Page 196 of On His Team

“Shit.”

Ten minutes later, I open the front door with one shoe untied and no makeup on. Rowan is standing beside his truck holding coffee.

He looks me over. “Rough.”

“Good morning to you too.”

He hands me the coffee. I take a sip. It’s my order.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Food.”

I tilt my head back and close my eyes. “You could have said that.”

“I did.”

I look at him. He looks completely rested, which is offensive considering he played a hockey game last night.

“You scored yesterday.”

“Yeah.”

“Just checking whether you remembered.”

“I did.”

“You seem very normal about it.”

“What should I be doing?”

“I don’t know. Walking around like this.” I throw both hands over my head and imitate myself from the stands. “ROWAN FUCKING LAURENS!”

He laughs and opens the passenger door. I climb in.

We get breakfast at a place near campus because I refuse to eat eggs cooked by Rowan for the third time in a week, which he takes as a personal attack.

“It’s not that I don’t like your eggs.”

“You said you were sick of them.”

“I said I want potatoes.”

“They have potatoes at Hawthorne.”

“I want professionally prepared potatoes.”

He looks at me across the booth. “You’re high maintenance.”

We talk about hockey. He says Stanley has watched his own game-winner at least twelve times and Rowan’s goal at least twenty. I tell him Ives emailed me at seven-thirty this morning with three sentences of feedback on the clinic, which means she was apparently thinking about my event before I was even conscious.

“Good feedback?”

“Mostly.”

“What’s mostly?”

“She said I overstaffed the second half.”