He does.
This time, the kiss is not urgent, desperate, or stolen between secrets. It isn’t the sharp, electric thing outside my studio or the careful, tentative thing in my apartment when we were both still pretending.
This one ismine.
This one isours.
And somewhere in the stands, I’m fairly certain I hear my father’s groan above the roar of fifty-two thousand people, which is, honestly, exactly what he deserves.
I smile against Reece’s mouth.
He feels it and pulls back, eyes bright with laughter. “What?”
“My dad.”
A beat.
“I know,” he says. “I told him I was going to do something special at the end of the game.”
I stare at him. “You—”
“He needed to see it.” Reece’s grinning now, full and unguarded. “No more hiding. You said it yourself.”
For a second, I can only look at him. At this man who drove to my apartment at midnight in an inside-out shirt, who bought me Pad See Ew on a Tuesday, who let me press my art into his skin and trusted me with the parts of himself he keeps off-camera.
“I love you,” I say. The words arrive without calculation, without warning, without any of the maps I usually draw before entering territory this uncharted.
His whole face changes.
“Ava.”
“Don’t make it weird.”
“I’m not making it weird.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you’re about to be completely insufferable about something.”
“I love you too,” he says, simple and certain. The way he throws a fastball, no hesitation, total commitment, all the way through. “For what it’s worth, which I think is a lot, I’ve loved you since you rolled your eyes at the sound of fifty-two thousand people chanting my name and went back to fighting with your security gate.”
“That was the first night.”
“I’m an efficient man.”
I laugh, and it comes out nothing like the careful, measured version I usually deploy in public, and I don’t care.
Below us, Martinez is doing something celebratory near home plate. Somewhere behind me, a camera shutter sounds. Tomorrow, there will be headlines, press conferences, and my father will have things to say over Sunday dinner for the foreseeable future.
And Reece is still holding my face in both hands in the middle of Wildcat Stadium, looking at me with the complete, undivided attention of a person who has decided, and I am looking back at him the same way.
No fear.
Not even a little.
“Come on,” he says. “I need to shower before the press conference.”
