AllFreeNovel
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“Dessert, too? You spoil me,” Shay said as she pulled out a chocolate chip granola bar. “My favorite.”
“No, it’s not.” Layne laughed. “The peanut butter one is your favorite. I just didn’t have any of those.”
“How long have you had this one?” Shay asked, holding it up to her face.
“It’s not expired. I checked. I think it’s from the summer. I ordered a lot of them because it was easier to grab one of those for breakfast when I was working.”
“Internship or the other job?” Shay asked.
“Other job. Breaks were… well, frowned upon. We had these numbers we had to hit to not get in trouble.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s customer support. I’ve never worked support before, but I hope I never have to do it again. I mean, I will if I don’t have a choice, obviously, but, for a minute, I thought that was going to be my life, you know? I didn’t think I could come back here. And I still think Coach pulled some strings for me and just pretended not to know anything about my business school application.”
“We haven’t talked a lot about that. I think you like to gloss over that part of your summer because you know I wasn’t happy that you didn’t tell me certain things.”
“Want to cook our dinners first?” Layne suggested.
“Are you trying to get out of it?”
“No.” She laughed. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know after we have our terrible dinner in front of us.”
“Hey, my date prepared this meal for me. You shut your mouth.”
Layne smiled at her phone screen. She was on a date with Shay Amos. She’d liked Shay since the beginning, but she’d never thought Shay could like her back. Now, here they were, on the strangest date in all of history, but it was a date, and they’d finally acknowledged it instead of flirting back and forth, not talking about their one-time kiss, and trying to get through this whole thing before they finally tried this. It was happening, and Layne didn’t know how it would go after this. She didn’t have enough ideas to have creative virtual dates with the girl she liked, but as she thought back, she could see that they’d basically been dating all along without even realizing it.
“Okay. Ramen is in the microwave,” Shay said.
“Mine too. Oh, I gave you an extra seasoning packet. I sometimes just eat the ramen without cooking it, so I didn’t need it.”
“You eat dry ramen?” Shay asked.
“It’s crunchy. And times were tough in quarantine, Shay. I think we all realized things about ourselves back when this first started.”
“Tell me about it. My mom started making a lot of sourdough bread, and everything became sourdough bread. We had it with every meal. Sourdough toast for breakfast. Sourdough BLTs for lunch. Sourdough croutons on a salad at dinner. Everything had bread in it. I probably gained ten pounds.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I gained, like, five pounds.”
“You don’t look like you gained any weight at all. You look like you lost some.”
“Muscle, probably,” Shay said before she disappeared from the view. “I was kind of frozen when I first got home.” She returned to the screen, holding her ramen, and Layne blew on her own cup of the stuff in her hands. “I’d just lost my dream,” Shay continued. “I didn’t think I’d ever get to play basketball again. I knew I’d never get drafted now. I tried to hold out hope that they’d give us another year of eligibility, but I didn’t know. And then…”
“Then, what?” Layne asked and opened her pretzel bag.
“Then, you and I had been getting closer, and it felt like, even though we’d known each other for years, it was finally happening for us. I don’t know if that really makes sense. We kissed once, and you thought I was drunk, but it felt like you, really showing up on that court when Martin got hurt, got me to realize that I’d never really given you the time of day. And as a captain, that was pretty shitty of me.”
“So, you only got to know me because you’re the captain?”
Shay smiled and said, “Not only. But maybe a little, yeah. I was supposed to be a leader on the team, and here was this apparent great player who had been riding the bench for four years when she could’ve been helping us win more games, and I’d never even noticed that before. Then, we were talking, and I kept wanting to know more about you. It was like every time we hung up, I just wanted to call you again.”
“I felt the same way.” Layne smiled.
“Yeah?” Shay took a bite. “Shit. Hot.”
“Babe, give it a second. Have a pretzel.”
