Ro sighed, tried to run his hand through his hair, and gave up mid-motion, remembering it was mostly gone.
“I kissed Cassie Clairburne,” he said.
I blinked at him.
“Cassie Clairburne?” I repeated.
“I know,” Ro said miserably. He fell back in surprise as I shoved him.
“An emergency, you said! Nine nine nine, you said!”
We’d adopted the code after watching some British TV series and realizing it was their equivalent to 911.
“Plus, flipped, it’s the devil’s number,” Rowan had added at the time. “Anytime one of us uses it, we’ll know they mean serious business.”
Serious business like a medical emergency or a breakup or—hell—even discussing his mother’s illness, which Rowan still wouldn’t talk about. When I knew more of Luke’s thoughts than Ro’s on something that big, there was a major issue.
“It is both those things,” Rowan said, unyielding. He pulled the tab off his can of beer and took a big gulp, as if he were drinking water. One of my eyebrows skirted up, but I said nothing.
Ro was finally confiding in me again about something, and maybe it wasn’t what I wanted him to tell me, but that didn’t matter. At least he was here. “So,” he went on, “you know Cassie and Eric are now paired up for mixed doubles, right?”
I nodded and got comfortable.
Honestly, Ro had called enough emergency shed meetings centered solely around his love life that it shouldn’t have surprised me. The difference was that thosehadactually been game changers, even if they were a little on the frivolous side.
The first time he’d called a shed meeting, we were ten and Jenna R. had just agreed to be his girlfriend. A secret so big, he couldn’t say it in the house for fear that his mom, brother, or dad—who still lived there at the time—would hear.
When we were fifteen, he’d asked me to ride over and meet him in the shed. “Don’t even go into the house,” he’d said, and I’d known it was really big. He told me he had lost his virginity to Ashley Paul.
I’d called my own shed meetings in the past, of course. When I’d overheard Dad on the phone one night, talking to someone I didn’t know about possibly hospitalizing my mother. When I was fourteen and it seemed for a while that we might be moving to Massachusetts, where Dad’s family lived. We needed more family support, Dad said, and Mom’s family weren’t an option because she hadn’t spoken to them since right before she married my father. In that shed I had told Ro about my first kiss, even though it was cheating because I’d technically spilled the beans to Mel first. I’d told him that I wanted to stop being his mixed doubles partner after four years of him being the standout and me being average, not to mention bored of tennis. (Watching it was fine; playing was an entirely different story.)
The shed was for those hard, awkward truths that were too fragile for sunlight or a space without cobwebs and old garden tools. I didn’t always like his reasons for dragging me in here, but I always tried to hear what he was and wasn’t saying.
“Eric had been making all these comments that he had the hottest partner, and he might give up the singles life entirely and just take up mixed doubles. All this stuff,” Ro continued. “So I thought, whatever, he can have her. Cassie is high-maintenance as hell anyway.”
“Ro—” I said with a roll of my eyes.
“Don’tRome. If you’ve never had to share a court with her, you can’t even judge.” He drank from his beer again. “Don’t get me wrong, her backhand is sick. I’m talking that old-school Henin one-hander.”
“Are you saying that because Cassie’s short?” When I was a kid, I used to get the Justine Henin comparison too. What I lacked in height, I made up for in tenacity. She was many a short girl’s tennis idol, and if I’d ever gotten passionate about tennis, I’d have been obsessed with Henin.
“No,” he said. “She’s just that good.”
I nodded and waved for Ro to go on. “Continue.”
“Anyway, so we’re at Cody’s party last night, right? And I’m waiting in line for the bathroom when Cassie taps me on the shoulder and tells me there’s another bathroom in the pool house, but she’s scared to go by herself.
“So, I’m like, I’m down, let’s go, ’cause I’m getting really desperate.” Ro slurped on his beer. “We get there. She goes in first ...”
“Gentleman,” I remarked, and he rolled his eyes.
“Then I go in. When I come back out, she’s waiting for me at the door, and she just like grabs my face and kisses me. Did I mention I was super wasted?”
“No, you did not.” I spoke calmly, but I felt a pinprick of worry. First the party where Luke and I picked Rowan up, then a party last night, and now he was drinking again today?
“Okay, I’m super wasted. So I kiss her back. We mess around, whatever, then go back to the party. I get to practice this morning before work, and Eric is like, ‘Dude, I’m going to ask her out. She’s been giving me all these hints.’ How am I supposed to tell him?”
“Maybe you don’t have to,” I offered. “If she’s giving him hints, maybe she’s into him and last night was just a series of bad decisions. On both your parts.” I couldn’t help voicing my disapproval. Cassie Clairburne was known for dating guys and dumping them the moment she got bored. Ro could do way better.
