Eli twirls his card on his finger like it’s laminated destiny. “Room service, a pool, and a show tomorrow night,” he says. “If this isn’t the rapture, I want a refund.”
“We haven’t played yet,” Miles says, but there’s a hint of pride in his tone he can’t completely bury.
“We will,” Drew says. He bumps my shoulder with the side of his bag. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I say, because I am and I’m not. I’m vibrating with the afterimage of that stage—and under it, a different frequency has hold of me, one that’s been threading through every hour since we landed.
Ollie’s here. The thought is almost too loud to keep behind my teeth. He’s here, somewhere in this desert maze, about to lace his shoes and step under his own lights. And he doesn’t know I’m in the same city.
We wedge into the elevator with a family arguing about whether buffets count as culture. The doors glide shut and throw our reflections back at us: four shadows and a thousand tiny bulbs. When they open again, the hallway carpet is so thick our wheels sink, and the walls hum with the universal hotel soundtrack of televisions, water in pipes, voices that make their way under doors and die there.
Our room is two queen beds, a desk bolted to the wall, an armchair upholstered in a pattern that wants to be invisible. The window makes the Strip look like a board laid with LEDs and temptation.
Eli face-plants onto the nearest bed and groans, “I live here now,” then immediately begins inventorying the minibar like he’s a customs officer.
Miles reads our set time off his phone and reads it again out loud like we didn’t hear him the first time. Drew stands at the glass with both hands on either side of his head and goes quiet in the way he does when he’s letting himself want something big.
“I’m grabbing food,” he says finally. “Eli?”
“Always,” Eli says, already halfway into his shoes.
“Rafe?” Drew asks me.
“Later,” I say. “I’m going to head out.”
He searches my face the way only a person who knows your tells can. He doesn’t press. “Text if you want anything. Or if you do something stupid.”
“Define stupid,” Eli says.
“Anything you’d do,” Miles says, and they’re out the door, their voices trampolining down the hall until the latch catches and swallows them.
I stand a second and let the room settle around me. The air here is clean in a way that doesn’t feel like air, the kind that hides the desert outside and the way heat holds on long after the sun drops. I cross to the window and rest my forehead against the glass. The city is galaxies of blinking promises and the slow creep of cars and, somewhere in it, a bus carrying twenty young guys in matching sweats, coaches who herd like sheepdogs, a trainer with a bag of braces and tape, and a schedule tight enough to choke on.
I put my hand on my jacket like I’m checking my own ribs. The ticket is where I left it, stiff and disbelieving in the pocket.
Anthony slid it across a table two hours ago, a plain rectangle that made my pulse jump like he’d handed me a detonator. “Don’t get arrested,” he said. “Stay off cameras. Don’t lose your voice.” He didn’t ask whose name I was planning to scream in a crowd of strangers. He doesn’t need me to draw him a map anymore.
I sit on the edge of the bed to tie my boots, and my foot won’t stay still. I tell my hands to be cool. They don’t listen.
I take the elevator down with a couple in rhinestones and a man in a polo shirt who smells like cologne and victory. On the sidewalk, the night is a soft slap. Cabs nose in and out. A different bachelorette party in matching pink satin sashes shouts the chorus to a song we covered a couple of years back and butchers it beautifully.
I walk. The Strip loops and blooms, and I let it carry me until the arena rises ahead, a steel bowl with teeth. Bodies pour toward it, a river in blues and golds and whites, faces painted, signs held aloft with shaky promises:BELIEVE; THIS IS OUR YEAR; TAKE US HOME.
I pull my hood up and go with them.
Inside, the concourse smells like popcorn salt and warm beer and the kind of hot pretzels that could burn your tongue and you’d still go back for a second bite. A brass band is doing battle with a DJ, drums ricocheting off cement, snares cutting through synth.
I scan my ticket under a red eye and climb the steps. The bowl opens in front of me, a bright mouth, and the sound hits like a wave. On the far side, cheerleaders are a blur of hair and glitter; a mascot with an expression of fixed derangement is doing push-ups slowed by the weight of his costume head. I find my row, then my seat on the aisle, and sit with my knees jammed and my hands locked between them like that will keep them from shaking.
When the teams run out, the decibel level goes from loud to something like weather. The Panthers emerge second, the noise tilting higher, and there he is, easy to find because my eyes have learned the shape of him even at a distance. He’s taller than he looks on streams and highlights. He carries his height like a quiet he refuses to give away. The camera follows the flashiest guard; the crowd roars for the kid who loves to shimmy after scoring a three-pointer; the announcer talks about points in the paint. My gaze is a magnet, and he’s the only thing it belongs to.
Warm-ups look like warm-ups until he takes a free throw and the whole of him settles. I’ve seen him dial in at practice, on campus, at the gym where we pretended not to stare. This is different. The focus here makes a circle around him that nothing enters without permission. Mouth set, eyes steady, shoulders square, a ritual he’s performed so often his body can do it without the part of him that knows fear.
Tip. The ball arcs, palms slap, and the game moves like a song someone pressed play on and immediately turned to eleven. Their opponent is quick and plays mean in the passing lanes. The first two minutes are turnovers and near misses and the kind of footwork that gets called “gritty” when your team does it and “dirty” when the other team does. I could argue with myself and say I know just enough to track it, but there’s no point bullshitting myself.
Since Ollie became my muse, my obsession, I know everything there is to know about basketball—not from playbooks or stats, but from watching how his body speaks it. The rhythm of a screen setting him free. The quiet split second between his breath and a shot. The way the court becomes a heartbeat when he’s on it. It’s music now, all of it, and he’s the hook that keeps me coming back.
He gets his first bucket on a backdoor cut. It’s not the kind that makes the highlight reels; it’s the kind that makes coachesnod because a guy saw a seam and took it. The scoreboard clicks. The arena swells with a giant sigh of relief that saysokay, okay, we’re here, we’ve started. He slaps hands with the guy who threaded the pass and doesn’t smile. I do, and it hurts a little because my cheeks are tight with something I haven’t learned to name out loud.
