A Promise Is A Promise

[13] Kayla

Realizing I couldn't kiss Claire before my game stung more than I thought it would. I'd seen plenty of my teammates do the same thing with their boyfriends before—even Frankie pressed one to Haylie's lips in the doorway of the dugout. There was no way I could have the same thing with my best friend. At least, there wasn't a way when we were in public. It wasn't like she could sneak into the locker room, though. There were too many risks involved. It was too dangerous. We had to settle for the moments where we were sure our parents wouldn't walk in and see something they couldn't: a touch at the wrong moment, one that lingered too long, words that revealed too much, ones that were said too loud... Any one of those things could end in a nightmare for both of us.

My brother's birthday luckily gave us an excuse to spend some time alone together. The day after my game, she came over after practice while my parents were shopping with Derek. We were supposed to decorate his cake before they got back and it was time for dinner, so I texted her to tell her she could come over and rushed through my shower as soon as I got home. When I'd dried off and gotten dressed, I tied my hair back and left the bathroom, tossing the T-shirt I'd worn to practice at her as I passed her. She grabbed it and threw it back towards me, but missed. "Come on, we have to start decorating the cake if we want it to be done before my parents and brother get home."

She slid off my bed and followed me down the stairs to the kitchen where she moved the cake my mother had made earlier that day to the part of the counter that stuck out from the wall. I grabbed the frosting from the fridge and a couple of knives from the silverware drawer. Before she could open the container of frosting, I took a bottle of green food coloring out of the cabinet in the corner and mixed it in to fulfill one of the two requests he had made—the other was that he got a chocolate cake.

At first, we were mostly quiet as we spread the frosting all over the dessert we'd be eating in an hour or two, but she couldn't be silent for long. "The birthday parties you and your brother used to have were so much fun, even though we weren't best friends or anything back then. Even Walker would talk about them for a few days after they happened, and he was probably getting too old to be going to them."

"He would always play with us, though," I pointed out and shrugged as I remembered something from when we were kids. "Derek used to tell me that he wished I would trade places with him so they could be brothers and we could be sisters."

She gave me a soft smile as she thought about that. "Back then, it would've been fun, but I'm really glad we're not sisters now."

I laughed and shook my head, picking up on the fact that she was happy with the way things were because that meant we were allowed to kiss each other. "So am I. That would've been so cool, though."

"It would've, especially if we were twins like Frankie and Jules. Our parents probably would've strangled us, though. Wait, which parents do you think we'd have?"

"Oh, I don't know. That's weird to think about, but I guess all of them are kind of like all of our parents, aren't they? I don't know, I think it would be fun to have yours, since I've already had mine for my whole life."

She hummed while she thought it over and I smoothed out the side of the cake. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I think I'd rather have mine, too. Yours are just—"

"The way they are?" I guessed, knowing exactly what she meant. They could be so strict sometimes, and for no reason at all. I'd only ever done a couple things that would warrant them being that way, but they'd never found out about them. I'd know if they had, that was for sure.

"Yeah." Claire let out a soft giggle of her own and asked me another question. "What's your favorite memory from when we were little, anyway?"

"It's probably when we went to Billings together to go to the zoo and the water park. That whole weekend was so much fun. It's honestly what made me love road trips so much."