LET IT GLOW
DECLAN
If you’d told me at the start of the season that I’d be spending Thanksgiving with Kelsey Best, the biggest pop star in the world, I would have told you to get checked out by the team doc. Concussion protocol. No negotiation. And if you’d told me I’d be completely in love with her, and that she’d return those feelings?
Drug test too. The full panel.
But in the last two months, my life got flipped, turned upside down.
Kelsey owned my heart and my soul, and I had never been happier in my life. Which no one else needed to know. I had a reputation to protect. Grr.
We’d been through so much in such a short amount of time, and every bit of it had only made us stronger. I may have been a Denver Mustang, but the most important team I’d ever played on was the one that started the night she walked into my life.
Whether I liked it or not.
I liked it.
Today we were living our very own Thanksgiving miracle on Bear Claw Mountain. Sounded like a Housemark movie. It pretty much was.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, neither the Denver Mustangs nor the Denver State Dragons were playing on Thanksgiving. That meant the entire Kingman clan had snuck away for a couple of days to celebrate the holiday together. We hadn’t managed this since Chris and I were in elementary school, which meant the cabin was running at full capacity, every surface occupied by a Kingman with an opinion about something.
I’d always assumed my father got his coaching instincts from Coach, my grandfather, whose record as the winningest high school football coach in Colorado history had all of us grandkids refusing to call him anything else. Then I watched Nana run her Thanksgiving kitchen for about ten minutes and that theory evaporated completely. She dealt out tasks the way a real coach calls plays at the Big Bowl, fast, certain, and with a look that made it clear opting out wasn’t a concept she recognized.
It didn’t matter who you were.
Big Bowl ring? Great. You could wear it while you peeled potatoes. Three Grampy awards? Tell your story walking and help get this table set.
No one was safe.
“Kik, I don’t know who raised you and told you that’s how you roll out a pie crust,” my grandmother said, her voice carrying the full weight of a woman who had witnessed many things but could not accept this particular one, “but it certainly wasn’t me.”
“Must have been my other mother, then.” The mountain of sarcasm in Aunt Kik’s voice was teensy. Barely there. You had to be paying attention.
Nana ignored her completely.
Aunt Kik and her partner Pat flew in this year since it was my cousin Levi’s first Thanksgiving as a Mustang. Most of my life she made sure to squeeze in auntie duties between her coaching at Dutchess University and raising Levi to be the star athlete and good man that he was.
“Everett,” Nana called across the room. “You’ve got to fold the cheese into the macaroni. Fold it in.”
“What does that even mean?” Everett stared at the pot like it had personally wronged him, stirring with the breezy confidence of a man who absolutely did not know what he was doing.
Across the room, Kelsey was folding napkins into swans. Actual swans. She’d arrived into the full chaos of a Kingman Thanksgiving without flinching and immediately started making herself useful, which was impressive enough. The swan thing was just showing off. I looked away before anyone caught me staring at her like the love-struck idiot I was.
Which I was.
A love-struck idiot.
“Declan, sweetheart.” I braced myself. Nana’s voice had that assignment quality to it.
“Yes, Nana.”
“Your grandfather is insisting on deep frying the turkeys this year.”
“Yes, Nana.”
“There are three fire extinguishers in the trunk of my car. I’m making you personally responsible for making sure he doesn’t burn down this side of the mountain.”
Okay then.
