The house was located on a residential street ten minutes from campus—far enough that the noise wouldn't reach the university buildings, but close enough that half the baseball team and an unquantifiable number of non-athletes had arrived before eleven.
Aaron heard it from the sidewalk before he saw anything.
Julius was already walking toward the front door. "Let's go," he said without turning around.
Aaron followed.
Inside, the music hit them first. Then came the crowd, packed dense and moving through the rooms with that specific energy of a college house party after a big win. Someone recognized Julius the moment they crossed the threshold, and a shout went up from the back of the living room. Julius answered by raising a fist in the air.
Aaron shut the door behind him.
Andrew Harrison spotted him first from across the room. He stared for a second, drink in hand, before weaving his way through the crowd.
"Aaron Reed at a party?" Andrew said when he reached him. "Am I seeing things?"
"You're seeing right," Aaron said.
"This needs to be documented." Andrew turned toward his brother. "Aaron! Get over here!"
Aaron Harrison emerged from the kitchen holding a beer in each hand. When he saw Aaron standing by the entrance, he wore the exact same expression his brother had thirty seconds earlier.
"I don't believe it," he said.
"What's so weird about it?" Julius asked, popping up from behind with two bottles of his own. "Aaron knows how to have fun too."
"Julius," Andrew said, "Aaron has turned down more party invites than any other player on this team. In fact, on this whole campus."
"You're exaggerating," Aaron said.
"How many times have I invited you this year alone?"
Aaron thought for a moment. "Four."
"Four," Andrew repeated, looking at Julius. "And this is the first time he actually showed up."
"Somebody had to convince him right," Julius said with a shrug.
Aaron Harrison offered him one of the two beers he was holding. Aaron took it.
"Welcome to the world of normal human beings," Aaron Harrison said with a grin.
Aaron didn't reply, but he didn't hand the beer back either.
James arrived a moment later from the backyard, drink in hand. When he saw Aaron standing in the living room, he froze in his tracks.
"Reed?"
"James."
"What are you doing here?"
"I've been asked that already," Aaron said.
James looked at him for a second, then turned to Julius. "Did you bring him?"
"I convinced him. He walked here on his own two feet."
"Technically true," Andrew added.
James shook his head with a chuckle. It wasn't a bad surprise; it was just that Aaron showing up at a house party was something he genuinely hadn't expected to see tonight—or any other night of the season.
The party rolled on.
Julius disappeared twenty minutes later toward a group of people calling his name from the kitchen. The Harrison twins drifted off as well, each drawn into separate conversations with people Aaron didn't recognize. James went back out to the yard.
Aaron remained standing with the beer in his hand, taking in the room.
It wasn't his scene. It wasn't that he disliked the people there or that the noise was unbearable. It was simply that in a room full of people who knew each other, or who were using tonight's win as an excuse to mingle, Aaron didn't quite know what to do with his hands other than hold his bottle.
He sipped it slowly.
At one point, someone recognized him and came over to talk about the final dunk of the game. Aaron offered just enough words to keep the conversation polite for a few minutes before the guy drifted off toward the kitchen, leaving Aaron standing alone with his drink once more.
Ten minutes later, he spotted the door leading to the backyard.
Outside, the noise dropped to a volume where it actually sounded like music rather than a wall of sound. Three or four people were scattered near the house, but most of the yard was quiet, the dark grass slick under the sharp February chill that Kentucky kept even past midnight.
Aaron walked toward the back fence.
He leaned against the wooden boards with his beer in hand and stood there for several minutes doing nothing in particular. He thought vaguely about the game, about Tuesday's call, about how Julius would likely stay up until three in the morning at minimum, and about how practice was scheduled for nine tomorrow.
He thought about Hannah.
He didn't dwell on it.
A few minutes later, he heard footsteps on the grass. Someone else was coming out of the house.
A girl stepped up beside him, leaning against the same fence about five feet away, drink in hand, saying nothing at first.
Aaron gave her a quick glance. Dark curly hair. A short floral dress. A gold necklace that caught the faint light spilling from the house windows. Tall enough to stand out, though not so tall that he had to look down very far.
He turned his gaze back to the yard.
About thirty seconds passed in silence.
"This yard is the best part of the party," she said.
"Yeah," Aaron agreed.
"Did you get dragged here too?"
Aaron looked at her briefly. "More or less."
"My friends have been telling me for two weeks that I need to get out more." She made a vague gesture toward the house. "So here I am."
"And are you getting out more?"
"I'm standing in a backyard talking to a stranger." She paused. "I guess it counts."
Aaron didn't reply right away, but he didn't end the conversation either.
"Do you go here?" she asked.
"I play here."
She looked at him more closely. "Basketball team?"
"Yeah."
"Were you at the game tonight?"
"Yeah."
"I didn't watch it," she said, offering no apology for the fact. "Did you win?"
"By 15."
"Is that a lot?"
"Against Florida, yeah."
She nodded like someone receiving information without enough context to know if she should be impressed or not. "I'm Zoe," she said finally.
"Aaron."
"Aaron." She repeated the name as if measuring it. "Are you always this quiet, or is this a special performance for tonight?"
"How quiet?"
"One-word answers. Staring at the horizon. Holding a beer you're not actually drinking."
Aaron glanced down at the bottle in his hand. He'd been holding it for twenty minutes and it was still more than half full.
"I prefer the yard to the party," he said.
"Well, we have that in common."
Zoe turned slightly toward him, her back still resting against the fence. "And what else do you like besides backyards?"
Aaron considered whether that question deserved a serious answer. "Basketball," he said.
"I already know that. What else?"
"Silence."
Zoe laughed. It wasn't loud, just a short, genuine chuckle. "You are definitely at the wrong party then."
"So I've been told."
"Who convinced you to come?"
"My roommate."
"And where is your roommate now?"
Aaron gestured vaguely toward the house.
"Exactly," Zoe said. "The ones who drag you to parties are always the first to disappear."
"Did that happen to you too?"
"My friends are inside doing the exact same thing they would be doing without me." She paused. "The only difference is I actually came."
They kept talking.
It wasn't a conversation with any set topic, but rather the kind people have when they've just met and feel zero pressure to impress each other—drifting from one subject to the next without forcing a direction. Zoe was a sophomore studying communications, originally from Louisville, who had picked Kentucky because the alternative was Ohio, and she didn't feel like Ohio. Aaron answered her questions about Queens with his usual economy of words, but without shutting the door on the conversation.
At some point, Aaron finished his beer. Zoe offered him a sip of hers, and he accepted.
They kept talking.
Inside the house, the noise ebbed and flowed with whatever was happening in the main room, but neither of them made a move toward the door. They stayed in the yard talking for another twenty minutes.
Zoe asked him if he always told his opponents what he was going to do before he did it, like he had with Wilbekin. It took Aaron a second to realize how she knew about that.
"I saw the clip on Twitter," she said. "Someone posted it an hour ago."
"It's already on Twitter?"
"With seventy thousand views."
Aaron processed the number. "People are crazy," he said.
"Or they just like basketball." Zoe looked at him sideways. "Why did you tell him what you were going to do?"
"To see if he'd believe it."
"And did he?"
"At first, no."
"And then?"
"Then it was too late."
Zoe smiled at that. She didn't ask anything else about the game.
They talked about other things. About Louisville and Queens. About why anyone would dedicate four years to something as hyper-specific as basketball or as broad as communications. About whether it was better to know exactly what you wanted or to keep your options open. Aaron gave his thoughts in more detail than he usually offered on anything unrelated to sports.
Zoe listened without interrupting.
The party raged on inside without anyone seeming to notice that Aaron had vanished. Or if they did, nobody came looking for him.
That was fine by him.
Zoe rested her elbow against the fence and looked at him more intently. "How often do you do this?" she asked.
"Do what?"
"Stand quietly in a yard while everyone else is inside partying."
"First time in a yard," Aaron thought for a second. "In general? Pretty often."
"And it doesn't bother you?"
"What?"
"Being on the outside while everyone else is doing something else."
"No," Aaron said. And it was the truth.
Zoe looked at him for a moment longer, then leaned her back against the fence again. "I wish I felt the same way," she murmured.
At some point, their voices had dropped without either of them realizing it—the way conversations do when people step closer to hear each other better, until eventually they stop needing to move closer because they're already there.
It was nothing out of the ordinary, until it suddenly was.
And then there was the hallway, and the door, and then the bedroom.
What happened after that, Aaron couldn't have explained with any precision if someone had asked him the next morning. Not that anyone asked, because nobody knew it had happened.
The next morning, the first thing Aaron registered upon waking was the ceiling.
It wasn't his ceiling.
The second thing was the weight beside him.
Aaron turned his head slowly.
Zoe's back was eight inches away from him, her dark curly hair spread across the pillow, the sheet pulled down to her waist. The rest was bare skin.
Aaron looked back up at the ceiling.
The room was small, with a window whose blinds were drawn low, letting in just enough morning light for Aaron to tell it was day—probably past nine in the morning judging by the brightness outside.
Practice was at nine.
Aaron closed his eyes for a second.
He had a hangover. Not a severe one, but he felt that specific weight behind his eyes and the dry mouth that comes with mornings after drinking more than usual—which, in Aaron's case, wasn't much, but had clearly been enough for the night in the yard and everything that followed to happen the way it did.
He tried to reconstruct the timeline.
The yard. The conversation. At some point, they had walked back inside. Julius wasn't around. The Harrison twins weren't around. James wasn't around. At some point, there was a hallway and a door, and Zoe saying something to him that he couldn't recall word-for-word, though he remembered the general direction perfectly.
Zoe shifted slightly beside him without waking.
Aaron looked at her back for a second, then stared back up at the ceiling.
What the hell happened last night? he thought.
It wasn't a question he expected an answer to. It was simply the kind of thought that pops into your head when you wake up in a room that isn't yours, next to someone who didn't exist in your life twelve hours ago.
He reached down into the pile of clothes on the floor next to the bed, feeling around for his phone.
Three missed messages from Julius.
The last one read: Where you at, bro?
Aaron placed the phone face down on the nightstand.
Zoe kept sleeping.
Aaron lay there staring at the ceiling with the same eerie composure he brought to everything else, processing the situation with the exact same focus he would give a tough possession in the first half of a game—looking for the next logical move without panicking over the fact that he didn't have one yet.
Outside the window, a garbage truck rumbled down the street. It was Sunday morning in Lexington, Kentucky.
Aaron Reed—who less than twelve hours ago had slammed a game-ending dunk against Florida—was lying in a bed that wasn't his, staring at a ceiling that wasn't his, trying to figure out how he was going to explain to Julius where he had been.
He didn't have a clear answer to that question yet.
But he had time.
Zoe kept sleeping.
Authors thought
What did you think of today's chapter? Give me your opinions and thoughts.
For football fans, check out my other fanfic, *The Golden Standard*, and discover the story of Wyatt Sterling.
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I created a Discord server! For those who want to join, the link will be here and on my profile https://discord.gg/pyqGRbHxt I also added some character images on Discord, so go check them out!
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If you want to see what Zoe looks like, you can check it in discord.