‘The real one.’He keeps asking for this, the version I don’t hand out freely, and I’ve learned to keep behind everything else because wanting things openly is how you get ambushed when they go away.
I look at him across my kitchen counter with his takeout container, his parallel chopsticks, the slight tension at the corner of his jaw that means he knows this answer could go either way, and he’s bracing for it without showing me he’s bracing.
“I don’t want to blow up your career,” I say. “Not as a hypothetical. Not as a worst-case scenario exercise. As an actual thing that I would not be able to live with.” I hold his gaze. “You have something real, Reece. The kind of talent people spend their entire lives chasing. And I know you say the contract doesn’t scare you, the media doesn’t scare you, and my father doesn’t scare you.”
“None of them do.”
“Then you’re either braver than me or less informed, and I don’t think you’re less informed.” I wrap my hands around my water glass. “What I want is to keep seeing you. What I also want is for the seeing not to end your career, my relationship with my father, or whatever we’ve been building for the past several weeks. And the problem with wanting all of those things simultaneously is they’re not all compatible.”
“Some of them are.”
“Enough of them?”
He’s quiet for a moment, turning the problem over the way he turns everything over, methodically, without visible agitation. “You know what I’ve been doing this season that I haven’t done in three years?”
“Throwing harder.”
“Caring.” He says it matter-of-factly. “About outcomes. About what happens after the win, instead of just whether I get the win. I’ve been running on autopilot since my second full season, going through the mechanics without needing any of it to mean something.” His eyes stay on mine. “You happened, Ava. Whatever that’s worth in the risk calculation.”
It’s worth a considerable amount. I don’t say this. I look at my food instead.
“Eat,” he says, which is the kindest possible way to give me a moment to reassemble myself without acknowledging I need one.
I eat.
Then we clear the containers.
He washes the chopsticks without being asked, which is such a specific domestic gesture that it short-circuits something in my brain, and I stand behind him at the sink trying to remember what I was worried about three minutes ago.
He turns off the faucet and spins around, and I am approximately four inches away from him, which is not entirely accidental on my part.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“Feeling better?”
“The Pad See Ew helped.”
“I’ll pass your compliments to the restaurant.”
“Your compliments. You picked it.”
“Because you like it, and I wrote it down.”
“You wrote it?” I stop. “You wrote down my food order?”
“Notes app,” he says this without a trace of embarrassment, which is one of his more disarming qualities, the complete absence of self-consciousness about the ways he pays attention to me. “You like it, you’re important to me, and I wasn’t sure if I’d remember.”
I stare at him for a long moment.
“Reece.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re making it very difficult to be sensible about this.”
His mouth curves. “Good.”
