Page 2 of On His Team

Used to being important.

It lasted about two weeks back in September and was based almost entirely on his face. Then I watched him spend twenty minutes at a party talking to Benson about defensive-zone exits and decided there probably wasn’t enough there to sustain me.

I’ve been fine ever since.

Mara shoves the bottle at me again. “Drink.”

I take it this time.

Across the room, from the couch, my brother says, “Gianna.”

I don’t even have to look at him. I know exactly what his face is doing. I drink anyway.

The tequila burns all the way down, and when I finally turn toward the couch, Benson is staring at me over Lucy’s head like I have personally ruined his New Year.

I smile.

He shakes his head.

I take another drink.

“Stop antagonizing him,” Lucy says, and she’s smiling into his chest when she says it, so I don’t take it seriously.

“I’m not antagonizing him.”

“You’re maintaining eye contact while drinking tequila.”

“It’s sibling communication.” I smile.

“That’s psychological warfare,” Rowan says from the floor.

I look down at him. He doesn’t look up. His face doesn’t do anything at all.

I point the bottle at the top of his head. “See? He gets me.”

Rowan says, “I didn’t say I supported it.”

“Too late, Laurens. You’re a supporter.”

Mara takes the bottle back before I can get a third pull off it and swings around toward the rest of the room with her arms out.

“Anybody else?”

Nobody moves.

Blue doesn’t even lift his head. Percy might have blinked. Melly looks like she’s considering it purely out of pity and then decides against it.

Mara turns back to me, deeply offended.

It is ten-thirty on New Year’s Eve, and Hawthorne House is embarrassingly peaceful.

That should not be possible.

The first time Benson ever let me come here, there was a hole in the drywall beside the coat hooks, somebody had left a keg in the kitchen for so long nobody knew whose it was, and I’m almost positive a guy I had never met was asleep in the downstairs bathtub.

Now the hole is patched, the kitchen smells like the frozen pizzas we made for dinner, and there are throw pillows.

Throw pillows.