I held up my hands. “Bring it on, pretty boy.”

My new friends cheered for me again as I took my place on the field. Jamie shot them a look, apparently noticing that his cheering section had changed their allegiance. It only made them cheer louder. I grinned. Yeah. That’s the way it is.

Forty minutes later, my team was up by one, the smile on Jamie’s face had long since faded, and I was dying. I’d been running on a regular basis, but nothing got my heart pounding like the stop and go of a soccer game. Factor in the adrenaline of competition, and it became a seriously intense workout. I was definitely feeling the burn.

But I couldn’t stop. Every time I felt like quitting, the look of confidence on Jamie’s face, the speed with which he’d underestimated me, flashed through my mind. We were winning, sure, but we couldn’t afford to relax. I raced toward Jamie as he passed the ball to his brother, the older one, who dropped his shoulder and faked left, then surged around Carlos and made a goal.

Fantastic. Tied game.

I stopped and leaned forward, resting my hands on my knees, my breathing heavy.

Matias came up behind me. “You okay, Lane?”

I glared at him. “Oh, look. He speaks English.”

He grinned. “Forgive me?”

I stood upright. “How much time do we have?”

He glanced at his watch, the only thing keeping unofficial time. “A little more than two minutes.”

I nodded. “Let’s do this, then.”

We dug deep and kept pushing, but Jamie’s defense was amazing, and we could not get a shot through. With the clock running down to the final seconds of the game, the pressure was on big time. Carlos surged forward, Matias and another player I couldn’t name close on his heels. In a second of crystal clarity, I saw the play happening in my head. I ran wide to the right, then crossed over to center field in time to catch a crossover pass from Carlos. For a brief second, my path to the goal was clear, but Jamie was approaching from the left, hard and fast. In a helicopter move my old college coach would have been proud of, I maneuvered around him and sent the ball sailing toward the goal. Their keeper jumped for it, but it arced over him and hit the net. Score!

We’d won five to four.

I collapsed onto the field, my legs feeling like rubber and my lungs on fire, buoyed only by the exultant victory cries of my teammates.

Carlos dropped to one knee beside me. “That was some game. You okay?”

I sat up, took Carlos’s offered hand, and let him pull me to my feet. “I am woefully ashamed of how out of shape I feel, but I’ll be fine.”

Chloe and the others were crossing the field from the sidelines, but one of the Hamiltons was on his way over too, two water bottles in his hand.