Ava:Okay.
Me:Okay?
Ava:We should talk. Not on the phone.
Me: Tonight?
Ava:Tomorrow. I have a full book today, and I need to think.
I stare at the wordthinkfor longer than is probably healthy. Ava thinking, without me present to redirect, is the variable I trust least in the current situation. Left alone with her own head, she builds cases, constructs arguments, and maps everypossible disaster with the precision of someone who once swore off athletes for exactly these reasons.
Me:Don’t think too hard.
Ava:You don’t get to tell me how hard to think, Steele.
Me:Fair. But whatever conclusion you’re heading toward before we’ve had the actual conversation can be dangerous for both of us.
Ava:Reece.
Me:Right. Tomorrow.
Ava:Tomorrow.
By evening, theSportsBeatpost has been picked up by four additional outlets. Two of them are aggregate sites with the journalistic standards of aTwitterreply section, and two of them are actual sports blogs with audiences large enough to matter. By eight o’clock, my name is trending in California.
Not nationally. Not yet. But California is enough.
I sit on my couch with the television on and no volume, watching the city lights outside my floor-to-ceiling windows, and do the math. The variables are not cooperating. Lena has commented on two more posts by other accounts in the last three hours, each comment carefully phrased to imply knowledge without confirming anything. She’s extraordinarily good at this. I have to give her credit for pure technical execution, even as I want to throw my phone into the wall.
The thing about Lena’s strategy, and she absolutely has one, is that it doesn’t require proof. She doesn’t need to name Ava. She doesn’t need a photograph of us together. All she needsis the sustained implication of something, the suggestion of a story, and the media will construct the rest themselves. Sports bloggers with nothing concrete to write about will speculate. The speculation becomes the headline. The headline becomes the narrative. And the narrative, once it exists, is almost impossible to kill.
I’ve watched this happen to other players. I never thought it would happen to me, mostly because I always kept the parts of my life worth protecting either absent or invisible. There was nothing to weaponize.
Until Ava.
Which is not her fault, and not something I’d trade, and also an objective complication I need to handle before it handles me.
My phone buzzes with a text from a number I don’t recognize. I open it, expecting another media inquiry.
It’s a screenshot.
Sent from a burner format Lena has used before. She has a method, a particular style with the contact name left blank and the number always ending in the same three digits, which tells me she either doesn’t know I’ve clocked the pattern or doesn’t care. I’m betting on the latter. She wants me to know it’s her.
The screenshot is of a photo taken from outside Ink District’s window, angled through the glass toward the interior. Slightly blurred, shot from a distance, but it’s entirely legible. I’m in Ava’s tattoo chair, shirt off, Ava bent over my ribs with her machine in her hand, completely absorbed in her work, unaware of anyone outside.
Taken last Tuesday.
I sit with this for a moment, the cold, flat stillness I use before critical pitches, when everything needs to go quiet and clear, and the only thing that matters is what’s directly in front of me.
She has the damn photo.
Whether she posts it is a different question, and the answer to that depends entirely on what she wants. If she wants leverage, this is it, a reminder she has something she can use, a negotiating position she hasn’t played yet. If she wants to detonate the entire situation, she posts it tonight and watches the fallout.
Lena is smarter than the second option. She’s always been smarter than the second option.
But smart people do stupid things when they feel cornered. And I’ve made my position on Lena Hart abundantly clear over the past several weeks.
I pick the phone back up. Look at the screenshot again. Look at Ava in it, focused, entirely present, completely unaware of the camera outside her window.
