She didn’t flinch when the cameras swept the family section during the seventh-inning stretch. I wasn’t watching. I was in the dugout, I couldn’t have been watching, but Mack was tracking it from the plate, and he told me later with a grin so wide it looked architectural.
“Ava looked directly into the lens,” he said, shaking his head like he’d witnessed a miracle of physics. “Not defiantly. Not nervously. She looked at it the same way she probably looks at a client who asks if the needle’s going to hurt. Calmly, like the question wasn’t even interesting.”
I dress fast and skip the team dinner despite three separate invitations, all of which I decline without specific explanation, and the small talk at the exit. Someone calls my name from across the parking lot, a familiar voice, probably Rodriguez, and I wave without turning around.
Keys in hand. Phone buzzing with messages I don’t open.
The drive across the city takes twenty minutes because of traffic, it normally takes less than ten and feels like both an hour and no time at all. The championship win is on every radio station I scan past, highlights, commentary, someone with a very enthusiastic voice saying my name in a sentence containing the words‘statistically unprecedented.’I turn it off after thirty seconds and drive in silence with the windows cracked, the night air carrying the last of the stadium noise out of my lungs.
No hesitation.
No second-guessing.
Not a single moment of wondering whether this is the right call.
I’ve done enough wondering for one season.
Her building rises ahead, familiar now in the way that places become familiar when you’ve been paying attention to them. I know the parking configuration. I know the entry code she gave me three weeks ago with a look that said she’d thought it overbefore offering it. I know the sound the stairwell door makes, which step creaks, and the particular quality of the light in the hallway outside her apartment at this time of night.
I park at an angle and don’t fix it.
I take the stairs two at a time.
I knock once.
The door opens, and she’s standing there barefoot on the hardwood, hair loose over her shoulders, wearing my old practice shirt that hits her mid-thigh. It’s the gray one I left on her chair three weeks ago and stopped expecting back sometime around week two. There’s a smudge of something dark on her left forearm that might be ink from sketching or might be charcoal, and she doesn’t appear to have noticed it. Her face is clean, stripped of the careful neutrality she carries in public.
Her smile hits first.
Bright, open, the real one, the one that reaches her eyes, and I’ve been cataloging since the first time she let her guard completely down in the front seat of her car outside the studio. The one she reserves for moments that are entirely, uncomplicatedly hers.
“You came,” she says.
“As if I wouldn’t.”
She steps back, and I walk in. The door shuts behind me with a soft, certain sound.
The apartment smells like citrus and something warm from the oven, and the speaker on her kitchen counter is playing something low and unhurried, something without words. Her sketchbook is open on the coffee table, pencil beside it, the page half filled with something I can’t read from here. She was working while she waited. Of course, she was. Ava, in a state of pure stillness, is a thing that doesn’t exist.
She starts to say something. Probably about the game. Probably about the ninth inning, the strikeout count, orsomething she saw from the third row that she’s been waiting to tell me.
I don’t let her finish.
My hands find her waist. Lift. Turn. Her back hits the counter, and something feral wakes up inside me.
Not anger.
Not dominance for the sake of it.
Claim.
Her hands fist in my shirt, and I feel the tremor in her fingers. She isn’t startled or unsure, she’s ready, and the knowledge of it strips away every last restraint I’ve been holding onto since the moment I walked back through that studio door.
I kiss her hard. My teeth catch her lip, pulling, needing the mark of her in my mouth. She answers with equal hunger, biting back, dragging her nails down my chest with a sting that shoots straight to my spine and lower.
Weeks of restraint burn off in seconds.
Every careful touch in a darkened restaurant. Every controlled kiss on a tailgate under city lights. Every measured distance in public spaces. Every calculated gap between us where I wanted none.
