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VERSE I.
She takes the shot. As the ball sails through the air, they hold a collective breath.
It hits the rim, teeters there for the barest of indecisive moments, and then falls away. It bounces once, twice, three times on the gymnasium floor, and the sound echoes. Holly moves mindlessly to catch the ball, to stop it before the next time it makes contact with the floor. Her hands shake.
When she turns to look at him, Marvyn’s eyes are closed, a slight frown drawing his eyebrows together. Something in her heart seems to twist at the sight.
“Okay,” he says, in the end. It feels as if it’s been an eternity. The distance between them stretches out forever.
“Marvyn,” she says, almost in a whisper.
He stands abruptly, not looking at her. She wishes he would, so she could see whatever spark she caught in his eyes before. She wishes he wouldn’t, so she doesn’t have to memorize the unhappy set of his mouth because he wanted her to make the shot. She wanted to make it. Maybe the universe knows better than they do.
“It’s okay,” he says, and shrugs. “Wasn’t meant to be, right?”
Holly’s breath catches again and this time, it doesn’t feel good when it does. “Right,” she answers.
He stays behind to clean up the electric candles that the girls left behind. Holly shuts herself in her bedroom before he gets back to the house. In the morning, they will pretend this didn’t happen. They’ve done that before, and it worked just fine.
Except this time, it’s different. This time, they’ve acknowledged it. It’s not as simple as just agreeing that a spur-of-the-moment kiss didn’t mean anything – no, now there are layers. Prom night compliments and stories that they don’t tell anyone else and three almost-kisses that play in her head whenever she closes her eyes. It’s too much.
“I found a place,” he tells her when she comes home with takeout. It’s his favourite of the menus she keeps in the drawer next to the fridge, but he’s talking mostly to the wall somewhere to the left of her head, so she feels like she’s deflating. It’s been eight days, not that she’s counting. “Close to school, beachfront. Emma and I will be out of your hair by Friday.”
It’s as if the breath has been knocked right out of her. “Oh,” she manages. Weakly, she tries, “You don’t have to, you know,” but she and Marvyn haven’t made direct eye contact for days.
They move out.
Her house feels like too much space for just her. It never felt like that before the wildfires, before she opened up her home to them. But now Marvyn’s things don’t occupy her living room and Emma’s favourite snacks don’t take up space in her kitchen cabinets. She can’t hear Emma’s muffled music playing from the room that she doesn’t even consider a guest room anymore. There’s no one to argue with about where the precise right spot for a dirty dish is, no one to watch the sports network with, and God, she can’t stop herself from noticing the ache of it all.
School starts up again and she throws herself into it. Teaching, coaching, they’ve always taken up space in her life, enough space to not pay attention to how lonely she is. The awareness won’t go away, though. It’s like kissing Marvyn Korn in a flurry of falling confetti unlocked something in her, a door that she can’t even find in order to close.
Time drags on and she pretends that it’s okay with her. Sherilyn asks over margaritas or tacos if she’s all right, but she doesn’t press when Holly only shrugs. The remediation job at Belford finally wraps up, and she shifts along with the boys back out of Westbrook. She avoids the Shot Clock altogether. She used to go all the time – on her own or with friends, Sherilyn, Felix – but now all it does is remind her of a pair of blue eyes that she can’t shake off.
It’s not like she doesn’t see him. Even split between a boys’ school and a girls’ school, La Jolla isn’t big enough to keep them apart. She goes to the Sirens’ games to support the team, and they keep running into each other in the stands at UCLA’s games, too. He has a foam finger with Louise’s new number on it, and it makes her melt a little. One night in November, she emerges from Belford long after it grows dark and finds his car parked crookedly, impulsively next to hers in the staff lot.
“You don’t work here,” she points out. She’s spent a lot of time thinking (dreaming?) of what she’d like to say to him, and this isn’t it.
Marvyn leans against the side of his car, arms crossed. He’s a vision and she can’t stand it. “I wanted to say hi,” he replies, as if it’s that easy. “So… hi.”
“Hi?” she repeats disbelievingly.
“Hi,” he nods.
Holly takes a deep breath. “Are we going to talk about wha–”
He shrugs and holds her gaze, a challenge. She waits, determined not to look away first. “Do we have to?”
Her teeth dig into the inside of her lower lip. Yes, is the answer she should probably give. It’s the responsible, grownup thing to do. But the dangerous thing about Marvyn Korn is that he makes her want to throw that away. He makes her want to stop thinking so hard.
She shrugs, too. “No, we don’t.”
And so they don’t, and that’s fine. They go back to whatever they were before, friends who talk about the hard things except when it comes to each other. That part, they lock up where the light can’t get to.
She notices, though, the little sighs of relief when both of their teams watch the tension melt, mostly, away. There’s a tiny, secretive grin that she comes to recognize on some of the players’ faces whenever she snaps at him mid-game to stop backseat-coaching from behind the bench, or when she drops by Westbrook to see Sherilyn and ducks into the gym to give him her opinion on a play or two. They don’t talk about this, and they don’t talk about the physical distance that they are so careful to leave between them, and they don’t talk about the way she can sometimes feel his eyes on her when she’s not looking. And they certainly don’t talk about how it still makes her heart skip nervously every time.
Her doorbell rings late at night, mid-January, once and then again, impatiently. When she opens the door, it’s to find him standing in the dark on her front walkway. He hovers there as if he was thinking about running before she answered, but he wavers towards the house now. It’s raining, the sound of it on the pavement filling her ears.
“Marvyn?” It comes out soft and gets lost in the rainfall. He steps up to the door and she raises her voice to be heard better, staring up at him in bewilderment. “What are you doing here?”
He blinks the rainwater away. “I had to talk to you.”
Holly shakes her head, eyes shifting to take in the sight of him. He has no umbrella, no coat. The sleeves of his shirt cling, soaked with rain, to his skin. She glances swiftly past him to the curb and can’t even see his car parked there. “You don’t own a raincoat? Did you walk here?” she asks, and doesn’t leave him time to answer. She pulls the door open wide. “It’s cold, it’s January, Marvyn, do you want to co–”
“I love you,” he blurts out.
She freezes. Her mouth opens in a question she can’t get out.
“I just had to tell you that,” he says. He’s breathing hard like he’s run a marathon. She tries to imagine him running here in the rain, in half his work suit, to spring this on her. “It’s killing me that you don’t know that. And I get it, the universe said what it said, but you can’t just pin everything on one bad shot. We should get to have a say, too.”
Her head spins. She wonders if she should pinch herself, because whatever this is, it doesn’t feel real. Instead, she grips the door handle tight enough for her knuckles to turn white. “You… you came here to tell me that?”
“I came here to tell you that I’m in love with you, Holly.” He says it so simply that it takes her breath away. She searches his eyes and sees nothing but truth. “And to ask if you might feel the same, or if I waited too long.”
She steps out into the rain and kisses him.
VERSE II.
She takes the shot. As the ball sails through the air, they hold a collective breath.
It nicks the rim and hits the backboard with a resounding echo, but it doesn’t go in. Holly wants to sink down through the floor. There’s no reason she should have missed that shot – it was easy, the perfect positioning, no defence, all the time in the world for a setup.
Marvyn stands, steps forward to catch the ball and sets it down at his feet. She watches his every move, afraid to speak first. He looked so hopeful when she said it – if I make it, then we’ll give this a try, for real. She’s seen a softer side of him enough times that it doesn’t always surprise her anymore, but there’s something about the way he looked at her then, and it swept her away.
“We both know you should have made that shot,” he says.
She hesitates. “Do we?”
He moves closer to her, tentative, giving her the time to move away. She doesn’t. There’s a glint in his eye that says he knew she wouldn’t. “You’re a basketball coach, Holly,” he points out.
She shrugs, waves a hand in a vaguely sweeping gesture around them. “The universe,” she starts, but he’s close enough to touch her now, and she still doesn’t pull away. Her gaze drops to his lips.
“Screw the universe,” he says, and kisses her hard. She gasps; his tongue sweeps into her mouth, demanding, overwhelming. He steals all the air from her lungs, his fingers twisting into her hair, his other hand flattening at the small of her back to pull her in. She kisses him back and it’s perfect, like they were made for this, and it’s a thousand times different than the last time they kissed mere feet away from this spot, and somehow it still manages to feel like coming home.
It would be easy to lose track of time, like this. She doesn’t know how long it lasts, only that she’s having trouble catching her breath when it’s over. “That – that was,” she manages.
Everything feels unfocused, when he’s this close to her. Their foreheads touch and their noses brush and all she can see is the cocky little smile that tugs at one corner of his mouth. It only lasts a moment, and then he’s serious. “I’ve been waiting a long time to do that,” he tells her, tenderly brushing her hair back behind her ear. Her fingers tighten at the zipper of his jacket in response, because she doesn’t know how to form proper sentences. She simultaneously hates and loves that he’s got her at a loss for words.
They stay there for what feels like seconds and hours all at once, breathing each other’s air. Holly can feel his heart hammering in his chest, is certain that he can feel hers, too.
“We should clean up in here,” is the first full sentence she manages. It doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what she wants to say. She wants to say that she’s ready for this, that she can’t imagine not being ready for this, that she never wants to let him go.
Marvyn laughs like he understands. He reaches to interlock their fingers, his left hand and her right. “Want to carpool home?” he asks softly, and she nods. Picking up the candles the girls left behind takes twice as long as it needs to when neither of them are willing to release the other’s hand, and she barely even cares.
She tugs him into her office for her keys and purse; he pointedly ignores them on her desk and presses her against the door to kiss her again. Her fingers curl into his hair as she opens up underneath him, and she can feel him smiling against her lips. Everything in her world seems to have come crashing down to this, to them, to Marvyn and the way his knee presses between hers to allow him to get as close as possible. Pinned between his body and a closed door suddenly seems like the best place to be.
Marvyn’s hands slip smoothly underneath the hem of her blouse, and when she pulls in a sharp breath, he stops kissing her and pulls back just far enough to whisper, “Is this okay?” Holly can’t form words again but she nods, dragging him back down to kiss him again, trying to pour her answer into it instead. She pushes his jacket from his shoulders and it falls to the floor. They’re moving too fast and not fast enough. She’s wanted this for longer than she can map out in her head, and it’s everything she didn’t let herself dream about.
His palms slide warm and intoxicating over her hips, her waist, trail daringly up her spine. She wants to give him that feeling back, tugs at his shirt until it comes untucked, fingers grazing his skin until his breath hitches. His lips move to her jawline and Holly arches to his touch, tilting her head back to grant him better access as he presses kisses down toward her collarbone.
Mindlessly, she pushes him backward towards the desk – it would be leading somewhere except that he trips over his jacket on the floor. They nearly fall together and catch themselves just in time; she laughs at the startled expression on his face and he laughs, too, and the moment isn’t quite over but she likes that she’ll remember it this way.
He frames her face in his hands and kisses her again, and this time it’s softer, sweeter.
“I want to take you on a date, Holly Barrett.”
She hums softly. “A date?”
“Yeah. A real date. And I’m the one who asked, so you have to let me pick up the bill.”
VERSE III.
She takes the shot. As the ball sails through the air, they hold a collective breath. Embarrassingly, it hits the backboard closer to the corner than the hoop. Automatically, she starts to catalog reasons why – it’s been a while, she’s more used to being on the sidelines these days, she’s in high heels and it threw her off, she was distracted in the moments before the ball left her hands by the intense focus in his eyes as he watched her.
Her gaze swivels to Marvyn as he straightens. He’s not meeting her eyes but he doesn’t move when she steps toward him, ignoring the basketball bouncing away into a corner. The universe has spoken, loud and clear: Not meant to be, not meant to be, not meant to be.
She kisses him, anyway.
If he’s surprised, it only lasts a moment before he returns the gesture enthusiastically, hands curving at her waist and mouth opening willingly when she moves to deepen the kiss. Her heart pounds as she moves as close to him as she can manage, trying to memorize the taste of him in case he never lets her do this again.
“That was a really bad shot, Holly,” he says when she pulls away.
She shoves at his chest but doesn’t mean it. “Shut up, I was nervous.”
VERSE IV.
She takes the shot. As the ball sails through the air, they hold a collective breath. It hits the rim but doesn’t go in, and as it falls, he steps forward smoothly to catch it before it can hit the ground. She’s mostly grateful for that, because she doesn’t want to hear the disappointing sound when all it means is that the universe wants her to be alone.
“I-I’m sorry,” she says. She thinks she says it quietly, but the words seem to echo.
He shrugs like it’s not a big deal and moves past her to start picking up candles. Holly remains frozen in place, right where she took the shot that should have gone in. She wanted it to go in. She stares daggers at the basket and wonders if Marvyn ever actually wanted her or if it was just a fun little game.
They take separate cars back to the house and pretend that nothing happened. In the morning, they bicker about the dishwasher like it’s a normal morning, but something feels off. Holly can feel it. Can he feel it, too? Does he notice?
She’s pretty sure that Emma notices. She doesn’t say anything, just allows her gaze to flicker back and forth between the two of them. Somehow, that’s worse than asking. When Marvyn drives her to the airport to send her off on a summer visit to her mother’s, Holly can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.
Still, the next week consists mostly of tiptoeing around each other and waiting. Everything is coloured by the awkward tinge of what could have been, and it doesn’t seem to want to pass. They talk but it’s different, more reserved, more cautious. They came too close to acknowledging that there were real feelings at stake, and now they can’t take it back.
“I got dumplings,” she announces from the front hall on day eleven.
He sets cutlery out on her kitchen table. He’s already poured her a glass of red wine; he seems finetuned to when she wants one, and he’s never wrong. She wouldn’t admit that to him, though. Compliments go to his head. “Not veggie ones, I hope.”
“No,” she assures him, setting the paper bag down. She watches him reach for it and start to pull out food, and then – without her permission – she can hear her voice again, like an out of body experience. “Are we going to be like this forever?”
Marvyn frowns at a napkin. “What do you mean?” he asks absently.
Gesturing frustratedly between them, Holly says, “You know what I mean. Like this. Awkward. Weird. I mean, I missed the shot, whatever, it’s fine – but now I just miss you.” That sentiment hangs there in the balance, somewhere between the wine and the dumplings, and she wishes she could rewind time. Just a few seconds. Just enough to not have to admit it.
He tips his head on an angle and meets her eyes for the first time since she stepped through the door. “What are you talking about, Holly? I’m right here.”
Her fingers close around the stem of the glass of wine he poured for her and she spins away. “Never mind,” she snaps. She shouldn’t have said anything at all. Maybe she read too far into whatever they could have been. Maybe she imagined the softness in his eyes and the way he leaned to kiss her like it was what he wanted.
But he follows her insistently into the living room, leaving the takeout on the table to grow cold, because the most consistent thing about Marvyn Korn is that he doesn’t like to let anyone else have the last word. “No, listen. You can’t just say something like that and not explain what the hell you mean by it,” he says, his voice rising incredulously.
“It doesn’t matter,” she lies. She lifts the wine glass to her lips and stares him down over the rim, and it’s a challenge. An invitation to read something else in her eyes and push harder, if he wants to. She knows what choice she wants him to make, and it scares her.
With a disbelieving scoff, he crosses his arms in front of his chest. “It obviously matters.”
She shrugs, gives in. “Fine, it matters. Happy?”
“No,” he shoots back, stubborn as ever. She rolls her eyes up toward the ceiling. “What do you want from me, Holly? Because I thought you wanted the universe to make the call for you, and it did. So we’re supposed to go back to normal, right?”
“But we haven’t!” she cries. The volume of it catches her off guard. “That’s the point, Marvyn, we haven’t. Tell me, what about this is normal?”
He sputters for a moment like there’s an answer on the tip of his tongue and he can’t quite find it. She stares, eyebrow raised, waiting. She’s not sure that she’s ever seen him at a loss for words – he always has something to say, even if he’s speaking faster than he thinks.
Holly sighs, sets the wine down and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Exactly,” she says into the startling silence. She grows quieter now. “It’s changed everything. I’m sorry I kissed you, okay? And I’m sorry I missed. I just – I can’t handle losing you over it. I… I mean, we were friends, right?”
Something in him softens at that, she can tell. He uncrosses his arms and nods minutely. “We are friends,” he says firmly. “You’re probably my best friend, actually.”
In spite of herself, she smiles, even though her vision is a little blurred with unshed tears that she didn’t ask for. “Slim pickings,” she says, and he bristles in mock offence. But she doesn’t mean it and he knows that, and it feels like they’re back on the right track.
At least, it does until he says abruptly, “I’m not sorry.”
She frowns. “What?”
“I’m not sorry,” he repeats, slower and louder syllables as if the problem is that she didn’t hear him. He draws closer to her and her feet are rooted to the floor, watching him wide-eyed. “I’m not sorry for any of it, and I don’t think you are, either.”
“Marvyn,” she says, half-warningly. He’s close enough to her now to make her breath catch in the way it did before, the nervous anticipation building for what’s about to happen.
His fingertips find her jawline to tip her chin up, just a little. “Tell me to stop, Holly.”
She looks for a moment into his eyes, dark and full of intention. Her palms come to rest at his chest and when she blinks, she sees them in the gym, surrounded by confetti. His other hand finds her hip; he’s in her space in a way that feels both dangerous and comfortable. She refocuses her attention to his lips. He holds there, patient, waiting for her to decide, no universe to fall back on this time. She knows without thinking that if she pulls back now, he will never cross this line between them again.
Tell me to stop, Holly.
In a whisper, she answers, “I don’t want you to stop.”
He grins easily and all she can think is, I’m not sorry, either. He kisses her before she can say it.
VERSE V.
She takes the shot. As the ball sails through the air, they hold a collective breath.
The ball hits the rim hard and deflects away. “Oh, fuck,” she says before she can stop herself. Her feet are carrying her forward already, heels clicking on the court, to retrieve the ball. “Shit. Let me try it again.”
He blocks her easily, too tall for her to get a clear angle. “What happened to one shot?”
Holly tries, unsuccessfully, to spin around him. “I’m taking another one,” she insists. She doesn’t miss the smile that spreads across his face at this, her admission that she knew exactly what she wanted the universe to say, her determination not to accept the answer it gave.
“You said one shot,” he says, very seriously, but the glint in his eyes tells her how weak the protest is. Reaching for the ball, he tries to tug it out of her hands and she only tightens her grip on it.
“Yes, Marvyn,” she huffs, “it was supposed to be cute, or romantic, or – God, just let me go ag–”
He kisses her midsentence and she sighs into it, softening, eyes fluttering closed as she breathes him in. She’s been thinking about kissing him again since the first time she did it, has come close a handful of times and imagined it when she closes her eyes at night. It doesn’t last long; he moves his hands as if to wind into her hair and she takes advantage of his moment of weakness, pulling back with the basketball clasped tightly in her hands. She moves backward at first so she doesn’t have to stop looking at him right away, reveling in the way it takes him a beat to catch up, the way his gaze tracks her lips even as she steps away.
Marvyn Korn wants her. It makes her feel like flying.
She turns and goes for the hoop at the other end of the gym, laughing breathlessly when he gives chase. They skirt around the candles the girls left out, shoes squeaking on the court. He reaches her before she can get much further, his height a definite advantage over her and the high heels she’d like to kick off. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I want to take another shot!” she declares as his arms encircle her waist, but suddenly they are spinning, and she’s dropping the ball altogether in the rush of it. It hits the floor and skitters away.
When her feet find solid ground again, she’s disoriented but laughing. Taking another shot mattered five seconds ago; it doesn’t anymore. She stumbles a little and his grip on her tightens, and God, it all feels like a dream. Maybe she’ll wake up any second. In an attempt to capitalize on whatever time she has left, Holly turns in his arms, her mouth already finding his. It’s his turn to stumble and they fall together, landing hard on the floor; her surprised shriek and his groan as he hits the ground seem to echo off the walls.
“Are you okay?” she asks, eyes scanning him worriedly as she leans over him.
Marvyn grins up at her like he’s much younger than he is, like the unexpected tumble to the ground hasn’t knocked the wind out of him. “I’m good,” he says. He turns his head to find the basketball that she pinned their whole future on. “You still want that redo?”
Her fingers find his chin to drag his attention back to her. “Nope,” she says, and leans down to kiss him again.
The next minute and a half is a blur of Marvyn and she isn’t sure she’ll ever get over it. He makes this little sound when her tongue finds his and she wants to commit it to memory and do it a hundred thousand more times. His hands are in her hair and at her waist and finding the back pockets of her pants, and she’s moving over him for a better angle with her knees bracketing his hips like this is where she’s supposed to be, where he’s supposed to be, what the universe should have answered in the first place.
“I should have known,” says a loud voice, and Holly pulls away disappointedly to find Sherilyn framed at the open double doors – she must have heard them fall and come to investigate.
She flushes and scrambles to put space between herself and Marvyn. “This isn’t what it looks like,” she tries.
“Really.” Sherilyn is tapping her foot and has a deep frown on her face, but there’s a glimmer of something else, and Holly isn’t sure if she’s imagining it. “Because it looks like you two have finally figured it out.”
“Oh,” manages Holly. Marvyn grins up at the ceiling.
Sherilyn’s eyes find him in the quiet. “You’re still not invited to Margarita Mondays,” she says firmly. He lets out a short burst of a laugh and Holly can’t contain a smile. “And you’d better take this off school property before HR gets involved. I don’t want to do any paperwork tonight.”
VERSE VI.
She takes the shot. As the ball sails through the air, they hold a collective breath.
It swishes through the hoop, nothing but net, like the universe doesn’t even have to think about it.