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There are four concrete chess tables, two on each side of the path, under the shade of several large oaks.
Tobin doesn’t notice them the first time she plops down to shake a pebble out of her left shoe. She doesn’t notice them the second time, the last warm day of late summer, when she stops to finish her ice cream cone that’s dripping too much to eat while walking. She doesn’t even notice the third time really, not at first and not on her own.
No, Tobin’s only collapsed on a seat because the prettiest girl she’s ever seen is sitting across the path, completely oblivious to the way she’s brought Tobin’s entire world to a screeching halt.
Tobin was minding her own business, kicking rocks along the path as usual, when a bright laugh drew her attention. As someone whose smile has been described as happiness personified, she never passes up the opportunity to find something in the world to smile at. So Tobin’s head moved on a swivel, trying to find the source of the melodic laughter. Once she did, Tobin found herself stumbling sideways, tripping over air, until she felt the cool stone of a bench though her pant leg. Then she was dropping heavily onto the horizontal surface, thankful to be further down the path and slightly behind and across from the stunning woman with the brilliant eyes.
Tobin’s still sprawled on the bench, unintentionally enraptured with observing the other woman. Her hands are flying as she smiles and talks, and her long fingers nearly clip the chess pieces in front of her, but they float daintily above every time. She’s cursing the angle a little bit because she can see her sharp jawline and the curve of her cheek but not those captivating eyes and heart-stopping smile.
Tobin’s so caught up trying to will her mystery woman into turning around so she can catch another glimpse without being a complete creeper, that she misses everything going on right in front of her.
“Young lady.”
The strident and almost censorious tone startles Tobin out of her intent fascination. She glances across the table to see an elderly woman sitting there, a full chess setup suddenly on the table between them. Tobin looks down, then back up again, floundering in complete confusion.
“I know she’s a looker, but it’s your move.”
“I”—she tries to find a gentle way out of this—“I’m not here to—”
“These seats are reserved for chess players,” the woman corrects her sharply, sounding as if she’s said this before, “And the longer you sit here, the longer you can stare at the pretty girl.”
This time, Tobin’s more collected so she finally realizes this woman is again busting her chops for staring. Properly scolded and called out, she looks down at the chess board to find the black pieces neatly lined up in front of her on the board etched into the concrete tabletop. Without much thought, Tobin pushes a pawn forward a square before glancing over to the mystery woman again.
“You really that distracted?” she asks with a scoff, “Or just stupid?”
Tobin splutters a bit, not expecting the blunt insult. “I’m not”—she immediately tries to deny and then admits on a sigh—“Distracted, I guess.”
“Mmhmm,” the woman agrees with a raised eyebrow.
Her phone beeps, and Tobin fishes it out of her pocket to find a text message from Allie wondering why the hell she isn’t back from lunch yet.
“I’ll see you on Friday.”
Tobin looks up as the woman carefully packs away her chess set into a felt-lined wooden box. Now that she’s focused, she sees that the pieces are also wood, worn, and well-loved. Suddenly and inexplicably, she’s feeling extremely guilty for being inattentive and neglectful to this perfect stranger.
“Friday?” Tobin repeats as a question, standing as she does.
“That beeping mean you have somewhere to be?” she asks, and Tobin nods even though it’s probably rhetorical. “Then I’ll see you on Friday, half hour earlier. Your girl will be here, and I’ll expect you to have read something on chess strategy.”
The woman goes tottering away, chess set secured under an arm, and Tobin watches for a second before Allie texts again. She winces, casts another longing look at the woman across the way, then turns and heads back to work. After an hour of dithering, she reserves a book from the library.
How to Beat Anyone at Chess
“There, that’s better.”
Tobin grins at the faint praise for her predictable move. She keeps one eye on Rosie’s hemming and hawing and the other on her mystery woman. Curls today, somewhat held in check by the pink beanie perched on her crown, but mainly wild and windblown. She’s the very picture of the first day of fall, even though the perfectly timed cooler temperatures took most by surprise, and Tobin thinks she’s adorable.
Rosie’s throat clearing brings Tobin’s attention back to their game, and she stares at their board in utter disbelief. “No way,” she groans, swiping a hand down her face.
“Checkmate,” Rosie says, not a hint of remorse, before she quickly resets the board. “Maybe if you stared less and strategized more...”
Five moves.
On their fifth intentional meeting, Tobin makes it to glorious double digits before Rosie’s triumph. (She’s not entirely sure it’s not a fluke.) It’s Tobin’s turn to reset the board so she does so, handling Rosie’s chess pieces with care and reverence.
“What do you like about her?”
Tobin looks up to find Rosie peering at her curiously. They’ve never talked about that before. Usually, Rosie just tells her when to show up and somehow the mystery woman is also always there, at the table across the way and playing against the same elderly man in the same outfit even as the color of his clothes change. Tobin’s content to let Rosie whoop her ass at chess and chatter about her family and life for nearly an hour while she sneaks glances at her mystery woman.
“She’s a looker, but what do you even like about her?”
“Oh, uh,” Tobin flushes and runs a hand across the back of her neck, “I don’t know. She’s pretty.”
“Then tell her that,” Rosie scolds in a mutter, talking more to the chess board than Tobin. “You kids these days. Don’t know how to talk to people anymore.”
Tobin points out defensively, “I talk to you.”
“Because I talked to you first. If you’re not going to tell her she’s pretty, you should like her for more than her looks.”
And Tobin does, despite never having had an interaction with her. She just doesn’t—
“She’s captivating. I like her laugh and her smile and her eyes. I like that she takes the time to sit in the park with her grandpa or uncle or whoever and just play chess. I like that she’s always happy. Maybe not always but when she’s out here at least. I like her because just seeing her smile makes me smile.”
Tobin flings the words out in a careless rush because she’s been struggling to justify to herself why she keeps showing up. She likes Rosie, the woman’s a ball buster with a life and history she finds fascinating, but that’s not the real reason. No, that’s an oblivious woman who doesn’t have the slightest clue that she’s upended Tobin’s life in the course of a half dozen lunch breaks.
“You should talk to her,” Rosie frowns again. “But maybe not all that. Probably scare her off.”
Ten moves.
By their tenth meeting, Tobin’s read three books on chess strategy and is starting to earn Rosie’s respect. In the realm of chess, at least. When it comes to matters of the heart, the woman is still sorely disappointed by Tobin’s cowardice.
“Not stupid, just distracted,” Rosie concedes with a grumble.
Tobin looks away from her mystery woman (in this yellow plaid blanket coat thing that should look ridiculous but makes Tobin long to cuddle under) to grin at the board.
Seventeen moves.
“Maybe we should find a coffee shop or something,” Tobin suggests gently. Fall is edging closer to winter, and it hurts her heart to watch Rosie shiver under a veritable pile of coats, including Tobin’s own.
Rosie scoffs. “Nonsense. A coffee shop doesn’t have your view.”
No, it doesn’t.
Tobin instinctively looks up and across the path to her mystery woman, smile nearly tucked into the oversized scarf wound around her neck.
“There,” Rosie says with finality, “That smile’s warmth enough for me.”
The smile that’s instinctive whenever she sees her mystery woman stretches a little wider, and Tobin blushes down at the board.
Twenty-three moves.
“Yes!”
Tobin laughs, victorious and free, as she raises her arms. Even Rosie is smiling proudly at the result on the board: a draw, Tobin’s first ever.
In the rush of her excitement, Tobin misses it. The way her mystery woman twists in her seat to seek the source of the exclamation. The way she smiles immediately upon seeing Tobin before turning back to her customary opponent with a soft blush. The way she sneaks another glance over her shoulder like she’s been doing for weeks.
Tobin misses all of it.
Thirty-four moves.
It’s the dead of winter now. Tobin calls Rosie to offer to bring soup and her own company to her apartment. She can’t stand the thought of Rosie sitting out in the cold for an hour just so Tobin can stare at her crush.
Rosie adamantly refuses and tells her she’ll be at the park whether or not Tobin and her thin skin can stand the cold.
So she runs around the office, snatching jackets and scarves and hats and gloves from anyone too slow to deny her request to “borrow that real quick, just for like an hour.” Never mind that it’s about lunch, and everyone will be needing their cold weather accessories soon. By the time she reaches their table, Tobin is almost sweating under the weight and warmth of the wardrobe she’s collected. She’s glad to have beaten Rosie there for once and goes about constructing some padding for the cold stone bench.
A throat clears behind her, and Tobin responds without turning around. “I know. I’ll move them off the table in a second, but you’re wearing them. I don’t care if you don’t want to, Ro.”
Tobin straightens the jackets carefully folded into a cushion and finally spins, smiling proudly over the little throne. Her smile drops, and her jaw goes slack when she sees who’s actually standing there. In response to her visible shock, the mystery woman smiles sunnily, and Tobin forgets about the near freezing temperature.
“Hi, I’m Christen. You’re Tobin, right?”
Dumbfounded, she nods.
Then Christen extends a hand, protected by a soft-looking pink mitten. Tobin shakes it gingerly, cursing that it’s winter and all she gets is a palm of soft wool instead of the feel of Christen’s hand. Belatedly, she realizes that Christen moved something to her left hand to shake Tobin’s, and that something looks awfully like Rosie’s chess set.
“Rosie sent me,” Christen continues as if reading Tobin’s mind, “She and Hank are enjoying a lovely lunch at home and didn’t want to leave you out in the cold, waiting for her to show.”
Tobin can’t quite process the what and how and why of everything happening at the moment. All she knows is that her mystery woman—Christen—is suddenly talking to her as if Tobin is a normal person and not her pseudo-stalker and Rosie had something to do with it all. Rosie who apparently very much lied to her about meeting in the park today. Finally, her brain catches on the most unfamiliar part of it all.
“Hank?” Tobin repeats, forehead scrunching.
Christen nods, a soft, teasing smile forming. “Her beau, to use the old fashioned term. The man I play against?”
The pieces start to fall together for Tobin. Somehow, their chess opponents have known each other all along and have conspired to bring Tobin and Christen together. She knows what Rosie’s motivations are, but she has no idea why the old man—Hank—would care to deposit Christen in her path.
“So you’re here to...” Tobin trails off, not wanting to make any assumptions even as her heart starts pounding against her ribcage.
Christen gestures for Tobin to step aside and sits, somehow elegantly, on the little pile of jackets Tobin folded. Unsure what else to do, Tobin takes her usual seat on the opposite side. She watches silently as Christen drapes the extra jackets to hang over the fence next to them and begins to set up Rosie’s pieces.
“A couple months ago, I sat on that seat over there”— Christen nods over her shoulder at her and Hank’s table—“because my heel broke.”
“I was trying to work up to limp back to my office when I saw this woman walk by. She was wearing headphones and just kind of bopping along, eating her ice cream cone. Then she stopped and sat here, where you are, and I couldn’t stop staring because she was just so beautiful, you know?”
It’s a rhetorical question, and Tobin’s not really sure what she’s agreeing to, but she’s definitely familiar with the concept of a beautiful woman—this beautiful woman—stopping her in her tracks so she nods.
“And cool and confident, I was just drawn to watching her. I thought for sure I was going to get caught staring and I was, but not by her. This older couple came up and told me the seats were reserved for chess players. I told them I was one, my grandpa taught me, and Hank challenged me to a game right there. He beat me in, like, five moves and told me to come back the next week so he could reteach me what I clearly forgot. I felt bad about stealing his time from Rosie, but he said she always has a way of finding a new opponent. And Rosie did, and it was my ice cream girl so I kept coming back, hoping she would show up to play against Rosie.”
Tobin takes this all in, realizing just how very similar this story sounds to her own. She can’t believe Christen noticed her—and noticed her first, really why was she focused on ice cream when Christen was mere feet away?—and came back to the park hoping to see Tobin. Christen seems to already know the similarities because she starts to smile before biting her bottom lip and asking, “So how do you know Rosie?”
“It’s a funny story,” Tobin starts, her own smile slipping through, “You see, I was walking by here like I usually do and I heard this laugh. The prettiest laugh I ever heard and when I looked around, I saw it came from the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. And I kind of just tripped over my feet and landed on this bench. I don’t know how long I was just looking at her, but suddenly there was this woman sitting where you are, and she bullied me into playing chess with her. Then I kept coming back because she told me the pretty girl would be here again, and somehow she was right every time.”
“Well,” Christen’s got the biggest smile Tobin’s ever seen on her, and she’s been looking for some time now, “how about that?”
They stare at each other, both trying and failing to wipe the dumb smiles off their faces. Christen is the first to recover, redirecting her focus to a white pawn piece. “Looks like we both got played,” she jokes, although Tobin knows it’s mostly truth.
“Their evil scheme worked,” she nods in agreement, “What do you want to do now?”
Christen pretends to think for a moment. She closes her eyes and scrunches her nose before peeking at Tobin through a squint. Tobin can’t really believe she wasted all this time staring at only Christen’s profile when she could have approached her from the beginning.
“It’d be a shame to waste all their hard work. And they’re so nice, I’d hate to disappoint them.”
“Nice?” Tobin repeats with incredulously wide eyes. “Of course you got the nicer half. Rosie’s been busting my ass since day one about how I should have”—she cuts herself off, realizing she’s about to reveal again how long and often she’s been conspiring to be near Christen—“never mind. I just mean Ro’s a firecracker.”
Christen smirks like she already knows what Tobin was about to admit. Tobin remembers instantly that, after all, Christen’s guilty of it, too. “And Rosie said she finally got you in good enough shape to give me a challenge.”
“Hey, I was giving her a run for her money from the start,” Tobin exaggerates, but Christen shakes her head with a disbelieving scoff.
“Then show me what you got.”
Tobin thinks she puts up a decent fight, and Christen’s not nearly the opponent Rosie is yet but she still has some experience over Tobin. So it’s after about twenty minutes of flirting in the form of trash talking that Christen props her elbow on the edge of the table and wiggles her mitten-free fingers at Tobin. “Your queen, please,” she requests loftily.
Tobin rolls her eyes to cover the fact that she is very charmed by all of Christen’s mannerisms and snatches her queen off the board. She dangles it an inch above Christen’s open palm but doesn’t concede the piece, not yet. “What do I get for her?”
“Get?” Christen arches an eyebrow, “I won her fair and square. What’s that you were saying about giving me a run for my money?”
Tobin flushes and ducks her head. “So I’m a little distracted. Sue me.”
Christen’s hand droops slightly, and she looks confused and maybe something else. It takes Tobin a second to realize that Christen is maybe a little offended and maybe a little upset.
“Oh. Distracted? Distracted by who—I mean what?”
Then she realizes that Christen’s concerned Tobin’s attention isn’t entirely on their chess game. And it’s not, at least not on the game, and for what—or who—she thought was the obvious reason.
“The prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,” she answers confidently (for once, around this marvel of a woman), and Christen blushes so prettily. Tobin presses her luck a little more when she finally places her queen in Christen’s palm. In a low and intimate tone, she murmurs, “My queen.”
Christen just about lights up.
“I’ve got an idea,” Christen starts as Tobin haphazardly moves a pawn because this game is officially a lost cause on her part but she really could not care less as long as Christen stays for a rematch, “Winner gets a date with the loser.”
Tobin’s smile stretches practically from ear to ear, and the corners of her eyes crinkle. Without any hesitation, she agrees to Christen’s win-win wager. “Deal.”
“Checkmate,” Christen declares immediately.
She’s pretty sure Christen’s blinding smile has only a little bit to do with her victory. Cheesy as it is, Tobin kind of feels like they’ve both won. And like she’s definitely met her match.