, lets Sabrina show him two hours of roller derby videos, raises one eyebrow at the Mayochup on our table.

“How’s Easton?” Mom asks while I clean the kitchen.

“Great,” I lie. My heart curls into itself a little. Truth is, I have no idea. She spent the holidays in Delaware with her grandparents, and I haven’t seen her or heard her voice in over four months. Based on my Instagram stalking, I suspect she’s dating someone named Kim-ly. I could ask, but it feels like admitting how apart we’ve fallen, since once upon a better time she used to text me pictures of all her meals.

“He’s good with them,” she says, looking at Nolan fixing Sabrina’s broken Polaroid in the living room. “Must be the caregiving experience at the senior center. I bet he’s great at reading romance novels to the elderly, with that voice.”

Of course, I chickened out of telling her the truth. I’m not going to the World Championship, which means that media interest in me has melted like sugar in hot water. I’m nobody. Nobodies don’t need to hurt people with uncomfortable truths.

“Yeah. He really brings turgid manhoods to life.”

Mom laughs softly. “You guys still not together?”

“Nope.”

“You sure?”

I turn to face her. “Of course.” I don’t have committed relationship experience, but I do know that it’s not a continuum. Either you’re in one, or you’re not. And if you are, you you are. How could one—

“Excuse us.” Warm hands close around my waist and shift me an inch to make room in the kitchen door. “Darcy is going to teach me how to make a cup cake.”

“

cake,” Darcy corrects him with a patient sigh. “Mom, do we have any sugar?”

Mom’s eyes dip to Nolan’s hand, still pressed against my lower back, then lift up to meet mine. She tells Darcy, “In the cupboard next to the fridge,” her smile knowing and very, annoying.

Sabrina doesn’t talk to me once, but I manage to corner her in her room just before leaving. “Everything okay?” I ask. As early as weeks ago, the picture above her nightstand was of me giving her a piggyback ride in a pumpkin patch. Now it’s a collage: her derby team, some school friends, even a Polaroid of Mom and Darcy making faces.

I’ve been deleted.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been around. But I’m earning really good money with this overnight thing.”

“Good for you,” she says distractedly, rummaging in her drawer, looking for a derby T-shirt she promised Nolan since “How has Mom been?”

“Fine.”

“Right. And Darcy?”

“Good. She’s actually almost bearable when you aren’t around. You must be a bad influence.”

I stifle an eye roll. “And you?”

“Fine.”

I sigh. “Sabrina, can I have your attention for sixty seconds?”

She finally looks up. Annoyed. “Mom’s fine. Darcy’s fine. I’m fine. The entire damn world is fine.”

“I’m serious. I rely on you to man the fort and tell me if I’m needed, so— ”

“Oh, you care?” Her blue eyes shine with tears. For a second, I see genuine hurt in them, and my heart lurches in my chest. But it’s all gone in a blink, and her expression suddenly turns half uncaring, half hard. Maybe I imagined all the rest.

“Excuse me?” I ask.

She walks to me. I still have a couple of inches on her. Will she grow more? God, she’s . “We’re fine, Mal. We can function without you.”

“Well, last time I left, you seemed pretty upset, so— ”

“We’re fine. You can put your power trip away. No one needs to ‘man the fort.’ Mom, Darcy, and I are and can take care of ourselves. We’re not pets you need to feed and walk.” She steps past me, T-shirt in hand. A surge of irritation courses through me— seriously?

Do I this?— and I slap the doorframe. It only gets me a splinter stuck in my palm.

When we leave, they wave at us from the porch. “Come back soon, Nolan,” Darcy yells.

“And don’t feel like you need to bring Mallory with you,” Sabrina adds archly.

“What’s up with that?” Nolan asks once we’re on the road.

“You mean, with the way my sister would love to drown me in a barrel of mead?”

His mouth twitches. “I did sense some animosity.”

“I’m not sure.” I sigh. “I’m doing my best with her. I make sure she has everything she needs and nothing to worry about.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you’re with your sisters, you act like they’re your responsibility. Like you’re their parent, almost. It works with Darcy, but Sabrina might find it infantilizing.” He shrugs. “Maybe she just wants you to be her sister.”

“What do even know about sisters?”

“Nothing. What do know about defensiveness?”

I cannot help laughing, and then we fall quiet for a while. Nolan drives like he plays, steady and focused, and for once I don’t feel antsy for not being at the wheel. I let my eyes wander over the halo of the streetlights, the snow weighing down the pine trees, his firm hand as he shifts gears, like he’s moving a bishop across the board.

He’s thinking about chess. He’s thinking about the Koch game we analyzed this morning, the one with the Queen’s Gambit that he lost to Davies three years ago. I know it. Not sure I know what’s in Nolan’s head, or when it started, but here I am. Knowing.

“Knight e5 was a stupid move,” I say.

He doesn’t skip a beat. “Koch’s attacks backfire a lot. Well.” He shrugs. “Backfired. Before he ate spinach and got an upgrade.”

“It might be a good strategy, luring him into becoming aggressive.”

“Yeah.”

I think wistfully about the tactics I’d use against Nolan if I were the challenger. He’s such an unpredictable player, always thinking of long- term advantages, of seemingly silent moves to exploit later, unexpectedly. I’ve heard commentators say that our styles are similar, but I think we’re oceans apart. I like to strangle my opponent, wear them down slowly, drain them of active play and attack possibilities one by one, until it’s just us— me and their king.

But Nolan would know how to deal with me. What to be on the lookout for. To beat him, I’d have to learn to let go of minute positional advantages and take more overt risks, earlier on. I watch him stretch his neck, strong muscles tensing under his skin, and think that maybe it would work, seducing him into a blunder. Maybe it wouldn’t, but it would keep him on his toes. He’d give me one of those long, knowing looks. Smile, even. He’d smile at me, and I’d get to smile back as I took his king.

It sounds like a dream. A thing imagined.

“Darcy pulled me into your room,” he says, “and conspiratorially whispered that she’s ‘in the know.’ ”

“Unlike Mom and Sabrina, she googles. Probably hangs out on the dark web. Signs up Goliath for Piggie- Tinder.”

“She asked me to teach her to play chess.”

“Darcy?” I perk up. “For real?”

“She said it’s . . . hot shit girl?”

I laugh. “Hot girl shit. You should really try to be online a little.” Most of the other top- ten players have Twitch and You-Tube channels. Nolan: Twitter and Instagram— both with written in all caps in the bio. I bet his social media guy got sick of people DMing him nudes. “Why are you not online, anyway?”

“I’m online way too much.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are pictures of seven- year- old me mining his nose for boogers while playing Nakamura. Throwing a tantrum like a whiny brat after a loss at fourteen.”

“Oh.”

“We all have embarrassing phases growing up, but mine were immortalized. Whoever’s looking for me already has plenty to find.”

I remember Emil’s words:

. “Do you mind it? Your . . . troublemaker reputation.”

“You mean, total piece of shit?” He laughs softly. “It’s deserved. I was one. I can only try to be different in the future.”

He’s succeeding, too. I try to recall recent incidents and come up empty. “You still get mad at the people who beat you.”

“Is that what you think?” He shakes his head. “I get furious at . For making mistakes. For not being the best I can be. And every time blunder, you feel the same.”

“Not true. I— ”

He gives me a side look, and I fall quiet. Whatever.

“I showed Darcy how the pieces move,” he says quietly.

“How?”

“She had a set under her bed. Pink and purple.”

I close my eyes. A knot tightens in my belly. “I thought I’d gotten rid of that.”

“You should teach her yourself.”

“What does she need to learn for?”

“She wants to. She idolizes you.”

I snort. “She calls me Mallopee and constantly makes me ‘Lamest Greenleaf’ graphics in Photoshop— which illegally downloaded for her, by the way. Ingrate.”

“She wants to be like you.”

“I’ll never teach her.”

“Why?”

I turn away. The road is deserted, and the pines are becoming thicker. “Chess is a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Look where it got me.”

“It got you here. To .”

Blood rushes to my cheeks, but his tone is matter-of-fact, not suggestive. He doesn’t mean it like that. He means . . . I don’t even know.

“It was you who saw him, wasn’t it?” Nolan asks. I look back at him, puzzled.

“What?”

“Your father. Something happened between him and that woman— that arbiter at the Olympics. You found out. Your mom kicked him out. I’m assuming you were estranged for a few years. And later his accident happened.”

I straighten. The seat belt tightens into my sweater. “How— how do you know? When did you— ?”

“I didn’t. But I remembered some rumors going around the tournament circuit at the time. About Archie Greenleaf. The rest . . . I just guessed.”

“You ? How?”

“Little things. Your reaction at the Olympics. You obviously love chess but talk yourself into thinking that it’s a loathsome thing. You feel responsible for your family, not just your sisters but your mother, too.” His tone is even, idle, like he’s reading a boring textbook to the rest of the class. “You constantly act like you’re guilty of something awful. Like you deserve nothing but scraps for yourself.”

Me. The boring textbook— it’s .

“Because I guilty,” I blurt out. Surprising myself. It’s not something I’ve verbalized out loud to anyone before. But if I hadn’t told Mom about Heather Turcotte, if Dad hadn’t left home, if he hadn’t had a reason to be driving drunk at 3:00 a.m. . . . If. If.

If.

“Did you know,” he says conversationally, “that I was the reason my grandfather was institutionalized?”

“What does this . . . No. I didn’t.”

“He’d been acting weird for a while. He’d say and do really inappropriate stuff, sometimes in public. My parents had gotten wind of it, but I think they just chalked it up to my grandfather being old. And I was staying with him a lot at the time, so I covered for him when I could. I honestly thought he just needed to sleep more or some shit like that. But then . . . it was his birthday. I went to his apartment, the one you’ve been to. I walked upstairs— same doorman as now, he doesn’t give a shit— and let myself in. I had a present for him, a chess set I’d made. Nine months of woodworking.”

He signals right and takes the exit. We must be home. Nearly. “We’d met the day before. We met every single day, but this time he didn’t recognize me. Or he did, but thought I had bad intentions. I’ll never know, I figure. He wasn’t a violent man, but he had a knife. I saw him take it out of the block and thought he wanted to . . . chop celery? I can’t fucking remember. But instead he stared into my eyes, ran at me, and the cut was deep. I needed stitches, which meant going to the hospital, which meant filing a report, and that was it. My father had the ammo he needed to lock him up. Said it was for the best, and maybe it was, but that’s not why he was doing it. He’d always hated his father for caring more about chess than he ever did about him.”

His voice is clinical. Like he’s turned this story in his mind so much, told it to himself so often, it’s a memorized thing by now. He thinks about it every day. Every hour. I know this, because I’m in his head. “I’m the one who gave my father that power. And my grandfather died in that institution, medicated to his eyeballs. It’s the last thing he wanted, and it’s something I have to live with every second of every day. So when you talk about guilt— ”

“What— no. No.” I twist toward him. The seat belt digs into my breast. “It’s your fault. You did what you could, considering that you were— How old were you?”

“I was fourteen. How old were you, when you saw your father?”

I close my eyes. Because it’s not the same. At all. But he makes it sound like it be, and I do deserve to be let off the hook and—

Suddenly I am furious. Explosively, incandescently furious.

He— he manipulated me. He pretended to self- disclose, and instead turned me into . . . whatever the hell this is. He sacrificed his queen to checkmate me, and how he? How dare he come into my home and analyze my family as though we were a game?

“Fuck you, Nolan.”

His expression is indecipherable and unsurprised. “Did I say something untrue?”

“Fuck you. What do you even know about families?”

“Is that the problem? That what I said is true?”

“Stop trying to— to me. To me. You might want to play chess against me more than anything, but it doesn’t give you the right to— ”

“Not more than anything,” he murmurs with a lingering glance. I ignore him, enraged.

“Is that what’s happening? You want to win against me so bad that you’ll score points however you can? Tic- tac- toe? Taking cheap shots at my family?”

“It’s not— ”

“Nobody got stabbed in my family. I could have kept my mouth shut, and things would have been fine. It could have been secret to keep, burden, and no one would have known or suffered for it. Mom would have had health insurance, and my sisters would have had the family they deserved, and Dad would be alive— ” I stop. Take a deep, shuddering breath. “You don’t me, or my sisters, or my mom, and you most certainly did not know my dad. So don’t try to pretend you and I are similar in any way, or like what did is comparable to what happened to you.”

“You’re not being fair to either of us,” he says calmly. Maybe he’s right, but I’m past caring.

“You know what?” The seat belt cuts into my throat. I’m overflowing with anger now, anger at . . . at Nolan. Let’s say Nolan. “Screw this shit. We’re going to play. Tonight. We’re going to play this stupid chess game, and you’ll quit the armchair psychology.”

“I— ” He stops, registering what I said. His throat works. “You’re not serious.”

“If you’re not interested— ”

“I am.” He sounds eager. Young. “I am.” Then he’s silent, as though he’s afraid to spook me, that I’ll change my mind. He barely looks at me until after the car is parked, the passenger door slammed closed, our coats tossed in a corner of the living room. We usually work across from each other, but he sets the board on the coffee table, and we sit side by side on the couch. Because this is an analysis of someone else’s game, and it needs to be clear.

It’s midnight. The heat has been off for hours, but I don’t feel cold. “Okay?” he asks, serious, making sure this game is consensual.

wasn’t “You can be White,” I say, cutting, expecting—

him to be offended.

“Thank you,” he replies with no trace of irony. “I’m going to need that.”

It makes me hate him even more, and so does his stupid opening— pawn to e4. I answer with the Sicilian. I roll my eyes and put my knight in c6, just to derail him, some niche line I vaguely remember studying with Defne— Rossolimo Variation.

Lots of pressure, very fast, and he doesn’t care, doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t even blink in the dim lights. His forehead is smooth. Hands steady. His knee brushes against mine, not every move, but sometimes. He doesn’t seem to notice, and I hate him. I feel clumsy, a lumbering, unwieldy, broken beast next to him. I feel raw, see- through, broken open, like he can reach inside my skull and pluck sharp, painful shards of my past and make me bleed with them.

Then I lose a pawn, and I feel stupid, too.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

“It’s just a pawn,” he murmurs without looking up.

“Shut up.” I advance my knight with shaky fingers, and then it’s not just a pawn. I left my bishop uncovered, screwed up my castling opportunities. I watch Nolan unhurriedly take my piece and immediately attack him from the side with my rook— I’m going to make him . Except, I knock over two pieces and completely overlook the way his queen inches toward my king and fuck, fuck, “Mallory.” His hand covers mine, trapping it on my knee. I look up to his handsome, hateful face. “I’m sorry about what I said. I was out of line.”

I don’t want to hear it. “Let’s finish.”

“I don’t know how things went with your father— ”

“Let’s. Finish.”

He shakes his head.

I laugh, bitter. “You’ve supposedly been pining for this game for months— ”

“That’s not what I’ve been pining for, and you can stop lying to yourself about it. I don’t want to play with you like this.”

“So now you need perfect conditions to play? Should I rearrange the furniture? Sage the room? Let me know what your are, what you want, and— ”

“You know what I fucking want, Mallory?” He leans forward, suddenly furious. “I want you to not be here.”

I gasp in outrage. “Screw you!

asked me to be your second— ”

“I want you to be elsewhere. Training with your seconds in preparation for . So we can play a real match in Italy. The real thing.” His eyes blaze. His hand is still flat on mine. Pressing. Warm. “Your presence in this house might be what gets me up in the morning, but we can stop pretending this situation is anything like what either of us wants or needs.”

I close my eyes. He is right. This . . . It’s wrong. All wrong.

“It was our only chance,” I whisper. “And I fucked it up.” Just like I fuck up everything. Friendships. Families.

“There will be other tournaments.” Nolan takes a deep, calming breath. “In two years there’ll be another World Championship— ”

“I’m not going to be doing this past the summer.”

He swallows. “Okay. Well . . . It is what it is.” He glances away. Then turns back to me, his expression softer. “I sorry. You’re right— I don’t know anything about families. Please, accept my apology so you can stop playing the worst game of your life. Let’s just . . . let’s go to sleep. We’re tired.”

I look down at the board. Black’s position is an amateurish, reckless mess. “God, what’s wrong with me?”

“Transient global amnesia, one can only imagine.”

I let out a laugh, and my anger melts like snow in the sun. He laughs, too, and I can feel the warmth of his breath against my cheek. We’re that close.

“I’m sorry. For this game.”

There are little specks of gold in his eyes. He has freckles, light and scattered, just a handful, and they look . . . pretty. Yummy. “You be sorry.”

I chuckle. Clear my throat. “You might want to move away. Since there are other people in this house.”

He seems confused. “And?”

“They could come in. Think we’ve been making out or something.”

He smiles. “They’re more likely to think we’ve been murdering each other over an en passant— ”

My brain short- circuits. Maybe it’s the late hour, or how I just dropped my knight less than ten moves into a mortifying game. Maybe it’s Nolan’s clean, familiar smell. All I know is that one moment I’m looking at him, and the next I’m not— because I’ve leaned forward and pressed my mouth against his in a . . .

A kiss.

There’s no way around it. That’s what it’s called, this clumsy, juvenile peck. I’m kissing Nolan Sawyer, and—

I jerk back, appalled. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I— ” I shoot to my feet. My knee knocks over the board, scattering the pieces. I lift my fingers to my mouth, and— it feels weird.

Different. Changed.

“Mallory.”

“I don’t know why I did that. I’m just— I’m so so sorry.” Nolan stares like I’m the center of gravity of the room, like nothing else ever existed but me in all of space and time. It makes my heart beat in my throat, it makes me want to kiss him again, it makes me want to run the hell away. “Sorry, I— ”

“Touch- take rule,” he murmurs. He stands, too. Every step back I take is one forward for him.

“I— What?”

“You touched me. Can’t stop now. Touch- take rule.”

“I . . . This is not chess.” My back hits an obstacle. “I can always stop.”

“Then just don’t.” His hands come up to cup my face. He towers over me, cages me against the wall, and I . . . I don’t mind. Which scares me. “Please, Mallory.”

“This is . . . We should finish the game. You said you wanted to play.”

“I said there were things I wanted more.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, but Nolan is so — I can smell him, feel him in every pore of my being. “Weren’t you the one who chose Kasparov over getting laid?” I say, petulant, whiny. When I open my eyes, his smile is faint.

“And you think it’s because I want to play you less than I did Kasparov?”

“Of course. Why else— Oh.” I close my eyes again. “Oh.”

“Can I kiss you?”

“But our game— ”

“I resign. You win. Can I kiss you?”

“No! I mean . . . why?”

“Because I want to.” He’s being patient. Why am being a total wreck while is being patient? “You don’t?”

“I . . .”

I do? It’s not a big deal. Nolan’s easily the most attractive guy I’ve ever met, and I’m not one of those Tinder weirdos. I’ve done a lot of things, and regret none of it. So what’s stopping me?

, I think. And then I hear myself say it aloud as my toes push up, and I’m doing that odd thing again— that light peck on his lips that makes me feel like I’m thirteen and sneaking behind the gym. But this time I don’t have to slap myself for being a total weirdo, because Nolan kisses me back.

He’s not good at it. Not immediately. Not bad, but there is an airy moment of hesitance, of suspended disconnect, when I think the kiss just won’t work out. Not meant to be. Two ships passing in the night, going their separate ways, a narrow miss.

But then he does something. Tilts his head, maybe. Adjusts his grip. Presses more firmly against me, and it all changes. His ship crashes into mine and my back is flat against the wall, and , he wants it. He wants it very, very much. He wants it as much as I do. I can tell from his leg sliding between mine and pinning me to the wall, from the way his hand shifts to my hip, assertive like on a chessboard. From the guttural sound in the back of his throat.

He good at it. Warm and forceful and , and he tastes good and—

A door opens somewhere in the house. Laughter. Footsteps. The hallway light turns on. I push on Nolan’s shoulders, and we break apart just in time.

“Oh, you guys are back.” Emil. Standing in the entrance, quickly tying his robe closed. “What are you doing?”

I glance at Nolan, thinking that Emil’s friend. The burden of coming up with a plausible excuse should fall on him. Problem is, Nolan is staring at me, pupils wide, lips full and . . . kissed?

“Um, we were just . . .” I clear my throat. Smile tentatively at Emil. “Talking about that Koch game that— ”

“Say no more, Greenleaf.” He shuffles to the fridge. “I cannot get sidetracked or Tanu will murder me. She sent me to forage.” He piles leftover pizza and three cupcakes in his arms, then disappears with a swish of his robe and a careless “Goodnight.”

I’m alone with Nolan again.

Nolan, who hasn’t stopped staring.

“It’s getting late,” I say, not meeting his eyes. I feel flustered. Because of a kiss. I regressing to thirteen. “I’m tired. I . . .”

He nods and does something weird: holds his hand out to me. Calmly. Quietly. As though he expects me to take it. And it’s exactly what I do: I slide my fingers in to his, and when he leads me down the hallway, stopping to turn off the light, I follow him meekly. We walk past Tanu’s door without reacting to the muffled laughter from inside, past Emil’s empty one, past all the others, too— including mine, until we’re in his room, which smells like clean skin and mind- bendingly good chess and his couch back in the city.

He nonchalantly takes off his jeans, all long, muscled limbs.

“What are you doing?” I blurt out. He doesn’t look at me, just smells his shirt, deciding that it belongs in a laundry hamper.

“Getting ready for bed.”

“I . . .” What is happening?

“Why aren’t you nervous?”

“About what?”

“About”— I gesture inchoately between us— “

”

He glances at me. “I don’t know. It feels right. Besides, I don’t get nervous much.”

Darcy once told me about a study they did, monitoring the heart rate of top chess players during important games. Nolan’s was always the slowest. The steadiest. Is that why he’s standing in front of me in boxer briefs and a Coimbra Chess 2019 T-shirt and I’m shaking like a leaf?

“Do you not want this?” he asks.

“No. I mean, yes. I mean, I don’t want this. But . . . we just kissed out of the blue, and you seem so okay with it, and . . .”

He shrugs. “It’s not out of the blue for me.”

“It isn’t?”

“I came to terms with this months ago, Mallory. The first time we played, maybe.”

I swallow. “I don’t understand.”

He comes closer. In two steps he’s in front of me, and for some indecipherable reason I’m shaking. A small-scale earthquake’s happening inside me, twenty kings are being tipped over, and Nolan just cups my face again.

“I’ve got you, Mallory. Nothing bad is going to happen. You can let yourself want this, because you already have it. You have me.”

Oh God. Oh God, God, . I’m shaking harder.

“I . . . Are we . . . Are we going to fuck?”

I’m purposely trying to rattle him. And it’s not working.

“No. We’re going to sleep.”

We lie down, and somehow it’s a smooth thing. I’m wearing leggings and a soft shirt and no jewelry, and that’s why I’m so comfortable. Not because my head is pillowed on his chest and his legs are tangled with mine, and I feel his slow, steady heart like a warm clock under my ear.

“I haven’t even washed my face,” I tell him. I’m still trembling, albeit more quietly. I’m a mess.

“That’s okay. Antonov won Coimbra 2019.”

I laugh shakily. “I . . . don’t think I can sleep.”

“Want a bedtime story?” His hand combs gently through the hair at my nape. “It’s called ‘Polgar Versus Anand, 1999.’ It starts with e4. c5.”

I groan. But I’m smiling when I ask, “And then?”

“Knight f3. d6. d3.”

“Mmm.”

“Yup.”

“And then?”

“Knight xd4. Knight f6. Knight c3 . . .”

I fall asleep mid- game— for the second time in my life held by someone, for the second time in my life held by Nolan Sawyer.