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 eat. 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 Doom Patrol 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 are loud.”
“That, or they have sex to whale noises.”
I laugh. “Still. You could . . . go skiing? Wear cuff links? Be positively aghast? 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 know 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.”
“Mug cake,” Darcy corrects him with a patient sigh. “Mom, do we have any sugar?”