Chapter 15 #2
Her muscles loosened up easily, and as was normal during a match at a Grand Slam, time sped up. Before she knew it, the chair umpire called them to the center of the court. Penny grabbed a quick drink at her chair and then headed to the meeting at the net.
Indy was already there, bouncing on the balls of her feet, her extra energy radiating off her in waves.
“Ladies,” the umpire greeted them. “Miss Gaffney, please call it in the air.” He flipped the large silver coin into the air.
“Heads,” Indy called out.
Tails never fails, Penny thought, and grinned when the coin landed on tails.
“Miss Harrison?” the umpire asked, picking up the coin.
Penny flicked her eyes to Indy. “You can serve,” she said, the first words she’d uttered to her friend since the other day.
Since she’d found out she’d be playing Indy, it had felt a little like the walls of Alex’s townhouse were closing in on them.
Running into each other in the hallways, in the kitchen, going to and from practice sessions had felt stifling.
And poor Jack was caught in the middle, even though it was also his own damn fault.
He should have told her right away; they both should have.
Indy tilted her head, confusion slipping over her features as she studied Penny. But then she smiled. “Let’s go.”
“Let’s,” Penny agreed, and offered her hand.
They shook and then they both shook the umpire’s hand before retreating to their respective baselines.
As Penny did, examining her racket closely, she felt something loosen in her chest, something she hadn’t realized was knotted tightly until that moment.
She was on a tennis court, a place where—no matter what continent she was on or who her opponent was—she knew who she was and what she was capable of. Everything else could wait; she had a job to do.
She kept her back to the court, pulling her necklace out from beneath her shirt, letting the dull bronze penny sit in the center of her palm.
Squeezing it in a fist, she kissed the fingers wrapped tightly around it, then tucked it back inside.
She bounced up into a short jump and landed softly, balanced, ready, and most importantly, without pain.
She turned as Indy was tossing a ball back to the ball boy. Then the chair umpire looked up from his score sheet and said, “Play.”
Keeping her toes at the baseline, Penny shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, rocking gently from side to side before bending over slightly at the waist. Most of Indy’s opponents would give the hard-serving player a few feet of space beyond the baseline.
Those extra feet would give Indy’s serve room to travel a little longer, slow down just a few fractions more before they had to return it.
Penny wasn’t all that concerned with reaction time.
She knew she could catch up to whatever Indy threw at her.
She was more worried about getting the ball back to Indy before she had time to react.
Indy wasn’t used to people being able to return her serve, and her ground game was a major weakness because of it.
The first serve was a screaming rocket down the center of the court, skimming neatly off where the lines met in a T, but Penny bounced out of her crouch in perfect position and, with a short, fluid forehand, an equally fierce groundstroke clipped the far baseline and sailed past a stunned Indy for a clean winner.
The crowd was silent for just a split second and then let out an almost collective sigh of appreciation and then applause.
Penny could feel Indy’s eyes on her from the other side of the court, but she didn’t look up.
This wasn’t the time to think about her friend or how they weren’t friends anymore or anything else other than the perfect return she’d just hit and the statement it had made.
For the best of three sets, Indy was her opponent and nothing else.
“Love–fifteen,” the chair umpire said.
Three more serves yielded similar results, though Indy managed to get her racket on the last, starting a short rally that ended when Penny raced up to catch a poorly placed backhand in the air and slam it back for a winner.
“Game, Miss Harrison,” the chair umpire said.
She had her break. Now all she had to do was keep it.
The ball boy sent her one ball and then another.
Both were still looking good, so she pocketed one beneath her skirt.
The other she bounced beneath her racket, getting a feel for it and keeping her feet moving underneath her, before stepping up to the baseline.
Indy lined up across the court, bent at the waist, twisting her racket between her hands.
Penny took the ball in hand, rolling it over her palm before bouncing it once, twice, three and four times.
Then bringing her hands together, coiling down toward the ground, she let her body gather power through her legs before exploding up and out, through the ball.
A hard, flat serve directly into Indy’s body, handcuffing her return, the ball hitting the racket frame and bouncing away weakly on the wrong side of the net.
Just as the ball bounced for a second time, she felt a small twinge in her ankle.
“Crap,” she muttered under her breath, but kept her face blank.
“Fifteen–love,” the chair umpire called, and Penny grabbed the ball out from beneath her skirt as she waited for Indy to collect herself. She did so quickly enough, Dom’s between-point routine training taking over, a few breaths, forget about the last point, and move on to the one ahead.
Penny didn’t want to forget the last point, though, so ignoring the fleeting pain and what it might mean, she piggybacked the previous serve with another that was almost identical, right into the body, as hard as she could hit it.
Indy tried to pull her hands in quickly enough to return it, but again, it was a mishit, barely making it to the net before bouncing away harmlessly.
The pain wasn’t there this time, but still, Penny kept all emotion off her face.
Indy wasn’t a master of the mental game yet, but they knew each other pretty well, well enough for the other girl to read her face during the match.
She needed to keep her reactions consistent.
“Thirty–love,” the chair umpire said, and the crowd started to murmur uncomfortably. Six straight points for one player, especially to start a match, always created a certain uneasiness with fans. Would the match be a boring blowout, one player totally dominating the other?
“Come on, Pen,” a fan’s voice shouted out through the murmuring of the crowd, and the noise increased in apparent agreement. Maybe they’d be cheering for her after all.
It was time to switch it up a little bit, keep Indy on her toes.
The next serve, off-speed with some major spin on it, arched high through the air and kicked out wide, making Indy lunge desperately, but the ball was beyond her before she could get there.
Again, no pain, and she let herself, at least on the inside, breathe a sigh of relief.
“Forty–love.”
Penny finally looked across the net. Indy’s face was crinkled, not in fear but in confusion, like her body wasn’t doing what she needed it to do and she couldn’t figure out why.
Maybe Indy was feeling the pressure, those nerves that haunted her back at OBX and early in Paris creeping up again.
Whatever it was, Penny was more than willing to take advantage of it.
The last serve she put straight down the center of the court, going for the white T, the same way Indy had with her service game.
A little bit of “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” played through her head as the ball skidded off the white paint, past Indy’s racket.
“Game, Miss Harrison. Miss Harrison leads, two games to love.”
“Yeah,” she let herself say, pumping her fist, letting her fingernails dig into the palms of her hand.
The pain was back, this time a quick pulsing ache that centered in her ankle and fanned out through her foot and her calf.
She moved to the other side of the court, tossing a leftover ball back to the ball boy as the crowd applauded politely.
But there was a buzz in the air now, not electric, but radiating disinterest, conversations about other matches coming up that day or plans for lunch before the next match starting up between the fans.
As she settled in to receive Indy’s next serve, Penny pushed the pain down and refocused. The crowd might be disinterested and her ankle might be hurting, but there was no way she was going to let that make any difference in this match.