Page 3 of On His Team

Hawthorne House has been domesticated.

“This is depressing,” Mara announces.

Blue looks up from the chair. “You’re holding a bottle of tequila.”

“Exactly. I’m carrying this entire party.”

“This isn’t a party,” Mila says.

Mara turns toward her so fast she has to catch her balance. “Thank you.”

“It’s a gathering,” I say.

Mila considers the room like she’s pricing it. “Barely.”

“There are eleven people here,” Lucy says.

“My grandmother gets eleven people for dinner.”

“That doesn’t mean your grandmother throws ragers,” Benson says.

“You don’t know my grandmother.”

I laugh and cross the room to drop onto the open piece of couch beside Mila, and Rowan moves his leg out of my way before I have to ask him to, without looking up, the same way he moved it the last two times.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

There it is again.

Yeah.

Rowan Laurens can do an unreasonable amount of work with one syllable. I’ve been cataloging it since October, not on purpose. There’s the yeah that means agreement. There’s the yeah that means the opposite of agreement and is functionally a door closing. There’s I heard you. There’s stop talking. There’s I have no opinion on this. And there’s the one he used on Blue, which meant, I have an extremely strong opinion on this, and I would sooner walk into the ocean than explain it to you.

I steal a pretzel out of the bowl in Lucy’s lap. She slides it an inch closer to me without breaking eye contact with my brother.

My eyes do a slow lap of the room now, taking inventory as I eat the pretzel.

Benson has Lucy curled into his side.

Blue has Melly perched on the arm of his chair.

Percy is against the wall with Penelope tucked between his legs, speaking approximately once every fiscal quarter.

Stanley’s girlfriend isn’t even here yet, and somehow he’s still staring at his phone like Aspen might crawl through it.

Mara starts pointing.

“This is what happened.”

“What happened?” Melly asks.

I answer, “You all got relationships.”

Blue looks down at me. “Tragic.”

“It is tragic,” I scoff.