Aspen hadn’t cooked after all, but she’d still wanted to see Kendra, so she’d invited her over to hang out. They’d talked for a bit, but Kendra had been exhausted and decided to go home. Aspen had almost asked her to stay the night, but knowing that she’d want to hold Kendra in bed, she wanted them to have a conversation first when Kendra was less tired, because it would’ve been awkward if they woke up that way without either of them talking about what was actually going on between them prior to that.

  “Stretch you out?” Kendra asked.

  “Yeah, so that I can play. You and DJ both seem pretty concerned about me being fully stretched.”

  “DJ is worried–” Kendra stopped. “Oh.”

  Aspen leaned in and whispered, “I can just lie on my towel, and you can stretch my legs out for me so that I don’t pull anything. You’d hate for me to pull something today, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Kendra said softly.

  “Hi! I’m here, too. Who’s going to stretch me out?” DJ half-yelled.

  “Chase!” Kendra and Aspen both yelled at the same time.

  ◆◆◆

  “What do you think?” DJ asked Kendra.

  Aspen smiled because that was the first time DJ had asked Kendra directly what she thought they should do. Aspen had asked her something at least three times during their practice so far.

  “If we play Steph and Becky,” DJ added.

  “We will. You know they’ll beat the qualifier,” Aspen said.

  “Steph and Becky are great,” Kendra began as they all sat in the sand. “But Becky isn’t as fast as she was last year. She put on a lot of muscle, which is great, but it’s also a problem for her when her main strength was the fact that she was the fastest one on basically any court she was on. And Steph has been struggling with her passing. I was at the tournament last weekend and the one this weekend. It was weird without you two there, honestly. Like, there was this void that everyone could feel. Anyway, Steph and Becky went out early both weekends. Steph had at least nine or maybe more passing errors, and that screwed up Becky’s set, so they had a higher hitting error percentage, too. I’d say… Pass Steph, make her prove that she can handle it, and prepare to block her because she’s the tallest woman on the tour at 6’4” and can really jump.”

  Aspen smiled with pride at the woman she wanted to kiss.

  “Her kills could actually kill someone,” DJ offered.

  “She’s got one hell of a right arm, but if you can get her scared up at the net with a strong block or two, she starts to lack confidence and second-guesses her spots.”

  “That’s a good tip,” DJ said. “Thanks. Becky’s really slower?”

  “Yes. She’s focused on her upper body strength, which I get because she was weaker last year, but they don’t have a coach or a regular trainer, so I think she’s put a little too much emphasis on that and not enough on balance, so she’s lost a step or two. If you run her back and forth, she won’t be able to get to the ball how she could last year. You two haven’t played them this season, so you probably haven’t noticed, but it’s my job to notice.”

  “You’re really good at your job, you know?” Aspen complimented.

  Kendra looked up at her in surprise and said, “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, this is really helpful,” DJ added. “Want to run a few plays, Aspen? Work on our spots?”

  “Sure,” she agreed. “Do you want to watch and give us some tips?” she asked Kendra.

  “I thought I’d shag balls or something,” Kendra said.

  “You can do both. I believe in you.” Aspen winked at her and stood up.

  “Hey, how is–”

  “My ankle is fine,” Aspen finished where she knew Kendra was going with her question. “I promise. I’ll still ice it when I get home, though, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Hey, are you two going to join me anytime soon, or am I supposed to pass to myself?” DJ asked.

  It was only then that Aspen noticed that DJ was already standing up on the court. She got up and held out both of her hands to Kendra, who took them and used them to help herself up. Aspen and DJ were both in their suits, but Kendra had worn a pair of jean shorts and a blue T-shirt, and when she stood, Aspen pulled up on the scoop neck because it had lowered a little, revealing the tip of the scar.

  “Thank you,” Kendra said, realizing what Aspen had done.

  “No problem. You know I’d never push you on this, but…” Aspen pressed her hand over the shirt between Kendra’s breasts. “You’re beautiful. All of you.”

  Kendra seemed taken aback but didn’t say anything, so Aspen dropped her hand and turned toward DJ, who was watching them.

  “Okay. Let’s get back to work,” she said and turned to see Kendra still standing there, looking a little dazed.

  Then, Kendra shook her head and walked to the other side of the net. Aspen picked up a ball and tossed it toward her.

  “Can you fake-serve, DJ?”

  “Sure,” Kendra agreed.

  They ran several drills, focusing on their speed and accuracy, and then switched to serving. Becky played on the left side, so they practiced hitting their spots there before Kendra suggested they go in the middle a few times in order to create confusion between the two partners who had been struggling this season. Having worked on that as well and hitting several of their spots properly, Aspen was tired and ready to go home. She’d get back to her usual workout and practice routine tomorrow. Today, she needed to eat and rest.

  “Do you two want to grab lunch?” DJ asked when they were packing up their things. “I was thinking about going to the smoothie place down the street and getting a bowl or something.”

  Aspen glanced at Kendra, who seemed to be waiting for her to respond on their behalf.

  “I’m kind of spent, DJ. I think I’d rather just get home and chill.”

  “Okay. You’re going to ice–”

  “Yes, Mom,” Aspen interjected.

  “I’ll make sure she does,” Kendra offered.

  “Good.” DJ nodded. “I’ll run to the smoothie place then and walk back for my cooldown. I’ll see you tomorrow. Oh, Kendra, will you be here?”

  “No, I’ve got work tomorrow. I’m covering the MLS game here. After that, I’m off for a full week, which is nice. I took it off a while ago to make sure I had time to work on the house.”

  Aspen winked at her again because she knew it would make Kendra smile, which it did.

  “Then, it’s the next tournament for you two,” Kendra added. “And I’ll be covering that.”

  “Cool. Well, I guess I’ll see you this weekend. Aspen, tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be here,” Aspen replied.

  DJ put her headphones in, and with her phone in hand and her bag already in her car, she took off to get her lunch.

  “So, you’ll be home for a whole week, huh?” Aspen asked Kendra as she walked around to the driver’s side of her car.

  “I’ve got some stuff to do in the backyard, and I’m going furniture-shopping, but other than that, I have no idea what I’m going to do. I thought about painting, but I don’t know. We’ll see. I still have to pick out the color, and that’ll probably take me the whole week to do.”

  They got in the car, and Aspen turned it on, letting the much-needed air-conditioning hit her face.

  “I can help with that, if you want. What color are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the problem.” Kendra chuckled as she buckled her seat belt.

  “Which room?”

  “Living room and dining room. It’s one space.”

  “You could still paint it different colors. There’s that little break up in the wall that could divide the colors.”

  “You’re an interior decorator now?” Kendra teased.

  “No, but I could still help. Out of the main colors, give me what you don’t want.”

  “You mean, go through ROYGBIV with you?”

  “Look at you; someone paid attention in school.” Aspen laughed and pulled the car out of the lot.

  “I don’t want a red living or dining room,” Kendra shared.

  “Okay.”

  “No orange or yellow, either. I guess I could do green, or blue again, and I have no idea what the difference is between indigo and violet.”

  “What about two different shades of one color? You could have a darker green in one room and a lighter in the other.”

  “I could go with dark-green on one wall and a neutral shade on the other,” Kendra suggested. “Maybe, like, an eggshell white or something. That might be nice.”

  “Yeah, it could be.” Aspen looked over at her and smiled. “So, want to eat lunch together and look at some paint swatches?”

  “I thought you wanted to go home and chill.”

  “I thought you were going to make sure I put ice on my ankle,” she fired back.

  Kendra laughed and said, “Stop by the taco place on the way home, then. I’m getting tacos. If you want healthy, you can get the pulled chicken ones.”

  “Yea, Ma’am,” Aspen replied with a little laugh. “And paint swatches?”

  “We can eat at my place. I’ll wrap your ankle in ice, and we can look.”

  “Deal,” Aspen told her.

  “But you’re helping me paint next week if I get something picked out.”

  “Deal again,” she said.

  Aspen knew they needed to talk, but this part – this trying to figure out if they were more or if they ever would be – was filled with so much excitement and anticipation, that she almost didn’t want to ruin it by speaking her feelings out loud. Only almost, though, because not talking about it meant she couldn’t yet kiss Kendra or do something more, and she really wanted to do the something more.

  CHAPTER 24

  “How’s the ankle?” Kendra asked.

  “Fine, like I told you yesterday, too,” Aspen replied, sounding slightly irritated.

  “You know people only ask because they care about you,” Kendra said. “And DJ, obviously.”

  Aspen laughed a little and said, “I know. And I’m glad people care about me. I just had my mom and dad over for dinner last night, and I was planning on cooking for them, but my mom literally brought dinner with her. My dad had a six-pack of beer and a bottle of wine, and my mom made a salad and her veggie lasagna, and she also brought dessert, which was a store-bought cherry pie, which she told me she felt bad that she had to buy because she only had time to make the lasagna.” Aspen shook her head. “She told me she didn’t want me up cooking. I reminded her that I was fine. Plus, DJ keeps asking, and I understand why – it’s her career, too. Then, I’ve got trainers and people asking me on social media. I also had a meeting yesterday with one of my sponsors, and their first question wasn’t about how I was doing in general. There was a handshake, and then they flat-out asked how my ankle was; because if I don’t make the Olympic Team, they can’t air all the commercials they want me to shoot for them. I mean, I get it; I do. It’s just also exhausting to have to answer the same question over and over again.”

  “Can I be honest with you?” Kendra asked as she set a bottle of sparkling water, that she’d bought specifically because she knew Aspen liked the brand, down on the kitchen counter.

  “Yes, please do.” Aspen slid the bottle over toward herself but didn’t pick it up.

  “I want you back on the court as much as the next person because I love watching you play – you work hard, and you also have a natural gift that most athletes would kill for – but it’s more than that for me. I know playing makes you happy. It’s part of you, like the beach is. I know how it feels to grow up in the sand and only want to do that one thing for as long as you can, and I know that’s in you, too. So, I want you to be okay because I know how happy volleyball makes you, not because I’m your partner on the beach and need you to help me win or because I’m trying to make money off of you. I see you smile when you’re out there, even at practice or when you’re in your backyard and you think no one’s around and you’re trying to hit spots on some board. You love this more than anything else, and I want you to have your dreams come true, Aspen. When I ask how your ankle is, it’s because of that.”

  Aspen nodded and gave Kendra a small smile.

  “That means a lot to me,” she said after a moment. “Did you buy this just for me? I don’t remember you having this the last time I was here.” Aspen held up the bottle.

  “I might have gone shopping knowing that you’d be helping me paint this week, and I wanted you to have something to drink that you liked.”

  “You didn’t have to do that. I’m not too good for tap water.”

  “Consider it part of your payment for the help, then,” she suggested.

  “Part of?” Aspen asked, sounding kind of hopeful.

  Kendra almost told her that she could have payment in other ways, but in that moment, looking at Aspen, making a joke like that didn’t feel quite right. If and when they finally acknowledged this, it wouldn’t be a joke to her, and likely, not to Aspen.

  “I’m cooking you dinner tonight, too. I’ve got steaks, and I bought a few different side options because I didn’t know what you’d want. I can make a salad, but I also have asparagus that I can grill, potatoes that I can bake, and I was going to make this bourbon sauce for the steak that my dad made for me a few times. It’s really good. Interested?”

  “Very,” Aspen replied. “Now, what colors did you end up choosing after we narrowed it down?”

  “You really shouldn’t have let me go to the hardware store alone…” Kendra told her with a little laugh and then moved into the living room, where she pointed.

  Aspen followed and said, “What the…”

  “I couldn’t decide, so I just bought all of them.”

  “There are, like, fifteen gallons of paint here, Kendra.”

  “Yeah, but I have more rooms to paint in this house, so they’ll all get used, at least. I got two gallons of a dark-green because I wanted to paint the long wall in that, and it might take two coats. I also got that off-white, eggshell color for the other wall, but I couldn’t decide at first, so I asked them to just give me everything I liked.”

  “Holy shit.” Aspen laughed. “Well, I guess we have a lot of work to do.”

  “I probably wouldn’t have spent so much money on paint had you been there with me. You can just decide like that.” Kendra snapped her fingers to demonstrate her point. “And I just start thinking about the fact that once I paint it, it’s on the wall, and I have to live with it.”

  “Or, you just repaint it,” Aspen suggested. “If you don’t end up liking it, you just pick a new color and paint over it, Kendra. It doesn’t have to be that big of a deal. Where is that blue color going?”

  “It’s some version of indigo, actually. Intense Indigo is the name. I mainly got it as a joke. It’s pretty dark. I don’t even know where I’d put it.”

  “It would look really good in my room, actually.”

  “Huh?” Kendra looked over at her.

  “I’ve wanted to paint a dark accent wall behind my bed for a while. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I thought I would when the season was over last year, but then I didn’t.”

  “Do you want it? You can have it,” Kendra offered.

  “Why don’t we do something first?”

  “What?”

  Aspen turned and took her by the shoulders, turning Kendra to face her.

  “Close your eyes.”

  “What?” Kendra chuckled.

  “Close your eyes. Trust me.”

  Kendra did trust her, but she didn’t like not knowing what was about to happen next. She swallowed as she stared into Aspen’s hazel eyes. Then, she closed her own and took a deep breath, trying to prepare for anything.

  “Dark-green in the dining room, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Eggshell for the living room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kitchen?”

  “I’d have to change the backsplash, but I really like that pale-purple for the kitchen.”

  “Your bedroom?”

  “The soft green, with maybe the same dark-green from out here as an accent or for the molding, at least.”

  “Your bathroom.”

  “I–” Kendra opened her eyes. “I got a different blue for that.” She pointed down at the can she hadn’t realized that she’d picked for that bathroom.

  “Do I need to go on, or did you just decide where all the paint goes?”

  Kendra laughed a little, and her head, on instinct, went to Aspen’s chest. Aspen’s arms wrapped around her, and Kendra stood there, not wanting to move, as Aspen held her.

  “It’s really not that hard. The decision is usually buried in there somewhere. You just have to pull it out. Like, if you weren’t sure what you wanted to have for dinner tonight, and you told me to pick between those steaks you still got to cook for us or ordering in Italian or something, the moment I said steaks, you’d either be happy about that, or you’d be sad or upset that I didn’t pick Italian. Then, you’d know what you wanted all along.”

  Kendra looked up at her. They were so close to each other. Thinking back, this might be the closest she’d ever been to Aspen. Maybe that time when she brushed hair out of Aspen’s face and called her ‘babe’ while Aspen slept, but no, her lips weren’t as close to Aspen’s as they were now. She could lean in, kiss her sweetly, and let Aspen decide if she wanted to continue it. Aspen looked down at the paint cans, though, which pulled Kendra out of the moment.

  “Do you want to start in the dining room or the living room?” Aspen asked.

  “Wherever,” she said.

  “No, you decide.” Aspen tickled her sides.

  Kendra laughed and pulled away.

  “Fine. Dining room.”

  “Good. Is the tarp and stuff still in the garage?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  When Aspen left, Kendra tried not to think about what had just happened because she’d been so close to making a quick decision, which she rarely did. She also thought Aspen was on the same page, but the woman had tickled Kendra instead, which, under different circumstances, would’ve been amazing, but when Kendra was about to finally show Aspen how she felt, it wasn’t great.