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“I hope so.”

“I feel like you two are basically already together. You just need to make it official. You talk to Kendra more than I’ve seen other players talk to their spouses when we travel.”

“It feels like that for me, too. So much so, that I now worry that maybe we’ve wasted time when we could’ve been official.”

“Nah. It doesn’t work like that. You’ve been into her since she moved in next door, and you’ve been building up to calling it what it has been all along. It’s not like you’ve been with or even thought of anyone else. I assume she hasn’t, either?”

“No, she hasn’t. She even got a little jealous about the masseuse this week. I got the impression that she didn’t like the idea of a Brazilian masseuse giving me a massage.”

“Oh, yeah?” DJ laughed.

“I picked on her a little when we were video chatting. She’s really, really cute when she’s jealous. Her eyes go all serious, and she scrunches her nose up. Is it wrong that I like her jealous?”

“No. I myself wouldn’t mind it if Mark got jealous of someone.”

“DJ, we both have to be careful here. And this isn’t me telling you not to date someone again. It’s just that we’re so close.”

“I know.”

“And I know that I don’t want to wait with Kendra anymore, either. I want to ask her out. That means things will get busier for me, and if you’re with Mark, it’ll be the same for you. Players manage having actual personal lives all the time, so I know it shouldn’t be a big deal, but my dating history is short. It’s basically a tweet. I’m not sure that I know how to balance it all. I might be bad at it, and that scares me.”

“You’re going to be fine. We both will be. We’ll just make sure we take care of ourselves. We’ll get good sleep, keep eating right, show up for practice – and I mean, really show up, just like we do now – and if we’re having any problems, we talk, okay?”

“I’ve never…”

“Never what?”

“I’ve put volleyball first for my entire life. It’s always been volleyball for me. I mean, I’ve dated, yeah, and had brief relationships, but volleyball came first. And I thought it always would until I retired. My mom kept telling me that I was silly to put a sport over the possibility of something else, but she was a player, too. I think she gets it deep down. Then, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to play volleyball. When Kendra told me she had something she wanted us to talk about in person, I felt like I wanted to be on a plane, flying back to her, more than I wanted to be on a court, and I’ve never felt that before.”

“She really matters to you, Aspen. That makes sense.”

“I know we have a coach interview tomorrow, and this might sound ridiculous because she’ll be home soon, but–”

“You want to fly to her, don’t you?” DJ asked with a smile.

“Not tonight. I want to do the coach thing first. We need to figure that out, and it’s too important to mess up. Lord knows, we could use one right now. We’re getting to that point where not having one is causing problems. We should have won today, and we didn’t.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

“I was thinking about leaving after, though. I want to book a flight to Minneapolis to surprise her. The match is a late afternoon one, so I thought I’d show up with flowers and finally ask her out. I know she’s flying back the next day and that it’s silly, but I’ve got all these frequent-flyer miles. I might as well use some of them, right? Plus, I think she’d like the surprise.”

“You’re not worried about getting all the way there, her telling you whatever she needs to tell you, and it’s bad news that ruins it all?”

“I’ll get a hotel room just in case, but I’m hoping that she hasn’t been leading me on this whole time. I got the impression that it’s just something she thinks I’m going to have to deal with or accept, and I can’t think of anything she could tell me that would make me not want to be with her.”

“Then, I say go for it.”

“If it goes well, I’ll stay there until she flies home. I’ll just try to get on her flight if I can. That’s a couple days of practice missed… and we have another USPBV tourney this weekend. I know I shouldn’t miss practice, especially after what we’ve just said about making sure to show up for practice, but I need to know, DJ.”

“I get it. We’re okay for this weekend. But after that is Berlin, Aspen.”

“I know. I won’t miss anything after this. And if she’d talked to me about it on the phone, I wouldn’t even go, but I’m ready, you know? I’m ready to finally be with someone. And I want it to be her, so if she’s worried about something, I want to know what it is so I can tell her that it’s okay and so we can finally start.”

“Then, go get your girl, Ashley.” DJ winked at Aspen.

???

“Hey,” she greeted when Kendra called hours later, right after Aspen got home.