“Not everything.”
“Most things.” He presses a kiss to the top of my head. “But not this. Tonight, you didn’t overthink. You chose what you wanted and went for it.”
He’s right. For once, I didn’t calculate the risks or map the escape routes. I wanted him here, and I made it happen.
“I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop,” I admit quietly.
“I know.”
“What if it does?”
“Then we’ll handle it. Together.” His arms tighten around me. “But, Ava? I’m betting there is no other shoe. I’m betting this is real, and good, and everything we’re both too scared to name yet.”
“You can’t know what.”
“Watch me.”
I close my eyes, breathing in the scent of him, feeling the steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath my cheek. He’s probably right. This is real. This matters. And for the first time in years, I’m ready to stop running from it.
“Stay,” I whisper.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
And for tonight, with his arms around me and my walls completely demolished, I believe him.
Chapter Eleven
Ava
The third session is booked for Tuesday.
I know his schedule well enough by now to work around it. Home game Wednesday, practice Thursday and Friday, travel Saturday. Tuesday evenings are mine. Or they have been for the past three weeks, in the specific way things become yours when you stop admitting what you’re doing and start building a life around it instead.
I close the studio at six, same as always. Zoe leaves first, winding her scarf twice around her neck and giving me a look on her way out the door. It’s the look she’s been giving me for two weeks, which is somewhere between delighted and deeply suspicious. I haven’t confirmed anything. She hasn’t asked directly. We exist in a comfortable arrangement of plausible deniability and the understanding she’ll be insufferable once she has actual information to work with.
After hours, the studio is at its best, with the overhead lights off, the task lamps on, and the Edison bulbs warm along the back wall. The street noise drops once the post-work foot traffic thins. I can hear myself think in here, which is the thing I’ve spent three weeks trying to avoid.
I’m laying out my station when the bell above the door chimes.
Reece comes in carrying a brown paper bag and wearing a cap pulled low, which is his version of being inconspicuous. On anyone else, it would work. On him, it mostly serves to highlight the jaw.
“You’re early,” I say.
“I was in the area.”
“You’re always in the area.”
“I’m in the area when I want to be.” He sets the bag on my desk. “I brought food. Thai, Pad See Ew.”
I look at the bag, then at him. The cap is slightly crooked, and he has the particular bright-eyed energy he carries after a good practice, the kind where everything clicked, and he knows it. I’ve learned to read his versions of good and bad days the way I read clients. It’s in the set of the shoulders, the pace of the walk, the way the mouth sits when it thinks no one is watching.
“You can’t keep showing up here with food,” I say.
“And yet here I am… with food.” He pulls two containers from the bag. “Sit down. Eat. Then I’ll be an excellent patient, and you can stab me with a needle.”
“It’s not stabbing.”
“It feels like stabbing.”
