I walked over. “Good luck.”
“Thanks. Please watch out for my face, you know it’s my moneymaker.” He winked.
I shook my head. I was going to say it was actually his hands that were the moneymakers, but it would just sound dirty with my family around. “No, seriously, please don’t mess up his face,” I said to them when they pulled me into the huddle.
“Guinevere, he is not on your team,” my father said to me. “We are on your team, and your teammates want to win, so…?”
“Lay them out.” It felt like high school all over again.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Lay them out!” I said louder.
“Are you just going to hug each other all day over there?” my mother yelled.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were in a hurry to lose, sweetheart,” my father hollered back.
Sometimes, I could not believe they were my parents.
Jeremy put the ball in the middle of the field.
“I’m guessing you want me to go up front?” I asked them. I saw them nod, as if to say “obviously.” When I walked forward, so did Eli. “I can’t go easy on you.”
“I know, your mother told me.”
I nodded.
Jeremy decided this was the time to be funny and begin preaching. “Now let us remember, this is merely a game, and as such let it be played fair, and let it be…a little bloody.”
“Jeremy…”
“1. 2. 3.”
We both attacked the ball, but he pushed me back with ease, flipping the stick, lifting the ball off the ground and throwing it over to Malik perfectly. They charged both Roy and my father, who stepped out of the goal even more so. Running forward, I tried to reach for it when Malik threw, but Eli jumped over my back leg, spun around Roy so badly Roy went forward, and faced off one-on-one with my dad. When he looked like he was going for it, he passed the ball right back to Malik, catching my dad off guard, and the ball just glided into the net.
“What the hell?” Jeremy said at the sidelines, pulling at his dirty blond hair.
Eli and Malik high-fived, and then Eli looked to my father. “You're right, I played a lot of baseball growing up, but that was only during the spring and summer. My coach didn’t want me to get bored, so I played lacrosse in the fall and basketball in the winter. If you'd brought a football, I would have been screwed.”
“How am I looking now, sweetheart?” My mother, who hadn’t done anything, stood smiling brightly at us. When Eli got back to her, she just gave him a high five.
“Guinevere,” my father said to me.
“Oh, I know,” I said to him, gripping my stick. “Eli, the kid gloves are coming off now.”
“I never asked you to put them on in the first place,” he replied.
“How can you date someone that cocky?” Roy frowned.
“Well, I’m about to humble him.”
When we met in the middle again, he crouched down right across from me, smiling like he'd stolen something, a gleam in his blue-green eyes.
“You know what they called me in high school?” he asked.
“I don’t care.”
“1. 2. 3.”
Our lacrosse sticks smashed against each other's again. This time, I pushed back with everything I had, and he fell back, chasing after the ball as it rolled across the grass. I had just picked it up when he smacked my stick, flipping it and the ball out. He picked it up this time, running back toward the goal. I came up as fast as I could, but Eli was on another level when it came to speed. One moment he was in front of me, and the next he ran straight toward my father, who eyed Malik coming up on his left. This time Eli didn’t pass, he took the shot, and because he was slowly trying to elevate my father’s and my blood pressure, it went in.
“It was a dead shot, just in case you were wondering,” he said, running past me.
Biting my tongue and taking a deep breath, I tried to remember it was just a game.
“Guinevere, you coming?” he called behind me.
“You, Dr. Davenport, are going to get hurt.”
Eli
With one swift thrust forward, she checked me so hard I landed on my back, and she fell straight on top of me.
“Oh,” I moaned, trying to breathe again.
“Did you just see the point he made?” Malik ran up to us.
“No, I was too busy being murdered,” I muttered, dropping the stick and rubbing my chest when she rolled off.
“Whelp, we lost!” Her mother came over to us. “There was nothing we could really do when Masoa, the big cheater, had to jump in.”
We had been playing for a little over an hour. I’d scored the first and only two goals of the game, but then her father had come out and decided to epically crush my pride. For a man who'd had a heart attack a month before, he was in damn good shape.
“Anyway, I had Jeremy run back to bring the food I made.”
I tried to get up, but my body just wasn’t feeling it. “I’m just going to lay here for a moment.”
Roy snickered, kneeling down. “And this is why we call it laying the grass.”
“Yep, I got that.” I groaned again.