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She tugs on my arm until I give in and let her drag my hand on top of the table. She clasps it with hers and lifts my limp arm up to lead us in a two-person version of doing the wave.

It was the first step of our secret handshake in the seventh grade. The whole thing was an elaborate, full-body routine that required at least two metres of empty space around us.

I’ve always felt so safe with her—safe enough to do dumb stuff like this no matter how old we get. I think that’s what led us to turn towards each other in high school, back when we were figuring out who we were and who we liked. We found a safe place in each other to face this scary, amazing thing we were both discovering about ourselves.

I see now that we never really had chemistry as anything more than friends. Kala and I figured that out pretty quickly after we tried to date, but I can also see how things might look to anyone watching us laughing and holding hands at this table. That’s always been the worst part about how things turned out with Lisa: I could see the problem so clearly, but I still couldn’t make it right.

Kala lets go of my hand after a moment and settles back in her chair. “So, are you going to tell me what happened?”

I take a deep breath in and hold it like I’m bracing for a punch to the face.

“I kissed someone.” I wince. “On the team.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while. Her immaculate black eyebrows rise a fraction of an inch, and she starts tracing the edge of the table with one of her fingers.

“Okay,” she finally says. “Why?”

“Huh?”

Whatever I was expecting her to say, it wasn’t that.

She taps on the table a few times and then points at me. “You once told me that the first time you kissed Lisa, it wasn’t even really because of her. It was because you had just failed an assignment for the first time in your life. You didn’t know if you could handle being on the team, being away from home, and living up to the expectation that you’d be this, like, lacrosse goddess bringing all this new funding in and revitalizing the team. Half the team was pissed you were even there at all. Then Lisa showed up like this perfect escape.”

I have to chuckle at that. Associating the word ‘perfect’ with any part of the Lisa situation is humor at its darkest.

“You’re one of the most determined people I know,” Kala continues. “Most people would call it stubborn as hell. It takes a lot to knock you off course, and you’ve basically made your whole ‘no dating teammates’ rule into a religion. So what made you set that aside? Was it this girl? Was it something in your life right now?”

“I—I mean, we’re not, like, dating,” I stammer as my pulse kicks up. “We kissed. Once. Last night. I was kind of drunk. I haven’t, you know, set anything aside.”

She lifts her eyebrows again. “Do you want to?”

“That’s not even part of the equation. Teammates don’t date teammates. It’s a rule, and everything falls apart when it doesn’t get followed. I shouldn’t have kissed her, and now I don’t know how to fix it.”

She reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ear and stares out at the ocean for a moment.

“You know, Becca, it’s not an official rule of lacrosse, or even the athletics department. It’s just a team culture thing that you—”

“Kala.”

I feel a twinge in my chest. Of all people, I thought she’d understand why this is so important to me. She knows what the team means to me. She’s the one who sat with me in my dorm room while I spent half my freshman year freaking the fuck out on a daily basis.

She turns back to me. “I’m sorry. I get it. I do. As your best friend, I just feel the urge to sometimes remind you that you are, in fact, a human being. You’re not just the lacrosse captain, which brings me back to my question. Why do you think the kiss happened?”

I’m about to say ‘I don’t know,’ but I clamp my mouth shut and force myself to think about it, really think about it. Kala might be onto something here. If I can figure out why it happened, I can stop myself from letting it happen again.

Of course, asking myself why I kissed Hope just makes me think about kissing Hope. Her blue eyes wide, her face leaning closer and closer to mine. The warmth of her breath on my lips before she met them with her own. The way she sighed and moaned against me. The curve of her hip under my hand.

I wanted to touch so much more of her, but it wasn’t just about the touching. I wanted to be close to her, in any way I could. Sitting with her in her room felt like stepping into another world. Her world. I wanted to learn about everything: the pictures on the walls, the clothes in her closet, the lines inked onto her skin. I wanted to know her. I wanted to explore her step by step like a new city. I wanted to memorize every street and neighbourhood, learn how they looked in the morning and how they sounded at night.

I didn’t just want to kiss her. I wanted to be with her.

“Oh, I see how it is.” Kala’s face has lit up as she sits there watching me pick through my memories. “You liiiike her.”

I don’t know if I shake my head for her benefit or mine. There has to be more to this. There has to be another reason why I let things go so far.

“She’s really cool,” I say. “I’ve always thought she was really cool, and she went through a horrible breakup last year. We kind of hung out for a bit after, and I just...I don’t know. It felt like we could be friends. Maybe all I really want is to hang out with her more, and the stress of fourth year and captaining again and knowing I have a whole other year left just got to me and messed all my feelings up. Oh, and the Corona buckets. We can’t forget there were Corona buckets involved.”

She grins. “The Mario’s special.”