Page 5 of On His Team

I look down at Rowan again. He’s got his head tipped back against the couch cushion an inch from my knee, watching Stanley check his phone for the fourth time in three minutes, and I can see the exact second he decides Stanley is up to something.

September was a strange month for me.

That’s all that was.

The front door opens, and the cold comes across the floor and up my legs. Mila swears and pulls me sideways into her, and Stanley is already moving.

Aspen shoulders the door shut behind her with a laptop bag on one arm and a grocery bag hanging off her wrist, her nose red, salt dried across the toes of her boots. Stanley takes the laptop bag off her shoulder and the grocery bag off her wrist and then puts his hand along her jaw and kisses her.

Aspen kisses him back for about a second and a half and then leans around his arm to look at the rest of us.

“Why is Mara holding tequila?” she smiles.

“Because I believe in joy,” Mara replies, holding it higher.

Aspen looks at me.

I put both hands up.

There’s a scatter of hi, Aspen and happy New Year, Aspen from around the room while she unwinds her scarf one-handed, and she’s smiling at the floor in a way that makes Stanley look even more suspicious than he’s looked for the past hour.

Rowan turns around against the couch, and his shoulder brushes my shin and stays there. Stanley puts both her bags on the counter and comes straight back.

Aspen sits down on the coffee table. Not on a chair. On the coffee table, in the middle of all of us, and she pulls the laptop out and opens it across her knees.

“I finished your Christmas present.”

The air changes in the room.

Benson sits forward and Lucy comes off his shoulder. Blue’s attention leaves Melly entirely. Percy lifts his head off the wall. Rowan sits forward, no longer against my leg.

One second, they’re five idiots arguing about whether eleven people is a party. The next second they’re hockey players.

Benson says to her, “You did all of them?”

She nods. “All eighteen games.”

“Eighteen?” Lucy repeats.

“Every one. Twice, for four of them.”

“My girlfriend ruined her Christmas watching you people,” Stanley says, with enormous pride.

“You’re not that bad,” Aspen says, fast, glancing up to make sure they heard her. She turns the screen around so the room can see it, which is a courtesy, because it’s a spreadsheet, and nobody in here except her and possibly my brother has the faintest idea what they’re looking at.

Nobody says anything as they look at the screen.

Five guys who will argue about the temperature of a room for forty minutes, and not one of them opens his mouth right now.

Aspen looks at them over the top of her screen.

“I have good news.”

Stanley puts a hand over his heart. “Finally.”

She says, “You’re good enough to win a national championship.”

Nobody laughs.