5. Kirin #3
“I have one of those,” she said, rolling her eyes behind her cup. “Why is it always the youngest when there’s three or more?”
“There’s three or more of you?” he asked, and she chuckled darkly.
“There’s only one of me, but I’m fairly close to being a carbon copy of my maternal grandmother.” Rose let out a long sigh, her lips twitching toward a fond smile. “My sisters favor my dad’s side—pale skin and dark hair with big navy eyes. They look like walking porcelain dolls.”
“How many?” he asked, and she lifted two fingers from around her cup.
“Eleanor is the middle one, and she acts like it. Everything is an inconvenience. She’s probably going to be magic on Broadway one day, but for now, she’s a pain in the ass.” She grinned, that fond smile lifting her features again.
He nodded. That was a fairly good description of Laurel. Though his sister would never be on Broadway; she’d almost passed out during her speech class final. Kirin had found her in the hallway with her head between her knees. “And your youngest sister?”
“Josephine is not nearly as elegant as her name suggests. I swear she’s half feral and is almost always covered in mud or sporting a cast. She drives my mom crazy, but Paulie said Mom was just like her as a child.”
“Karma,” Kirin whispered, and Rose nodded, her eyes widening with her grin.
“Oh, yeah.” She glanced at her notebook again. “I should get back to work.”
Kirin glanced down at his phone and tapped it twice to check the time. “I still have fifteen minutes. Do you have any questions for me?”
When he glanced back up, her eyes were still on his phone. He peered down at the notifications. A ton of them were from numbers he didn’t have saved, stacked beneath three from Maya. He winced internally, but her eyes flitted away when he looked up again.
She hummed to herself as she took another long drink from her coffee. “What put the distance between you and Laurel?”
His eyebrows shot up. Of all the questions he could have guessed would come out of her mouth, it wasn’t that. Either way, it wasn’t something he was fond of talking about, so he lied. It turned his stomach. “There’s no distance.”
One eyebrow lifted. “Lying—that’s interesting.”
When he didn’t deny it, she frowned. The defenses that had dropped around him were rising fast. “I’ll see you tomorrow—”
“One of her best friends in high school climbed into my bed during my senior year.” He rubbed his forehead with a frown. “I was being nice to her, nothing else, and she took it as an invitation.”
“There’s no accounting for crazy,” Rose murmured.
“Laurel started keeping her distance at school because of that. She didn’t want anyone else to use her to get to me, and when we started college, it was the same thing but on a larger scale.
Like you asked when I first sat down, I get stopped a lot.
And my phone number gets passed around quite a bit.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never shied away from the benefits, so she keeps her distance when she can. ”
“You sleep with her teammates, though.” Rose tilted her head, her gaze dropping to his phone for a second before she looked at her notebooks instead. “Isn’t that an issue?”
“I’ve only slept with two of her teammates.” That had her eyes lifting, surprise evident, but he kept going. “Both of which I knew before Laurel joined the team, so she hasn’t complained too much.”
“And I’m no friend of hers, so no chance I’m using her to get to you,” Rose reasoned, and he grimaced, but nodded. “And yet I’m using you to get in her good graces. Hypocritical, don’t you think?”
He nodded slowly; it was definitely hypocritical, but he knew Laurel well enough to know she had a habit of getting in her own way. And allowing her team to steamroll a skilled addition to the team was an amateur move.
“She won’t like us together, but this is going to help her just as much as this will help you next year when I’m not around.” He offered her a smile, ignoring the dread that weighed down his stomach when he realized he wouldn’t be seeing Rose after their final.
“You’d better be right. I can’t transfer again.” She sighed, rubbing a finger over her eye.
She looked better than she had on Wednesday, but he couldn’t say he was holding his breath about her body going through any miraculous healing since then. “How bad has it been?”
“They’re very good at holding a grudge.” Her fingers dropped to brush over her side.
He watched the movement, and he wondered again what damage she’d endured.
Laurel and Maya were queens of grudge holding, and he’d seen how physical they could get during matches.
He’d have to watch her to make sure she was healing properly.
“I’ve got it handled, but if your plan blows up in my face…
” She tilted her head back and forth as if she were considering.
“Well, I’m not sure it could get much worse, so at least I’ll know what to expect next season. ”
From what he knew about Laurel’s coach, she was a fair but stern woman. That team was so close because she encouraged disputes to be handled in-house. “It’ll get worse before it gets better.”
“I have no doubt. I knew I was signing up for an uphill battle, and Coach has been great about letting us work it out. And I think she’s going to let it play out so long as it doesn’t impact our games, and it hasn’t yet.”