She laughs, and the sound moves through her chest and into mine. I pull her closer, and she comes without resistance, settling her cheek back over my heartbeat.
We’re quiet for a moment. The speaker shifts to something with a slower tempo.
“What are you going to say tomorrow?” she asks.
I’ve been thinking about this since Coach Bishop walked away from my locker. I’m done rehearsing anything, but will think through the architecture, what it needs to contain, and what it doesn’t.
“The truth.”
“All of it?”
“Enough of it. Your name. That we’re together, that it’s not a rumor, and it’s not going away.” I feel her inhale slowly against my chest. “Nothing more than that. The rest is ours.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “And if they don’t like it?”
“Then they’ll learn to.”
“Reece.” My name comes out as a gentle warning. “Your contract negotiations are in three months. Management already has opinions. My dad is going to be sitting three feet away from you.”
“I know.”
“You’re not worried?”
I think about it honestly, the way she deserves me to think about things when she asks. I search for the anxiety that should be sitting in my chest alongside everything else, the career-specific dread, the contract calculations, the image management instinct that’s kept me making careful, strategic decisions since my first season.
It’s not there.
“No,” I say. “Because the thing I was most afraid of wasn’t management or the media or your father… it was losing you because I didn’t handle things fast enough.” I press my lips to the top of her head. “That’s already resolved. Everything else is paperwork.”
She’s quiet again. But her hand, resting on my chest, spreads flat, which is grounding.
“You don’t have to threaten to walk…” she says finally, “… if it comes to that. You don’t have to burn anything down.”
“I know what I owe this organization and what I don’t.” I keep my voice easy. “I show up. I perform. I win. My personal life has produced career-best numbers for most of this season. If someone can’t follow that logic, then we’re having a different conversation than I thought we were.”
She tilts her head up to look at me. Her eyes are dark, serious, and warm all at once. “You’ve thought this through.”
“I’ve had weeks of pacing apartments at two in the morning. I’ve had time.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment. Then she kisses my collarbone, deliberately, and settles back down.
“Okay,” she says.
No qualification. No condition. No bracing.
One word that means she trusts me to do this right.
I’mnotgoing to waste it.
We eventually move off the kitchen floor around two a.m. when my back starts registering its position, and Ava notices the hardwood is not, in fact, as forgiving as exhaustion made it feel. She makes us both tea with the particular purposeful efficiency she brings to everything, and we take it to bed and drink it in the warm dark with the city humming somewhere far below her window.
She falls asleep first.
I lie there for a while, her breathing slow and even against my shoulder, and stare at the string lights she never quite turns off all the way, always one setting down from off, casting everything in a low amber glow. Her art covers the walls. Her sketchbook sits on the nightstand. The room smells like her, citrus, ink, and something warmer underneath.
I close my eyes and sleep for the first time in weeks without calculating anything.
The morning comes with the particular mercy of a dreamless night.
