Elise zipped her bag shut with her good hand. "I'm not avoiding."
"Then come." Frankie put her arm around Elise's good shoulder. Her grip was firm and warm and brooked no argument. "Camille and I have discussed it and we've decided you're coming. You've been hiding in your apartment for weeks and you need to get out and drink something that isn't sad coffee."
"My coffee isn't sad."
"Your coffee is the saddest coffee on the eastern seaboard."
Camille materialised on her other side, blonde hair still damp from the shower, smelling of expensive conditioner. "Please, Elise. We miss you. And Lavender has those little bruschetta things you like."
Elise looked between them. Frankie's face was firm. Camille's was earnest. Behind them, Lou was watching with her arms crossed and her expression neutral, which meant she'd sanctioned this intervention.
"Fine."
"That's the spirit." Frankie clapped her shoulder. "Nine o'clock. Wear something nice."
Elise went home. She showered. She stood in front of her wardrobe and stared at her clothes and told herself she didn't care what she looked like, and then she spent twenty minutes choosing an outfit anyway, which was a level of self-deception she'd normally find embarrassing. She drove back to the waterfront at nine with the windows down and the radio off and smelling of the perfume she saved for occasions.
Lavender's at nine o'clock on a Saturday night during lesbian night was a different animal from Lavender's on a Tuesday morning with a flat white and a lemon poppyseed cake. The pale purple walls were washed in low, warm light. The whitewashed furniture had been pushed back to create a small dance floor near the counter, and music pulsed through the space, a bass-heavy track that vibrated in the floorboards. Lavender had put candles on every table and the back section was already occupied by a cluster of Valkyries players, drinks in hand, voices raised over the music.
She'd expected Sienna wouldn't be here. Sienna didn't drink. Sienna didn't socialise with the players outside of work. Sienna was probably at home in her tidy apartment with her oat milk and her half a bell pepper and her medical journals, being professional and disciplined and not thinking about Elise.
Good for her.
Elise was in dark jeans and a black top that showed her collarbone, her hair down, her sling off for the evening because she was tired of looking injured. Her shoulder protested at the freedom but she ignored it.
The atmosphere hit her as she walked in: warm, loud, alive. People were laughing. People were dancing. Women were leaning close at small tables with drinks and eye contact and the easy, comfortable energy of a space where you didn't have to explain yourself.
Elise ordered a gin and tonic at the bar and took it to the back section where the team had claimed a stretch of sofas and low tables. Frankie was already two drinks in and telling a story that involved a hotel minibar and a broken fire alarm. Camille was curled against Lou on a sofa, her legs draped over Lou's lap, and Lou's hand rested on her knee and she'd stopped caring who saw. Dani was deep in conversation with Rowan, their heads close together. Lex was at the bar with a beer, talking to a woman Elise didn't recognise.
And there, in the far corner, Mara. Mara Ellison, head coach, who never socialised with the players, who maintained professional distance as a philosophy, was sitting at a high table with a glass of wine and cheeks that were slightly flushed and a looseness to her posture that said she'd been here for a while. She was laughing at whatever Helen had said, and the laugh was unguarded, and Elise thought, with a pang, that this was a version of Mara she'd never seen before.
The team swirled around her. She sat on the edge of a sofa with her gin and tonic and participated. She laughed when Frankie finished her story. She answered Camille's question about her rehab. She clinked glasses with the young rookie, Holly, who looked nervous and excited about being at a lesbian bar for what might have been the first time. All of it was genuine, warm, the real thing. And her chest ached straight through it.
The music shifted to a slower song, and two women moved onto the small dance floor, their bodies close, hands finding waists and shoulders with the easy confidence of people who'd done this before. Elise watched them and the loneliness sharpened.
She'd been in queer spaces before. She'd dated women since college, never secretly but never loudly, a quiet confidence that came from growing up in a family that didn't talk about feelingsbut also didn't judge. She was comfortable in her own skin. She knew who she was.
What she didn't know was what any of it meant now. You couldn't fake the way Sienna's breath had quickened when Elise's fingers touched her collarbone on the sofa. She'd felt it. Elise was certain.
And Sienna had pulled away anyway.
She drained the rest of her gin and considered ordering a third. Frankie was now arm-wrestling Dani on one of the low tables and losing, which was funny because Frankie was strong and competitive and Dani was doing it one-handed while eating almonds with the other. Lou was watching, visibly assessing whether the table could survive. Camille was taking a video.
They were happy. All of them. Playing well, winning, celebrating together. This was what being on a team was supposed to feel like, and Elise was sitting on the edge of it with a melting ice cube in an empty glass and an ache behind her ribs that had nothing to do with her shoulder.
She was about to stand up and leave when the door opened.
Sienna walked in.
She was in civilian clothes. A dark wrap dress, simple and nothing like the armour of the medical suite, her hair down from its usual ponytail and falling around her face in soft, dark waves. No glasses. The absence of them changed her face entirely, made her eyes larger, more open, more vulnerable. She was wearing a touch of lipstick and small gold earrings and she looked like someone Elise had never seen before and also like the exact person she'd been looking at for four weeks.
She was beautiful. Devastatingly, completely, impossibly beautiful. Not as she was beautiful at work, where her attractiveness was muted by the medical suite and the glasses and the professional armour. Not like this. This was Sienna unguarded, Sienna on a Saturday night, Sienna in a spacewhere women danced with women and nobody had to explain anything.
And she was here. At lesbian night. At Lavender's.
Elise's breath left her in a rush.
Elise's hand tightened around her empty glass. The noise of the bar faded to a hum. Everything narrowed to the door and the woman standing in it and the way Sienna's eyes swept the room and found Elise before they found anyone else.