No standing half outside the moment, observing from a careful distance, prepared to detach the second it demands too much.
Fully here. Both feet grounded. No qualifiers.
When we finally break apart, we’re both breathing like we’ve done something strenuous, and the noise in the stadium has reached a pitch I’m not sure human ears were designed to process. Reece is looking at me with those gold-flecked eyes and the most insufferably, beautifully certain expression I have ever seen on a person’s face.
“I told you,” he says.
“You tell me a lot of things.”
“I told you there wasno other shoe.”
I look at him, this infuriating, patient, entirely too perceptive man, standing in the bleachers of his own stadium in full uniform with thousands of people watching, looking at me the way I’ve only ever seen people look at art they intend to keep.
“You were right,” I say.
His smile widens.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t say‘I know.’”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“You were absolutely going to say that.”
He laughs, and it’s the rough-edged, warm-underneath one, the genuine one, and the crowd is still chanting something I can’t describe because all of my attention is accounted for.
He rests his forehead against mine. His thumb traces my jaw, unhurried, certain.
“This is not going to be simple,” I say.
“I know.”
“My father is going to have opinions.”
“He already does. He shared several of them at dinner.”
“The media is going to—”
“Ava.”
“Make it into something—”
“Ava.” He tilts my chin up. “We can handleall of it.”
“Together?”
“Together.”
I look at him, then glance out at the stadium around us, absurd, vast, and lit like the center of the known world, and I look at the life waiting on the other side of this moment, complicated, real, and entirely ours.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” I pull him back down. “Now stop talking.”
