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She nodded. “Well, I appreciate it.” Her eyes darted upstairs as the sound of Sage stomping around the room had me chuckling. “I actually have a, uh, story idea. Kinda want to play with something this morning.”
It was amazing the pride you could feel in someone else’s work when it had nothing to do with you. If I gushed the way I wanted to gush, she’d feel uncomfortable, but fuck did I want to.
“So whatever you did yesterday was working, huh?”
Color bloomed high on her cheeks, and she nodded a little. “Mm-hmm.”
“Why are you blushing?”
“I’m not blushing,” she said hotly. Then she pressed her hands to her cheeks, hiding the nonexistent blush from my view. “Do you have to always point out everything you notice?”
I grinned. “No.”
For instance, I wasn’t pointing out that her sleep shorts had a hole in the hem just under the curve of her ass, and I wasn’t pointing out that her hair was kinked out to the side because of however she slept.
“Ready,” Sage yelled, pounding down the steps.
She gave her mom a quick hug and darted out the door. I pointed at my own hair. “I like the look this morning.”
Harlow’s hand flew up to her head, patting around until she found the pieces sticking out. Mid-eye roll, she flipped me her middle finger. I was still smiling when I hopped up into the truck. Sage was already belting herself into the passenger seat.
“You figure out what you’re going to say to the coach?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Immediately, she pulled out a piece of paper with bullet points written out in Sharpie. Reasons I Should Join The Team, it was titled. My eyebrows shot up my forehead. While I drove, I glanced down at her copiously written notes.
“Looks pretty persuasive.”
“Flag football is the fastest-growing youth sport in America,” she said on a rushed exhale. “And most of that is coming from girls. There’s been a forty percent increase in female players in the last year alone. High schools across the country have it as a varsity sport now because over half a million girls are playing in leagues.” She sighed. “They don’t need me on their team forever, but I bet there are enough girls here and in neighboring towns that they could start a girls’ team if we got a chance. That’s all I’m asking for.”
I cut her a quick look. “You convinced me. Is the coach a nice guy?”
“I don’t know,” she said, folding her paper with precision, then tucking it back into the front pocket of her backpack. “I’ve seen him around school, but I’ve never talked to him. Mom only emailed him once when we first moved here.”
The drive to the school didn’t take long, and because of the early hour, not many kids were trickling in. When the lights from the parking lot cut through the windshield, highlighting her face, I could tell she was nervous.
“Holy shit, it looks the same,” I said.
The distraction was enough because she studied the building, then cut her eyes toward me. “Did you like going here?”
I shrugged. “As much as any kid likes going to school at this age. Your mom always had better grades than I did. I remember that much.”
“She did?”
“Oh yeah. She’s still smarter than me. The only thing I was good at was being intimidating. Probably still is.” Sage laughed, which made me realize just how not-intimidating I was to the Keaton women. That had me grimacing as I pulled into a spot and checked the time. “You sure he’s here?”
She nodded. “I checked his office hours last night.”
I tapped my thumb on the steering wheel, watching her out of the corner of my eye. Her fingers were twisted in a tight knot, and she’d lost a little bit of color in her face.
Pep talks had never been my forte. Giving them or receiving them. If it was someone in my family, they wouldn’t expect me to have a filter, so there’d be no second-guessing of my word choice. If it were Harlow, I could be as blunt as I wanted with no recourse. If she didn’t like what I said, she’d tell me to fuck off.
But I tried to remember what it was like at ten years old. What my life was like. Sage had experienced a different kind of uprooting in her life than I had. Around her age, my dad had just married Sheila, and even if the expansion of our family had been a good thing, it was scary as shit at the time.
The adults in my life, my dad and new stepmom, had come alongside all of us to tell us that it would be okay. That we could be scared or nervous or pissed off or excited, and all of those feelings were normal. They were there, even if it was standing off to the side while we faced the thing that made us nervous.
And as the thought registered, I heard myself ask Sage, “Want me to come in with you?”
