“He’s going around her. She can’t stop him now. No use trying. He jumps. He shoots. He…”

I watched the basketball sail through the air, my mind registering everything in slow motion as it closed in on the hoop. It obviously wasn’t going to go in given the way it curved, but that didn’t stop me from leaning my body to one side to try to telekinetically instruct that big ball of rubber to change its course.

It hit the backboard with a clang, bouncing off the ring before sailing downwards and landing straight into Sammy’s waiting hands.

“Misses,” she cried. “Again!”

Shit. I released all the air in my chest and glared at her. “That’s only my third miss and we’ve been playing for ages.”

“Third? Try your sixth miss, loser.” Sammy stuck her tongue out as she spun on her heels and began to dribble the ball, her eyes narrowing on mine. “I mean, back in your prime, that would have been unheard of. Six missed shots from number twenty-three, Mr. Marcus Edward Anderson.”

I gasped in mock shock, slapping my hands to my cheeks for effect. “You middle-named me.”

“It must have been a slip of the tongue, MC Eddie A.”

“Oh, it’s on, Samantha Traitor Anderson.”

I began to stalk forward, my smirk alive as she attempted to dodge my approach and dribble around me, but it was no use. I blocked her path one way, then again in the other direction, until eventually the two of us were dancing in circles, our arms everywhere as I tried to distract her while she kept beating me off.

“Leave me alone, you big bully,” she shrieked through a giggle.

“I am man. Man does not accept defeat,” I roared.

“You’d think you’d be used to losing by now.” Her foot went to move one way, only for the little trickster to quickly move in the other direction, giving her that split-second advantage to turn, spin, jump, and shoot.

The clang of the ball on the hoop had me looking back over my shoulder just as the ball bounced back up in the air, sailing in a perfect arch before it gracefully swished through the net.

“Woah!” Sammy cried out, both her arms going skywards as she leaned back and began to celebrate. “I am on fire!”

“You got lucky.”

“No, you got complacent. I am skilled and the next best NBA player of the decade.”

“You’re five-foot-three. Unless you’re playing with the other Oompa Lumpas in The National Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory League, dream on, little sis.”

Sammy planted her hands on her hips and scowled at me. “Why can’t you just admit that I’m better than you?”

“I’m not in the habit of lying.”

“Only to yourself,” she muttered, arching a brow.

“Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Dude, that knife. My back. The two don’t go together. Take it out, take it out, take it out.”

“Just say it, Marcus. Why can’t you just say it?” She smirked.

“Because,” I groaned as I bent forward and scooped up the basketball, turned, jumped and took a clean shot. “You’re not.”

Thankfully, this time, it swished through the net with a wispy kiss before it bounced onto the ground.

“I never had you down as a sore loser, mate,” came a rougher voice from somewhere behind me. I recognised who it belonged to instantly.

With a bright beaming smile on my face, I turned just in time to see the big, manly stud walking forward.

Cameron Davis

“No. It can’t be!” I shouted.

His hands came up in the air as he walked forward, his blonde, Viking-like hair—longer than I’d ever seen it before—covering most of his upper body. Cam wasn’t your average twenty-five-year-old. He looked at least six or seven years my senior because of his peppered blonde beard, and his upper body was ripped so much it was a mystery why he hadn’t been asked to feature on the cover of Men’s Health yet. Known for taking part in every damn sport that existed, he’d turned into a poster boy for how all of us mid-twenty males should and could have looked if we put down the beer, climbed a mountain, and maybe wrestled a few bears. He shook his head as he approached me in his man vest and cargo shorts, smirking like the cocky, handsome bastard he was as his flip-flops, well, flipped and flopped.

“Fear not, my child,” he bellowed. “Your god has arrived.”

“What the hell are you doing here, man?” I asked, slapping his shoulder before I reached out to shake his hand.

“Ah, you know. I had time to kill and thought I’d check in with the skinny boys of Calverley.”

I flexed my biceps, which usually looked pretty decent, but standing next to Thor himself, I soon realised that I was an average five out of ten when it came to muscle mass.

“Point taken.”

“Thought I’d stop by and see your ugly arse.” Cam ruffled the top of my head. “And kick it at basketball.”

“Yeah? Join the queue.” I laughed. “How did you even know I was back with my folks?”

“Aunt Lois phoned Ma.”

Lois was my bubbling wreck of an emotional mother who was also best friends with Cam’s mum, Erin. It was why the two of us had felt more like brothers, going back as far as we could remember. Even though we went to different universities when the time came, we always stayed in touch. He was the guy I couldn’t have made it through high school without. The one who knew more about me than most.

More. Just not everything.

“Should have guessed.”

“You know how often those two talk. She phoned about an hour ago. I happen to be off work for a few days, so I popped round to Mum’s for a good feed. As soon as I heard that Sammy was showing you how basketball should be played, I decided to come along and give you some one-on-one tuition.”

“There isn’t a thing you can teach me that I don’t already know, mate.”

“Except how to defeat women.”

“That I could do with some help with.” I pointed at him.

He turned to my little sister and gave her a wink. “Hey, Sam.”

“Hi, Cam,” she said through a smile, and my eyes flickered between the two of them before Sammy coughed, pushed her hair behind her ears and began to shuffle.

“You doing good?” he asked her, and I could have sworn I saw my little sister, who never blushed, blushing.

“Yep.” She nodded before looking up at him and growing even redder. “You?”

“All good,” he purred. Fucking purred. Like he was a damn big cat that was yawning and stretching himself awake. My mouth opened in surprise as I watched some form of silent communication going on between my oldest buddy and my little sister, but before I had time to blink, Sammy had made her excuses and was turning to go inside. When Cam looked back at me, he appeared unfazed. I made a mental note to try to remember to ask him about that later.

“You still going soft on the ladies, Anderson?” he asked me.

“And getting my arse kicked at every turn for the trouble.”

“Ah. Girl woes. I knew there had to be a good reason why you were back home with the ‘rents.”

There wasn’t much point in lying. Out of all the random mates I’d accumulated over the years, Cam was the one I struggled to hide anything from. He seemed to know my poker face, and he could definitely smell my bullshit from a mile off.

“Me and Nat broke up,” I said flatly.

“Yeah. Mum told me.”

“Of course she did. And my mum told her.” I nodded.

“Aunt Lois worries. You know that.” Cam had called my mum “Aunt Lois” for years, and in turn, I’d done the same with Aunt Erin. They were the family who weren’t actually family, but were just as important. “She needs a shoulder to cry on when you lot tell her to quit being silly and to stop worrying. Someone who will actually listen to her.”

“I’m glad she’s got your mum to talk to.”

Cam pulled a bobble off his wrist, never taking his eyes off me like I was a lab rat that he was studying, as he scooped his hair in his hands, wrapped it around itself a few times and shoved it up in some man bun thing on the top of his head.

“Shame about Nat, though. Good girl. I liked her. Thought you guys were set to last the distance.”

I shrugged, scratching the back of my neck awkwardly. “For a while, so did I.”

“What happened? Aunt Lois didn’t give Mum a solid reason.”

“She just assumes we ran our course.”

“And that’s not the truth?”

“Kinda. She… Nat loved someone else, mate.”

Cameron’s face dropped, his shock and surprise very apparent as he stared at me with wide eyes. “She cheated on you?”

“No.” I scowled. “Not really. But she had an ex she couldn’t seem to forget. She tried. She would have stuck around if I’d asked her to, but… I let her go.”

“Let her go or pushed her away?”

“Half a dozen of one, six of the other.” I sucked in a deep breath, letting it all out in one heavy blow as I drummed my hands on my thighs and shrugged again. “I wanted her to be happy, and even though I know I could have made her that and given her a good life—and she’d have stayed, ‘cause Nat’s like that—who the fuck am I to stand in the way of all that true love, meant-to-be shit? There’s being happy and then there’s being happy. I couldn’t give her that extra thing that was missing for her in our relationship. Whatever that piece of magic is, this other guy has it for her in spades.”

“Wow. That’s…”

“Pathetic?” I smirked.

He laughed his deep laugh. “I was going to say that’s brave, but we can run with pathetic if that makes you feel less awkward.”

“Cheers, pal.”

“And this other dude… The ex? Will he treat her right?”

“He’d better.”

I bent down to scoop the ball up, holding it on my index finger before spinning and balancing it for as long as I could while Cam watched it rotating, disinterested.

“What’s the plan for you now then?” he eventually asked.

“Now… we play basketball. Then we’ll probably drink some beer and pretend we’re just two guys with no worries or cares in the world, and we’ll catch the hell up on each other’s lives.”

“What are we? Forty?”

“You could pass for forty. I think it’s the long hair.” I scowled, tilting my head to one side. “Or maybe it’s the beard. Are those strands of grey in your eyebrows?”

He snatched the spinning ball off my finger, barely even moving before he threw it through the air, scoring a definite three-pointer.

“For that, I’m really going to beat your arse at this game.” Cam jabbed me on the shoulder, hardly putting any effort into it, but it still made me take a step back to regain my balance.

“Careful, you beast. I bruise like a peach!”

“Want me to kiss it better?” he asked, his lips going all pouty.

“Maybe when it’s darker so no one can see us.”

“Whatever you say, stud. Now, let’s play some basketball, and then I want to buy my broken-hearted friend a pint and sit out in the sunshine. Maybe head into Leeds after if we feel like it.”

“I’m meant to be back here with Mum and Dad to get my head straight. To stop drinking my troubles away.”

“You’re saying no to me?”

“How could anyone say no to you, you handsome brute? I was just pretending to put up a fight. Makes me feel like I’m making some progress.” I grinned.

“So, it’s on?”

“Game on.” I pushed myself backwards and ran to retrieve the ball from the ground, taking a shot while he just stood there watching me with a smile on his face, looking at me like he knew something I didn’t.

Maybe he did. Maybe everyone did. As things stood on that driveway, there wasn’t much I knew about anything, other than my vital statistics and the fact that I had some shit to figure out sometime soon in the future. But all of that could wait for one night. It could wait because life was short and it was moving fast, and goddamn it, if I wanted a beer with an old friend of mine then I was going to go and have one.

I only had myself to think about now.