M: Where are you?
D: Third floor. Come find me.
I push off the wall and head toward the elevator, and I'm smiling before I get there.
Chapter 25
Molly
A Month Later
"Come on Magnolia Grace. We're gonna lose if you gutter this ball!" I yell at my best friend, annoyed that she keeps shaking her ass for my brother instead of bowl for us ladies that are on her team.
Surprisingly, we've taken to bowling one night a week with Lucy and Bryan. They're still together, and it annoys the shit out of Dakota, but I think it's cute as hell.
"I'm trying," Magnolia says, but she's laughing, and she throws a look over her shoulder at Levi that tells me exactly where her focus is and it is not on the lane in front of her.
"Magnolia Grace!" I say her full name, the way her mother used to when she was in trouble, and she snaps back around and actually lines up her shot this time. "Thank you."
"You're so bossy," she mutters.
"I'm competitive," I correct her. "There's a difference."
She rolls the ball and it goes straight and clean down the middle, and takes out nine pins, and I throw my arms up because that is what I needed from her fifteen minutes ago before we fell behind. "See? That's all I wanted."
"I got it," she says, spinning around with a bright smile. "One more."
"One more," I confirm, and I look over at the other lane where my brother and Dakota are standing together watching us, and I catch Dakota's eye and he shakes his head like he's not even a little bit sorry about the state of their scorecard, and I point at him with two fingers and then point at the screen where our scores are sitting, because I want him to look at the numbers and understand what is happening here.
He grins. He doesn't look at the screen.
Lucy is at my elbow. "They're not paying any attention to bowling," she says, with the energy of someone who has assessed the situation and found it amusing.
"I know," I say.
"Bryan keeps looking at me instead of lining up his shot."
"I know that too." I glance down the lane at Bryan, who is indeed watching Lucy in a way that is going to make this young man miss his spare by a significant margin. "How do you feel about it?"
Lucy tilts her head, considering. "Honestly? I don't hate it."
I laugh, and Magnolia comes back from retrieving her ball before taking her second shot and picking up the spare. I do a small celebration that is probably excessive for a Tuesday night at the Laurel Springs Pine Social, but this is what a month of weekly bowling nights does to a person. You develop traditions.
The guys are down by fourteen when the final frames roll around, and there is a direct causal relationship between that deficit and the fact that Dakota spent the better part of the last two hours watching me line up shots in a pair of jeans that I wore intentionally and without a single ounce of shame. He knew what I was doing. I know what I’ve been doing. Magnolia definitely knows, because she suggested the jeans, and my brother made an unfortunate comment about them early in the evening that Dakota shut down with two words and a look that Levi accepted with surprising goodwill given the events of the last month.
Things between Dakota and Levi have found their footing again. I watched it happen gradually, the way these things do when two people who have been friends long enough to know each other's faults decide that the friendship matters more than being pissed at each other. They still give each other a hard time about it, which is how I know they're fine, because Levi only lets himself be teased about things he's actually made peace with.
Bryan misses the spare. As predicted.
Lucy pats his arm, which makes him look like he just won something more important than a bowling game, and I have to look away because watching a teenage boy be that transparent about his feelings is equal parts charming and a little embarrassing.
The final scores go up and us girls have won by seventeen pins, which is the largest margin yet. I turn to Magnolia with the specific look we have developed for winning and she returns it with the same energy, and the two of us do a brief celebration that involves more movement than the setting probably calls for, but neither one of us care.
"You cheated," Dakota says, coming up behind me.
"We bowled better because we were actually paying attention to the lane," I tell him sweetly. "That's not cheating, that's just being better at the game."
"You wore those jeans on purpose."