Girls of Summer

by Kate Christie

  GIRLS OF SUMMER

  Book Five of Girls of Summer

  by Kate Christie

  Copyright 2019 by Kate Christie. Second Growth Books, Seattle, WA.

  All rights reserved. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be resold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual organizations, persons (living or dead), events, or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Dedication

  To the petitioners in Obergefell v. Hodges: April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse; Jim Obergefell and John Arthur; David Michener and William Ives; Georgia and Pamela Yorksmith; Kelly Noe and Kelly McCraken; Joseph Vitale and Robert Talmas; Brittani Henry and Brittni Rogers; Gregory Bourke and Michael DeLeon; Randell Johnson and Paul Campion; Jimmy Meade and Luther Barlowe; Kimberly Franklin and Tamera Boyd; Maurice Blanchard and Dominique James; Timothy Love and Lawrence Ysunza; Johno Espejo and Matthew Mansell; Kellie Miller and Vanessa DeVillez; Ijpe DeKoe and Thomas Kostura; Valeria Tanco and Sophia Jesty.

  Thank you.

  Acknowledgments

  As always, I offer my sincere gratitude to my two trusty early readers/editors, Kris and Margaret. The Girls of Summer wouldn’t be the same without you.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  About the Author

  Patreon Supporters

  Chapter One

  “What do you think?” Jamie asked, tapping her phone case nervously with her thumb as Ellie gazed around the one-bedroom apartment.

  It wasn’t quite the exposed brick walls and high ceilings Jamie had been looking for, but after a solid week of apartment hunting, her list of desired qualities had shifted. Noise, car pollution, and the scent of cigarettes and other smoking products was not a good combination, she’d discovered while looking in the hipster neighborhood she’d thought she wanted to live in. Burnside, home to the apartment they were currently viewing, was quieter and more residential, and offered easy access to Washington Park and its wooded trails, decorative gardens, and the city’s resident zoo.

  The building was historic, nearly a century old but carefully maintained and recently updated, according to the property manager. The wood floors were in good shape, the kitchen counters and appliances had been recently replaced, and the windows looked clean and functional. Windows which, incidentally, looked out over Providence Park only a block and a half away. That meant she would be within walking distance of Thorns (and Timbers) home games, only two and a half miles from Ellie’s house, and twenty minutes from the team’s training facilities in Beaverton. Not only that, but—and this had made the decision for her, really—there was a Fred Meyer and a Chipotle across the street from the stadium. Jamie could walk to most of the necessities in life, an advantage that trumped wall surfaces and ceiling heights any day.

  “I like it,” Ellie announced, gazing around at the gleaming wood floors and the three wide windows in the living room.

  “It isn’t too white?” Jamie asked. The walls and most of the wood trim had recently been painted a nearly blinding white.

  “Well, this is Portland we’re talking about,” Ellie joked.

  “Ha ha. I meant the interior.”

  “No, really, I think the white makes it seem bright in here.”

  That had been Jamie’s impression, too.

  “Burnside isn’t cheap, though,” Ellie added, lapsing into what Jamie thought of as mom mode. “Is the rent doable?”

  She shrugged. “It wouldn’t have been before. But now… Besides, I could cover the lease with my savings if I had to.”

  She was hoping—planning—that she wouldn’t have to do that. She had yet to receive her first permanent roster paycheck from US Soccer, and the Nike deal wouldn’t offer a payout for a little while yet, but she’d been earning more than league minimum while living rent-free at Ellie’s, not to mention her Champions League bonus for making it to the semis. Even without additional compensation, she could afford the deposit and a few months of rent without taking too much of a hit.

  “All right, then,” Ellie said, grinning at her from across the empty apartment. “I think you should go for it.”

  “Good,” Jamie said, her return smile a bit crooked. “Because I signed the lease an hour ago.”

  “Are you kidding? It’s yours?”

  “At least for the next year,” Jamie confirmed.

  During the open house that morning, there had been multiple applications submitted on the apartment. Fortunately, the property manager was some form of queer, Jamie was pretty sure, as well as a self-avowed fan of the Thorns and Timbers. The place was Jamie’s if she wanted it, the manager had told her when she dropped off a completed application, giving her a smile that let Jamie know she was getting the preferential queer treatment that every once in a while made life as a non-binary lesbian easier to deal with. Or maybe the manager just liked the idea of having a soccer player in the building. Either way, Jamie had taken the apartment on the spot, only a little nervous as she signed the lease and handed over the deposit and first month’s rent. Signing the checks had made it real in a way that even filling out the lease hadn’t done.

  Now she took a deep breath as she gazed around her first solo apartment. She was definitely going to need to find some furniture. But that was what Craigslist was for, wasn’t it?

  “Aw! My kid is growing up!” Ellie said, her arms opening wide as she approached Jamie.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Jamie said, steeling herself for one of her soon-to-be former roommate’s signature bear hugs. But she was smiling, too.

  “Have you told Emma yet?” Ellie asked as she released her.

  “I had her on FaceTime during the open house.”

  “Nice. So when do you move in?”

  “This weekend.” As Ellie gave her a surprised look, she shrugged. “I know, I’ll barely be here for the next couple of months, but I wanted to have a place to come home to after Canada. You know?”

  Ellie nodded and threw her arm around Jamie’s shoulders. “I know exactly. Now show me the rest of it. This place is definitely bigger than my basement.”

  “You mean your daylight basement, right?” Jamie said as she led her toward the kitchen and dining room.

  “Sure, buddy. Whatever you say.”

  The tour didn’t take long, because while the apartment was decently sized for a unit of its kind (Jamie felt like an expert on Portland residential properties after the past week), it was still only three large rooms plus a walk-in closet.

  “Holy shit,” Ellie said, turning a circle inside the closet. “This is huge.”

  “I know,” Jamie said, grinning as she surveyed the space. She could practically fit her car in here, which wasn’t saying much given it was one of the smaller automobiles on the road, but still.

  “Well done,” Ellie said, holding up her hand.

  Jamie slapped it hard, laughing at Ellie’s wince as the sound echoed through the empty apartment. This was her new place. Her place. Hers.

  A few hours later, though, as she la
y in the guest bedroom in Ellie’s basement going through her nightly meditation routine, she found herself distracted. Upstairs she could hear the occasional rumble of a voice, punctuated by the creak of a floorboard and the whoosh of water surging through pipes. Usually, these sounds were white noise, but tonight they engendered an almost panicked nostalgia. In a matter of days, she would be sleeping alone in her new building several miles away, surrounded by strangers in separate, locked apartments. But maybe she didn’t actually have to move just yet. Ellie wouldn’t mind if she figured things out after the season ended, would she? The property manager might let her rescind her application. It wasn’t like they wouldn’t be able to fill the space.

  As anxiety swirled through her, Jamie closed her eyes. Thinking, she told herself, trying to pick up the threads of her lost mantra. She refocused and made it through the exercise twice more before the wave of nausea subsided, leaving her tired and slightly empty. She went through her mantra a few more times, continuing until, finally, she could feel the peace of meditation in every part of her body and mind. May all beings everywhere be happy and free. Including me.

  But she wasn’t free, and it was possible she never would be.

  In the middle of the night, she awoke from a dream so real that it took a full thirty seconds for her to realize that it was only a nightmare. Even after her eyes grew accustomed to the dark and she understood that she was in a house in Portland and not in the back room of a bar in France, the dream that was in fact a memory lingered, its inky fingers probing her mind. She huddled under her comforter, sweat making the short hair at the back of her neck itch. She was too hot, but she couldn’t stand the thought of baring her skin to the cool air. So she lay where she was, shaken and shaking, and tried to trick her mind into thinking different thoughts.

  At first she conjured an image of Emma the last time she’d visited Portland, but that wasn’t quite right. She tried another memory, one from their recent trip to Lyon—but no, that was wrong, too. The idea was to escape the nightmare, not revisit it. Finally, she remembered their last camp in Carson. On movie night, Emma had sat beside Jamie on one of the beds, their hands clasped loosely, friends and teammates all around. Jamie had felt completely at ease even though she was still technically on the bubble. It had helped that Jessica North had been cut before New Zealand.

  At the thought of Jessica North, a tiny spark of outrage flared in her brain. Quickly, Jamie seized on it, fanning it carefully until it became an actual ember that burned away the remaining dark tendrils of the dream. Jessica North didn’t deserve to represent the stars and stripes. Ultimately, it didn’t matter if you were the most skilled player on the soccer field; you had to be a good teammate, too. Jamie had seen it in the men’s game in London again and again: a team made up of superstars who couldn’t seem to find a way to work together on the pitch. That was why seemingly inferior teams were often more successful—their players struggled less with subjugating their egos to the team.

  The flame of righteous indignation did its job, and soon the sweat was cooling on her skin and she was burrowing into her comforter for warmth rather than safety. Ellie’s basement really was cold, even now that spring had sprung in Portland. In a matter of days, Jamie would be sleeping far above the earth on the third floor of—

  She cut off the thought and pictured instead Emma in her condo at the top of Seattle’s iconic Queen Anne Hill. Buyer’s remorse once again threatened to settle in, but she pushed it away. She needed to think of good things, like the smell of fresh mown grass, the morning dew sparkling on a sunlit soccer field, the softness of her cleats after she rubbed shoe polish into the leather. These memories were easy to summon. Soccer had been the one almost daily constant in her life since she could remember. Even if she wasn’t in season, she was always training for the next pre-season, the next opening match, the next championship run.

  When her soccer career was over, how would she mark the passage of time? Maybe she would coach, maybe not. Either way, there would be kids to teach the ways of the beautiful game. She and Emma were both clear on that. Which meant kiddie practices and Saturday mornings at the local soccer complex, wherever that might be. Would their daughters (sons?) someday play at Emma’s high school, following in their mom’s—and Michelle Akers’s—footsteps?

  The thought made her smile, and the gesture pushed out the remaining darkness gripping her mind. She breathed deeply and concentrated on the images that always calmed her. Soon, before she even knew it was happening, she drifted into sleep where she remained until the world beyond her daylight basement was suffused again with light.

  #

  Her nightmare the following night was more of a morning-mare. She awoke at five a.m. sweating and gasping, certain once again that the dream was real. But it wasn’t, of course. She was in Ellie’s basement, not her new apartment, and—THANK GOD—there wasn’t actually a faceless man standing beside her bed, silent and ominous.

  Jamie held her chest where she could feel her heart pounding. Blood rushed in her ears, muffling the silence of her bedroom and making her feel oddly disconnected from reality. What had she been thinking? She clearly wasn’t ready to sleep by herself in her new apartment. She’d romanticized the idea of living alone without taking into account what it would actually feel like, and now the reality was creeping in.

  The sky was already growing light outside. What she really wanted was a long, hot shower, but the noise would wake Ellie and Jodie. Instead, she slipped out of bed, pulled on warm socks and sweats, and went through the exercises and stretches she always did before starting a tai chi session. With her crazy travel schedule, it had been difficult the past few months to keep up her routine. Why was it that even when you knew something was good for you, you couldn’t always make yourself do it?

  As she began her tai chi moves, she remembered an article Lacey, the national team’s fitness coach and chief of torture, had shared a couple of months earlier. The trick to making a habit stick, the author had written, was to start small; schedule the new practice after an existing step in your daily routine, like brushing your teeth; and associate the action with a pleasurable reward. A square or two of dark chocolate wouldn’t be a violation of the team diet, Lacey had stressed unsubtly, especially as studies showed that dark chocolate was good for the human brain.

  Maybe Jamie should pick some up. According to Ellie, Trader Joe’s chocolate selection was the best, and Portland had at least three TJs in the city limits, one of which was only a few blocks from her new apartment. It might help her work her mental health regimen back into her daily routine, something she obviously needed. The incident with Jenny’s stalker and the trip to Lyon were hitting her at last, judging from her dreams.

  Freaking PTSD. Every time she thought she’d gotten past Lyon, it came back to bite her in the ass. Or, to be more precise, in the brain. During her recent trip to France, Jamie had been surprised how little angst she’d felt strolling the narrow avenues of the city where she’d been assaulted. She would have thought she’d be looking for the guy everywhere, and she did occasionally think of him and what had happened. But even if she had crossed paths with him, she doubted either of them would have been the wiser. A decade was a legitimately long time, and she was such a different person now. Being in Lyon didn’t have the power to hurt her like she’d thought it would, maybe because Emma had been there, too.

  At the second leg of Champions League semis, Emma hadn’t hidden in the stands in a baseball cap and sunglasses, but rather insisted on sitting directly behind the visitor’s bench at the Parc Olympique Lyonnais stadium, her blonde ponytail defiantly uncovered. When Jamie had asked worriedly if she was sure she wanted to be so public, Emma had touched her shoulder and said, voice calm and confident, “Yes. Don’t worry, okay?”

  And then she had taken off her sweatshirt and turned away, and Jamie had realized she was wearing an Arsenal jersey. Jamie’s Arsenal jersey, to be exact. For a United fan, this was nearly akin to proposing marr
iage. Britt must have had similar thoughts because she’d slapped Jamie in the arm during warm-ups and waved toward the seats where Emma was posing for a fan photo with her back to the camera, smiling over her shoulder with “Maxwell” and Jamie’s number clearly visible.

  “Do you think she’ll take your name when you get married?” Britt had asked. “Or wait, I know—you could both change your name to Blakewell!”

  “Shut it,” Jamie had said, but she couldn’t help smiling. Emma was definitely working hard to make up the whole lying to her thing. To be honest, it was working.

  Emma’s presence had been the best thing about the match against Lyon. That, and scoring first only five minutes in. But Arsenal had ended up losing 2-1, and even though beating Lyon at home had been a long shot, the loss had still stung. Flying home in first class with Emma had been an excellent distraction, though, Jamie had to admit.

  First class travel, an apartment of her own, and enough money in the bank to pay off her car, if she wanted. Or even to buy a different model. If the Nike contract turned out to be as lucrative as Amanda, her new agent at Sparks Sports Management, had suggested—especially if the US won the World Cup—then maybe Jamie would trade in her tiny Kia for a car more befitting a world champion. Like a Beamer, or maybe a Mercedes… She stopped herself. No need to get all status-conscious. She lived in the Pacific Northwest, so a Subaru would be the best bet. Then she and Emma would have matching cars.

  And yeah, no. That would be a little too saccharine even for her taste.

  She used to fantasize about what she would do with money. She’d lived month to month for so long, never certain where her future income would come from. Her first professional job with FC Gold Pride in the WPS had come to a sudden, disastrous end, leaving her with the sense that no job in women’s sports was ever guaranteed. Even now she knew plenty of NWSL players who lived with host families. If Ellie hadn’t offered up her basement, Jamie might well have pursued a host situation herself. But with a US Soccer contract and a growing list of sponsorship opportunities, everything had changed—except who she was. All she really needed was a quiet place to sleep, a gym membership, cooking supplies, and comfortable furniture. Well, and maybe some updated electronics. Her laptop was ancient, and she’d never actually bought a television. But she didn’t really need much more to be happy. As long as her car could get her to Seattle and back, she was good.