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Kendra Bowie: I have to get ready for work now. Can you maybe text later? Or call, if you can? I’d love to hear your voice today. I miss you, too, by the way.

When she didn’t get a response right away, Kendra thought Aspen might have gotten to the treatment tent and would reply later, but before she could toss her phone on the bed, she had a ding. It wasn’t just a text, either. It was a video message.

“Hey, babe. I will call you later tonight. DJ is in her own room, so we can talk as much as you want. And you have nothing to worry about, okay? I just wanted to make that part clear. I’ll call you later, beautiful. If you want to FaceTime then, we can. I’d love to see you.” Aspen smiled at her before the camera turned.

“Hey, Kendra!” DJ waved at her. “She misses you and is a big sap because of it.”

“Shut up,” Aspen said, laughed, and the video stopped.

Kendra laughed and decided to send a video message back.

“I like that you’re freely calling me ‘babe’ now, but I thought we were supposed to wait until after we talked and one of us asked the other out finally for that. Don’t stop, though. Just to be clear: I don’t want you to stop. Tell DJ I said hi. And we can FaceTime later. Congrats on the win. I’m really proud of you, Aspen. You’re amazing.”

She hit send, looked down, and realized that her towel had shifted. Her breasts hadn’t been on camera or anything, but her scar had been more exposed, so she went to delete the message because she wasn’t ready for Aspen to see that much of it. Even when she’d pulled down her shirt on the beach that day, it had only been for a second, and it had taken about that long for Aspen to look down. Kendra knew that Aspen hadn’t really seen much, but in a video that lasted several seconds, she would be seeing a lot more of it. Aspen was already typing, though, and Kendra’s heart was pounding in her chest, waiting on the message.

Aspen Ashley: I can’t wait to see you. So, I’ll call you later so that I can at least see your face on camera. Have a good day, BABE.

The word ‘babe’ was in all capital letters, and Kendra smiled, letting out a sigh of relief. Then, she stood and let the towel drop to the floor before she walked to the floor-length mirror that was opposite the bathroom and took in her body, which she rarely did because she couldn’t stand looking at it. She forced herself to examine the scar that really had faded a lot since her surgery about ten years ago. She supposed she’d failed to notice that due to her trying to avoid looking directly at it. Kendra ran her fingertip over it and felt the small bumps that were still there, wondering how Aspen would feel doing the same thing. Would she be disgusted? Worried about hurting Kendra? Would she just be Aspen?

“She thinks you’re beautiful,” she reminded herself. “She said she thought all of you was beautiful.”

CHAPTER 29

They’d made it as far as the final, but then lost to a great team from Norway in a match that no one could’ve predicted. Aspen’s serves were off. DJ struggled at the net, with hitting errors all over the place, and they had no excuse. The wind wasn’t bad. The rest of the weather was fine. They had no injuries to speak of. They just had a bad match. As the highest-ranking American team in the tournament, they’d done what they needed to do, but the win would’ve been nice. It was next to impossible for them not to make the Olympic team now since they would be really hard to overtake, but there would be three other American teams vying for the automatic bid in Berlin. The team that won the whole thing would get it, so if that was one of the other US teams and not Aspen and DJ, they’d go down to the number two American team in qualification. That meant there was still a chance another team could win a tournament or two and take them out of the running, so while it felt good to walk away with the high likelihood that they’d make it, it also sucked not knowing.

“We have to win,” DJ said as they sat next to each other on the plane. “Berlin. We can’t come in second. We have to win.”

“I know,” she agreed. “I’m sorry for my part of this morning. I don’t know what happened. I just didn’t have it.” Aspen shook her head.

“Neither did I. I had more hitting errors than you did serving, and I couldn’t set you up worth a damn.”

“My sets weren’t great, either. And my passes were barely there.”

“What do you think it was?” DJ asked.

“I have no idea. I felt good in warm-ups.”

“Me too.”

“And they were good, but far from the best team we’ve ever faced. Brazil was better.”

“We had three tough matches leading up to it,” DJ suggested. “Brazil was in two sets, but they were tough. Australia took us to three sets, and they were all close until the end. Then, Argentina almost beat us yesterday. Three sets to two points at the end of each of them.”

“Think we’re tired?” she asked.

“I think we better get it together before Berlin. It’s our one chance to qualify outright, and whoever wins, gets it, Aspen. If that’s Brazil, they’re in. Norway, and they’re in. It’s not just about being the highest on the podium for US teams.”

“Yeah, I know,” Aspen replied.

“Let’s talk about something else because rehashing this right now, when we’re both tired, isn’t going to help us. Are you going to Kendra’s tonight?”

“No, she’s in Kentucky, covering the NWSL tonight. And she doesn’t get home for a couple of days. She’s covering two indoor matches in Minneapolis the next two nights.”

“You miss her, huh?”

“I do, yeah. We got to video chat a few times, and that was nice, but I miss having her there, you know?”

“Where? At a match?”