Bring it home, lucky ball.
I rear back, crouch, and unleash it.
Eight pins fall. There’s a pin still standing on either side of the lane. Laughing at me. Mocking me. I take a deep breath, shake out my hands, and ignore Violet’s gaze that feels like needles pressing into my skin.
My ball comes back. I take it back, ready myself, and bowl again.
It sails straight down the center of the lane, a perfect strike ball if only the pins had cooperated.
I glare at them as the apparatus comes down, knocking them into the gaping mouth at the end of the lane.
Eight. As long as Violet scores less than eight, I’m golden.
I turn. I lock eyes with Violet. Her beer cup is empty, and she nods once, rising.
We say nothing. I sit where she was sitting, her warmth still in the plastic. Another light flicks off in the alley, but neither of us turn our heads.
She grabs the ball, steps forward. The vacuum stops. The scraping in the popcorn machine continues.
Seven pins. Two on one side of the lane, one on the other.
My heart clenches. I hold my breath. She doesn’t look back at me as she waits for her ball to return, and I wonder what happens if we tie this game.
Her ball comes out of the return. She grabs it, hefts it carefully, goes back to the lane, all without casting so much as a glance in my direction.
I’m literally on the edge of this seat as she crouches, swings her arm back, and releases the ball. It veers sideways, closer and closer to the gutter. Neither of us is breathing. I’m on my feet now, staring at the ball like I can will it into the gutter.
Halfway down, it veers back. My heart sinks. In front of me, Violet is clutching her hair with both hands, standing on tiptoes as the bowling ball traverses the lanes, cutting clear across the wood.
It hits the two pins on the right perfectly, knocking them both down with a hollow smack.
Violet screams.
“YES!” she shouts, pumping both fists into the air. “YES! YES!”
I slide back into the plastic seat, my defeat settling over me like a heavy blanket. One pin. One stupid bowling pin.
It’s not even about the coffee. Coffee itself isn’t such a huge deal. It’s the fact that I have to deliver it every morning, like I’m her personal butler or something. It’s the fact that every single morning for the entire summer, I have to give her coffee and see her I’m better at bowling than you face.
It’ll be absolutely, completely, one hundred percent terrible to see her every morning. I’m not secretly looking forward to it even the slightest amount.
I wish I could go back in time and smack myself before I offered to make it interesting.
She walks back, grinning. Her face is pink with glee, her hair a little wild, and she’s laughing. Still cursing myself, I hold out one hand, and she shakes it.
“Good game,” I say, trying to mean it.
“Cream, no sugar,” she says, looking me right in the eye.
“You already said.”
“Just making sure you know,” she says, a glint in her eye. “And I like it hot.”
“How hot?”
“As hot as you can make it.”
I raise one eyebrow.
“You think you can handle it that hot?” I ask. It just slips out.
Violet laughs, though I swear she blushes, too.
“Don’t worry about me, Loveless,” she says, shark eyes still dancing. “I can take it.”
Are we still talking about coffee?
I withdraw my hand from hers, look at her again, still flushed with victory, still breathless and wild with it.
She’s beautiful like this. So beautiful that whatever I was about to say flickers and dies before I can say it, so beautiful that she lights up this dingy bowling alley.
I’m blindsided by a sudden, irresistible thought: I want to leave here and take her with me. I want us to leave Sprucevale behind. I want to bring her somewhere new, somewhere exciting where she’s never been. I want to take her breath away and make her giddy with happiness, just like this.
The light over our heads goes out, and I’m jerked back to the reality that Ken’s Bowl-o-rama is closing and the only thing that makes Violet this happy is beating me at something. The scoreboard over our lane flicks off. I try to tell myself it was just a dumb, meaningless bowling match. Even with the coffee bet, meaningless.
But that’s never been true of anything between Violet and I. Nothing is ever meaningless.
We return our bowling shoes to the bored teenager without talking, but Violet is practically glowing. I can hardly look at her straight on.
“I’m gonna hang out here for a while,” she says when I head for the door.
“They’re closing.”
“They’ll be closing up for a while. I brought a book, they won’t mind,” she says, still seated on the bench by the rental shoes.