Page 4 of Spin Serve

Aspen walked off then, and Kendra tilted her head. Aspen’s work uniform, as they all called it, was a bikini, and today, she was wearing a dark-blue one with white around the waistband of the bottoms. Even though those were covered with her towel right now, Aspen’s entire back was still exposed, and Kendra could see it in all its muscled and tanned glory as Aspen walked away from her. Kenda had done her best to keep her eyes off Aspen’s flat stomach during the interview because she could not be objectifying the women she interviewed.

Strangely, it was always Aspen, though. In her line of work, Kendra would interview women in various stages of undress – sometimes, in their locker rooms after basketball games or soccer matches, where they were in towels post-shower or in their sports bras – because the athletes didn’t give a damn about just another woman being in there at times, but she’d never thought about any of them the way she thought of Aspen Ashley.

Aspen, who was younger than her by at least six years if Kendra remembered correctly; Aspen, who wasn’t exactly a player, according to all the rumors, but who never seemed to settle on one woman and liked to date when she could; Aspen, who had been on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue the previous year and had looked ridiculously hot on a beach, in a bikini not exactly made for playing a professional sport, with whatever oil they used to make her skin glisten like that… And Kendra needed to pay attention because her cameraman was clearing his throat.

“Oh, right,” she said. “We can go.”

Kendra was more than ready to get to the airport herself. She liked Chicago, but she wanted to get home to Los Angeles because she’d just bought a house there and had closed on it right before having to fly here, so she still hadn’t moved in. She couldn’t wait to get home and have her first night in the only place she’d ever owned. It hadn’t been her plan to buy something solo, but after years of saving and looking for the right place, she hadn’t wanted to lose it because she was waiting to fall in love and move in with someone else. Now, she wanted to decorate it, buy furniture, do some landscaping in the postage-stamp-sized backyard, and maybe even try for a garden if she could manage to keep some low-maintenance plants alive with all of her travel. Then, at some point, she would put herself back out there and try to find someone to date. It wasn’t exactly a priority for her, but after years and years of traveling for this job much more than she’d sought out, she was ready to stop losing girlfriends or possible girlfriends because she worked too much and was never home.

All her life, all Kendra had ever wanted to do was play volleyball, like Aspen and DJ. Growing up in Southern California, beach volleyball had had her whole heart from a very young age, but after playing indoor and beach in high school, her dreams of playing in college and then going pro had been cut short when she’d been diagnosed with a heart condition. It was something she’d dealt with ever since. She could play for fun, maybe, but not at the pro level and not without risking her health, and when the colleges that had offered her scholarships had found out, they’d told her they couldn’t have her on the team because it would’ve been a liability. So, instead of playing college volleyball and then maybe going pro, if she were lucky, Kendra had ended up with a degree in broadcast journalism, which had been the most interesting thing she could find for herself as an alternative, more than something she really wanted to do. Now, at thirty-five, she’d been doing it for over a decade, and she was tired.

She loved most sports and covered all of them as the network needed her to, but volleyball, both indoor and beach, was her true area of expertise. She supposed, it was also the reason she kept going in her career: it kept her close to her favorite sport, even though she couldn’t play.

When Kendra got to the airport after the tournament, she checked in at the kiosk because she’d forgotten to do it on her phone and applied for an upgrade using her reward status, hoping she’d get a first-class seat to take her from O’Hare to LAX. As she sat in the lounge, waiting until it was time to board, she kept checking the screen for her name, hoping she would be sitting in a more comfortable seat on the way home. Finally, seeing her name highlighted for an upgrade, she breathed a sigh of relief, walked to the gate, scanned her ticket, and sat down in her seat.

“Damn. The network gets you first-class?”

Kendra looked up and saw Aspen standing in the aisle.

“Must be nice. I’m in the back, with the rest of the riffraff,” Aspen joked.

“Uh… No. I upgraded. Points.”

“Oh, cool.” Aspen looked up. “I’ve got to go, or the people behind me will start hitting my ankles with their bags.” She nodded toward the moving passengers.

“Right. See you later?”

“Sure.” Aspen smiled and walked on.

CHAPTER 3

Aspen never slept in. Most mornings, she was on a beach by six or seven at the latest because beach spots filled up quickly, and she couldn’t exactly afford to have her own court in her backyard, even if it could fit there. She did have some equipment back there and hadn’t bothered to put grass down to replace the dead stuff that had been in place when she’d moved in. She’d put in some sand, yes, but it wasn’t a full court. It was more so she could pass, set, hit, and practice a little against the box she’d set up back there in order to make the ball come back to her whenever she was alone. She’d had to get special approval to put sand in her backyard from the homeowner’s association, which she thought was ridiculous because she’d bought the damn house. Why did she have to get someone’s approval to do what she wanted in her backyard if it wasn’t hurting anyone or doing any damage?

Today was her day off, which didn’t mean she was actually taking it off. It only meant that she’d planned to sleep until eight, make a light smoothie breakfast, get in some work in the backyard, have some lunch, work out in her gym, which was really just her third bedroom with an elliptical, treadmill, and some weights, and have some baked salmon with a side salad for dinner, along with a glass of white wine, which was her treat for the day. She tried to give herself something outside of her usual diet, in moderation, at least a few times a week. Sometimes, it was splurging on Starbucks with all the sugar in her Frappuccino; sometimes, it was a glass of wine or a beer; and other times, it was a piece of her favorite chocolate. It was her way of rewarding herself but still sticking to what she needed to do to win matches and, hopefully, medals.

It was just now eight o’clock, according to Aspen’s phone, which meant she had woken up before her alarm. That was odd because, due to her experience with traveling, she’d had to adapt her sleep schedule a thousand times over to adjust to the different time zones. She’d gotten great at sleeping on planes, busses, trains, in just about any hotel room, even though she shared it with her partner most of the time and DJ snored like crazy, and she hardly ever woke up before her alarm.

Then, she heard it, the likely cause for her waking up early on her one day off. It sounded like one of those big trucks beeping like it was alerting the entirety of Los Angeles that it was backing up and to stay out of the way. Aspen grunted because it was way too early for there to be a big truck yelling at everyone in the neighborhood. She tossed her phone aside and decided to give herself another half hour to sleep before getting up, but then, she heard the sound of what had to be metal hitting the concrete. It was a loud thud that she could’ve sworn she felt from her first-floor bedroom, and had she lived anywhere else, it probably wouldn’t have reminded her of a small earthquake.

“What the fuck?” she muttered and sat up, rubbing her face rapidly with both hands. “I guess I’m up.”

Aspen decided to take a shower to help her wake up since she was pretty sure she’d just been woken up in the middle of some amazing deep sleep, which wasn’t something she got all that often. She turned the shower on to lukewarm because she couldn’t stand cold showers but didn’t want a hot one, either, scrubbed her skin a little, cleaned her face, and got dressed for her morning workout.

Her smoothie was her go-to breakfast just about every morning, and it was what her nutritionist always told her to have. They’d tweaked it a few times over the years to add more or less of something she might need based on how she was feeling or performing, but the base was greens and banana, which, thankfully, made it taste less like greens. She drank half of it, grabbed a bag of balls, and carried it outside, where she dropped the bag and took a look at the sky.

The weather was supposed to be normal for a SoCal summer today, which meant that she’d sweat a little, but it wouldn’t be blistering heat making her lethargic and wanting to go back into the air-conditioning. Aspen set her smoothie down on her backyard table that sat on the concrete stone back patio that was here when she moved in, and walked out onto her sand.

It wasn’t too hot yet, which was another reason to start training early because once that sun hit the center of the sky, the sand could start to burn her feet. She could help things by grabbing her hose and spraying the sand down, but she’d be fine for right now; she’d do that later if she needed to. Aspen pulled a ball out of the bag and walked to the side of her yard opposite her plywood-made triangle-shaped box. She called it a box, anyway, but it wasn’t really a box. It was a thick piece of plywood resting on cinder blocks that she could remove or add to, changing angles to get in a little more work than with the ball usually just returning to her if she hit it just right, which was the goal, of course.

She had a short fence that hit her around her chest, but she was taller than a lot of people, so for many of them, it would hit them around their shoulders. It helped if the ball bounced and she didn’t get it, but sometimes, it wouldn’t stop it, and she’d land a ball in someone else’s yard. She’d asked her neighbors if she could go in and pick it up if that happened, and the neighbors to her right and left had both agreed. She had one neighbor behind her who hadn’t liked the idea of her going onto his property, so they worked it out that he’d toss the balls back over the fence whenever he saw them. She’d autographed a few things for him for his trouble since his teenage granddaughter was a fan, and that seemed to prevent any issues.

She lined up to toss the ball against the box and start working on her passing when she heard a voice, which she recognized, coming from behind her.

“You can just put it there for now. Thank you.”

Aspen turned her head before she turned around fully and saw Kendra Bowie directing two burly men to put a table down on the back patio of the house next door to her own.

“We’ve got the chairs coming,” one of the movers said.

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