She set her glass down, and looked at me, “Well … there’s Aerin here …”

Annie trained an uncomfortable gaze at me, and answered slowly, “Of course, Helena.   There is Aerin over here. Sitting next to our Harley. Together they make for quite a pair, don’t they? Fucking chemistry between them is off the charts, right?”

Shane came to my rescue as I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. Harley remained cool as a cucumber, sipping on her ice water.

“Anyway … the friends I’m meeting up with for brunch will be hooking me up with tickets for the LA Sparks game that opens the season. Anybody interested in coming with?” Shane asked the group.

“Oooh! Oooh! I am!” Katy answered excitedly, raising her arm up as she turned to Shane. “Can I bring my husband? He’s always taking me to Lakers games, and I think it would blow his mind if he sees the women in action!”

As the others picked up on the new thread of conversation, I noticed Annie continued to shoot glances our way. Katy and Shane were comparing the best basketball games they’d ever seen live, and, as Helena cut into their exchange with her story about a random soccer game she’d watched involving England’s national team and the US side, making Katy and Shane look at her with puzzled frowns, Harley had rested her head on my shoulder, and for a second I’d let my guard down, and dropped a quick kiss on her hair.

Just for a second. I imperceptibly straightened up, and jumped in, “You know the excitement level with which you all were reacting to live sport events actually has a scientific basis …”

Harley lifted her head up from my shoulder, rolled it to the other side, and rested her head on her hand, as I hoped she would.   Like everybody else, she observed me with bemusement.

“Aerin do you always have to be such a geek?” Shane asked, with another puzzled reaction to my outburst, and leaned back on her arms to wait for me to explain this non-sequitur interruption to their stories about games they’d watched.

“Well, while I was preparing for this last trip, I was reading up on ways by which people’s behavior can be influenced. And there was all this research I came across that had all these interesting conclusions. Briefly, some of them involved mapping the brain patterns of spectators of sporting events and then compared these to the brain patterns of the actual competitors or participants in those games. And they found that the brain patterns were eerily similar! Albeit the patterns of the spectators were less intense than those of the competitors – but this research showed that people feel like they’re participating themselves in something that they’re merely observing. Which has a lot to do with theories about how empathy can be used to influence …”