Page 31 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

“You should,” I call from my tube. “It's excellent.”

Nolan swims back to shore muttering about corrupt judges, but he's smiling, which tells me the redemption worked regardless of the score.

The volleyball comes out not long after, and teams start forming with the usual chaos. I drift toward one side. Beck starts toward the same side.

“No,” Dani says, before either of us gets there. “You two aren't on the same team.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“You already won the pool-noodle championship together. It's not fair to the rest of us.”

“That seems arbitrary,” Beck says.

“It's evidence-based.”

Nobody argues with Dani when she uses that tone, so Beck and I end up on opposite sides of the net. I don't think about it too hard until the game starts, and I realize what it means. I have an excellent, unrestricted view of him for the next thirty minutes.

He's good. Not showing off good, just genuinely coordinated, the kind of athleticism that comes from using his body for a living instead of a gym. He dives for a ball that has no business being save-able, digs it anyway, and pops back to his feet before anyone else has finished being surprised.

“Lucky,” I call across the net.

“Skill.”

I spike the next point directly past him, and he throws both hands up in mock outrage.

“That felt personal,” he says.

“It was.”

“Noted.”

The game settles into an easy rivalry, the kind where nobody's really trying to win so much as trying to make the other person laugh while losing. Reid heckles everyone equally. Nolan takes his own performance far too seriously for a casual game, diving for balls that were never his to dive for.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Beck goes up for another impossible save, gets it, and comes down laughing at something Reid says, brushing sand off one arm, sunlight catching the moisture on his shoulders, turning an ordinary guy laughing at a joke into something closer to a problem. I've seen him without a shirt before. That's not new information. Somehow it still gets my attention, and I forget, for one costly second, that I'm supposed to be playing volleyball.

The ball comes back over the net.

Toward me.

Tessa and Reid realize I’m not moving for the ball. They dive and collide into each other in a tangle of limbs, the ball bouncing uselessly away while they end up in a heap on the ground in the sand.

I look at them. “Interesting trajectory.”

Tessa freezes mid-untangle, then points at me. “That was your ball.”

“I wanted to see how fast you two could react.”

“And?” Reid asks, still on the ground.

“Room for improvement.”

When the game resumes, I risk a glance across the net. Beck's looking right at me, one eyebrow raised, like he's asking a question he doesn't plan to say out loud. I can't tell if he's amused by Reid and Tessa, or if he saw why I missed that ball in the first place. I decide the safest possible course of action is intense, unwavering focus on the volleyball for the remainder of the game.

My team wins in the end. I get the final point, a clean spike Beck almost gets to but doesn't. I make sure he sees how pleased I am about it. I throw both arms up and turn a slow, deliberate circle so he gets the full view.

“Rematch,” he says, hands on his hips.

“You lost.”