“Does it make me a bad girlfriend if I say that I really don’t like basketball?” I asked Sophie, who was sitting beside me on the bleachers by the basketball courts as we watched Carter’s first basketball game of the season. It was only ten minutes into the period or quarter or whatever and I was already a little bored. At first, I just followed Carter with my eyes everywhere that he went on the court. But then that got boring because he was so small and far away so then I tried paying attention to the game as a whole but I just had no idea what was going on.

“No, you don’t have to like it,” Sophie assured me. “It just matters that you’re here to support him. And you’re here, so you’re good.”

“I just can’t get into this,” I admitted to her. “I mean, I’m going to stay and I can tell when they score, I think, so I’ll just cheer him on and stuff.”

“There you go,” She chirped. “I know that Andy wasn’t a big fan of soccer but he was at every home game that we had. Just that you’re here is what matters. Except next time, you’ll have to bring Paige with you because I’m not the biggest fan of basketball either.”

I groaned. “I mean, he looks so amazing out there but I just wish that he played something that wasn’t basketball. Or that one of you guys could explain it to me. Maybe I’ll bring Andy or Will next time so that they can explain to me what’s happening.”

“Yeah, why didn’t they come to this game? Didn’t they all go to your games to support you?” She wondered curiously.

I nodded and then took a handful of popcorn out of the sleeve of popcorn on my lap. “Right but that was because… I honestly have no idea why they went to my games. They all went to that one at the beginning of the year, even Owen showed up for that one. But I guess that was enough for them. They never go to Will’s hockey games either so I guess it just isn’t a big deal.”

“Speaking of Will,” Sophie said with a wide grin but she was cut off by a loud cheer from the crowd around us and I could tell that our team had just scored so we both did our plentiful amount of cheering. I tried to get Carter’s attention to blow him a kiss or something but he seemed very focused and into the game, so that didn’t happen.

“You were saying about Will?” I reminded Sophie after the crowd calmed down.

“Right. He has his date with Aster this weekend. Do you know where they’re going?”

I shrugged and shook my head, keeping my eye on the court where Carter was being put on the bench so the game just became exponentially less exciting. “He hasn’t told me anything. He’s really excited though, that much is obvious.”

“She’s freaking out,” Sophie added with a small laugh. “I wish that we could go on this date with them to spy because it would be so amusing, they’re both going to be such nervous wrecks.”

“That’s so mean,” I scolded her but I also couldn’t stop myself from laughing just a little bit.

“But you know that it’s true.”

“Sadly,” I conceded. “I’m happy for them though, I’m sure that they’ll make a cute couple. And Will really likes Aster.” I didn’t tell her that Carter told me that Will talks about Aster a lot lately. In fact, he won’t stop talking about the poor girl. That wasn’t something that Will would want spread around and, although Sophie is one of my best friends, that wouldn’t be fair to Will if I told her something like that. Although I did think that it was absolutely adorable of him.

“They will make a cute couple. We should triple date!” Sophie tells me excitedly. “And then when Paige and Ethan finally get together, we can quadruple date. And then we can add Tommy and Anna in there and then… what would that be?”

“A quintuple date maybe?” I offered with a laugh.

“Yes! It’ll be so much fun,” She grinned.

“You know, we basically do that now. That sounds like everybody just going out to dinner, like what we did for Will’s party a few days ago, we all just went to dinner. It’d basically be like that,” I reminded her because that’d be ten people in a quintuple date and it just seemed like a dinner party or something to me.

“Sure, but it’s different because at the end, everybody has sex,” Sophie assured me.

I checked the court again but Carter was still on the bench. “That sounds disturbing. Four of them are brothers, you know, and I’m not a swinger.”

“Shut up,” She rolled her eyes at me, jokingly shoving my shoulder. “You know what I meant.”

“I know. We should do that, it would be fun. All we have to do is get Ethan to ask Paige out,” I reminded her that this quintuple date was only hypothetical.

“Or Paige could ask Ethan out, Maddie, don’t be so sexist, this is the twenty-first century,” Sophie scolded me.

“I know that, I didn’t mean it like that,” I told her. “I just mean that Paige is way too shy to do that, so if they do get together, it’ll be Ethan asking Paige out. You know that. I love her to death, but she’s painfully shy, especially when it comes to Ethan.”

“You’re right,” She sighed. “They’ll get together though, I have a feeling.”

“This isn’t a rom com, Sophie, but I appreciate your faith,” I said with a small laugh just as Carter got back onto the court and immediately got the basketball into the hoop, so I started cheering with the crowd again.

The game never really improved because I never could grasp what was going on. I mean, I could tell when the ball went into the hoop that it was good but that was about the extent of my knowledge on the sport. I also knew that when the final buzzer buzzed that Carter’s team had won.

I greeted him outside of the locker room to give him a celebratory hug and a light kiss, ignoring his teammates around us.

“We should go to dinner to celebrate,” I told him as we walked with Sophie to Carter’s car along with Ethan on the other side of him.

“We can’t tonight,” Carter said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. I remembered to be thankful that he took a shower in the locker room before coming out to greet me. “Tommy needs us back at the house as soon as possible. He apparently has an announcement to make and it’s big.”

“You don’t know what it is?” I asked him curiously.

He shook his head. “I have a pretty good idea but I’m not positive.”

When we got outside, I snuggled closer to Carter’s side because it was so cold outside and Sophie traveled over to Ethan to start talking to him. I hoped that she wasn’t about to start talking about Paige but I was sure that was the only thing that she’d want to talk to Ethan about.

“What do you think it is?” I asked him.

Carter grinned at me. “I’m not telling you my theory. I don’t want to ruin the surprise if I’m right.”

“Fine then,” I chuckled. We all got into Carter’s car and then soon, we were pulling up to the large house. All four of us hurried inside, eager to hear the big news that Tommy had for us tonight. I wasn’t sure what it could be though. Maybe he got a job offer far away so he had to move out of Rawlins.

Inside, everybody was gathered at the dinner table eating dinner so we all joined them. Sophie sat with Andy but I stayed with Carter, sitting between my boyfriend and Tom.

“How was the game?” Tom asked Carter.

“We won,” He confirmed. “What’s the big news?”

“He won’t tell us,” Andy sighed, motioning toward where Tommy was sitting with Anna, who was grinning and then I started to have my own suspicions as to what the big news is. I was hoping that I was right.

“Now that everybody’s here, will you enlighten us as to why we have been summoned here tonight?” Will wondered dramatically as everybody turned to look at Tommy and Anna expectantly.

“Yeah, okay,” Tommy cleared his throat. “Um, well I’m just gonna kinda say it…”

He paused for just a moment too long for Anna’s preference, because she jumped in with a huge grin on her face as she finished his sentence, “We’re engaged!”

There was a collected gasp from everyone around the table. Even though that was what I was thinking the news was, I was so glad that I was right about that. Especially looking at how Tommy was hugging Anna close to him, as if he was afraid that she’d float away at any moment and that he never wanted to let her go. It was beautiful.

Everybody started to clap and cheer and then everybody was standing up to congratulate Tommy and Anna. I hugged Anna and then with Sophie, we demanded to see the ring, which had an absolutely huge diamond in the center and it was very extraordinary.

As she told us how he proposed, I had tears in my eyes because I was such a softie when it came to proposals and weddings and stuff like that.

He’d her to the park where they had their first kiss back in high school, Anna had told us, and that was where he proposed to her. It was really romantic and cute even though they got a lot of weird looks from the strangers around them.

“I’m really so happy for you,” I said to Tommy, giving him a tight hug after Anna had told us the story with a lot more detail than that. She was trying her hardest not to cry through the whole speech so it was a little hard to understand but I got the general idea of the story.

“Thanks, Maddie,” He muttered with a small smile.

“Do you guys have a date or anything?” Sophie wondered as we all sat back down in our seats to finish dinner but how could I eat dinner now that I was so excited for Tommy and Anna.

“No,” Anna shook her head. “I don’t want to start thinking about that stuff yet. My mom is in Jersey and she’s flying back soon and I want to tell her first, so that she can be part of the planning.”

“You could get married here at the lake!” Sophie suggested with a squeal, obviously proud of her very romantic idea.

“That would be really cute,” Anna nodded.

“Which is why Owen did that with his wedding,” Tommy added. “So no. I’m not copying Owen’s wedding.”

“We’ll find something,” Anna confirmed with a nod.

The rest of the dinner conversation was about the wedding and I just listened for the most part, thinking about how scary it is to be getting married. I mean, I’d seen two marriages up close in my life.

One of them being my mother and my father’s relationship which, granted I wasn’t sure if they were married or not, they were still in a serious relationship. And that ended disastrously with my mom running off to Indiana with a broken heart that she tried to fill with disgusting men and alcohol. My father hurt too, I thought, but he hid his pain behind his work which was healthier than my mother’s coping but it was still painful for him.

And then there was Tom and his wife, Brianne, and they’d loved each other amazingly. It was so beautiful but then it was gone. Neither one of them did anything wrong but the universe didn’t want them together or something and now, Tom had to live with the pain of losing his other half, knowing that she didn’t deserve to die. I couldn’t imagine that pain and now, surrounded by his children, I bet that he could see her eyes when he looked at his sons.

It wasn’t like I completely didn’t believe in happy endings because if that was the case, I probably wouldn’t have been with Carter at all. I did believe in love and happy endings, it was just scary to me to take a risk like that. Maybe you’ll separate, maybe the other person will die or maybe you will die. You just never knew what would happen.

And marriage was kind of testing fate to me. It was a promise to each other that you would get your happy ending but it just seemed like such a daunting promise to make. I didn’t like to think about marriage myself because it was just too intimidating and it was forever away for me, so I pushed away my inhibitions about marriage to be happy for Tommy and Anna, who definitely looked like they were going to get their happy ending.

“Who do you think is going to be his best man?” I asked Carter once we were alone upstairs in my room. It was Friday night so we were going to spend the night in my room together.

“Probably Rodney, his best friend from college,” Carter shrugged. “And then we’ll all be his groomsmen. Anna might ask you to be a bridesmaid.”

“You think?”

He nodded. “Sure.”

I wasn’t sure if I’d still be here by the time they got married, I thought, but I didn’t say that. Even if that was the case, I could always come back for the wedding. “They looked so happy together tonight. I’m really excited for them.”

“Yeah, they’ve been together forever. We all knew that they’d eventually get married,” Carter told me, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “I knew what was coming when he told me that he had news to tell us tonight.”

“Well, wedding aside, you did really good tonight at the game,” I told him, deciding that I shouldn’t let Tommy’s good news overshadow Carter’s victory at the basketball game earlier.

“Thanks,” He chuckled. “I wasn’t really playing my best though.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I mumbled. “Considering I don’t know the first thing about basketball. Sophie said that me just being there and being supportive is good enough though.”

“Yeah,” Carter laughed before wrapping his arms around my waist. “I do like that you went. But you know, if you don’t like basketball, you don’t have to go to the games.”

“You went to all of my soccer games,” I reminded him.

“Sure, but I can stand soccer,” He shrugged. “It’s really not a big deal, Maddie.”

“It is a big deal. You won, you should celebrate your victory.”

“We win almost every game.”

“We won all of our games but we still celebrated them,” I told him with a roll of my eyes before I spun around so that I was straddling my boyfriend’s lap and then I gave him a mischievous grin. I kissed his lips for a moment and then his stubbly jawline. “Let’s celebrate.”

“You said that very suggestively,” He said, his voice getting a little heavier and quieter.

“I did, didn’t I?” I giggled, pushing him down onto my bed so that I was hovering over top of him and then I started kissing his neck, wondering where in the hell I got this confidence from.

First the lingerie and now this, I felt like a completely different person than who I had come here as. And that wasn’t a bad thing. I felt so much more alive when I was with Carter, here in the Fisher house. I felt wanted. Not just by Carter but by all of the Fishers and Sophie and Paige. It was an amazing feeling.

But with Carter, it was obviously special because I wouldn’t dress up in lacy lingerie for any other Fisher or for the soccer team and I sure as hell wouldn’t start to disrobe them with my own hands.

Yeah, with Carter, I was a different person. I was confident in everything I did because I saw the way that he looked at me and it made me feel like I was a star. And I was addicted to that feeling almost as much as I was addicted to this moment.