I pick up my bag.
I know now.
The players’ exit opens onto the side lot, and the cool night air comes in before I’m fully through the door, carrying the smellof the city, car exhaust, distant food trucks, and the particular freshness that follows a loss when you’re the one responsible for it.
I stop.
Ava is across the street.
She’s at the corner near the studio, maybe thirty feet away, and she isn’t looking at me. She’s coming from the direction of the café two blocks down, a paper cup in one hand, her bag slung across her body, wearing dark jeans, a leather jacket, and her hair loose, which she doesn’t usually wear like that in public.
She doesn’t see me at first.
I stand at the doorway, watch her, and my chest does the thing it’s been doing for six days, which is not adjust, regardless of what I tell it.
Then she looks up.
For a second, we’re just staring at each other across the empty street. Fifty feet of pavement, six days of silence, and everything we said and didn’t say, stacked between us in the dark.
She raises her hand.
A wave—small, honest, not performed—the kind of gesture that acknowledges the other person without asking anything of them. Her face is unreadable from here, or maybe I’m too far away to read it, or maybe she’s made it unreadable on purpose because she’s been living inside the same six days I have and has her own defenses to manage.
Then she turns and keeps walking.
Every instinct I have fires in sequence. Go across the street. Call her name. Tell her what I worked out in the shower—that I finally understand what I was doing wrong. That I’ve been performing for so long, I lost sight of what’s genuine underneath it. But I know with more certainty than I’ve known anything in years that she is real, and I am when I’m with her. And I don’twant to manage that anymore. I want to choose it openly, out loud, and without a contingency plan.
I don’t move.
She reaches the middle of the block, and the streetlight catches the back of her jacket. She doesn’t look back.
I stand with my hand still on the door and let her go.
Because she’s not ready.
I know she’s not ready the same way I know when a pitch sequence has been read, when the batter has timed me, and when pressing harder will produce the opposite of the result I want. There’s a read you develop after enough time in the game, an instinct for timing, patience, and knowing when to wait.
Ava Bishop ended things because she was afraid, and she was afraid because she cares. She cares more than her rules allow, and pushing her right now in the dark outside the stadium after the worst game of my season would not be the right pitch. It would be the wrong pitch at the worst time from a place of my own need, not hers.
She taught me something about control. About the difference between holding on to it and choosing when to let go.
I can choose to wait.
I drop my bag on the pavement, scrub both hands through my hair, and stare up at the stadium.
Tomorrow I have a rest day.
Tomorrow I’m not going to train until I can’t stand up. I’m not going to throw bullpen in an empty stadium, run eight miles, or channel everything into the performance.
Tomorrow I’m going to sit in my apartment, which feels like a hotel room, and figure out who I am when no one is watching. What I actually want, not what I’ve been told to want, what makes good copy, or what protects the brand, the contract, or the carefully maintained version of Reece Steele who winsgames, gives good quotes, and keeps his complications out of the headlines.
I’m going to figure out what I want for myself.
And then I’m going to figure out how to be worth it.
When the answer is clear, I’ll find a way to tell her.
But I’ll do it on her terms, in her time, when she’s ready to hear it rather than when I’m desperate to say it.
