Not just functioning.
Not just performing.
Alive.
And I knew exactly who had struck the match.
The locker room after a win smells like wet cotton, heat, and relief.
Guys were loud.
Music was worse.
Somebody threw a towel at my head and missed by a mile.
I sat at my locker, elbows on my knees, still coming down from the game, and finally checked my phone.
No new text from Stella yet.
Which was fine.
Probably she was showering.
With teammates.
Or studying.
Or asleep.
Or maybe she was lying on her bed replaying the same impossible almost from the gym and making my life harder from two hundred miles away without even trying.
Kane dropped down beside me, still buzzing.
“You know what’s sick?”
“You saying literally anything?”
He ignored that.
“You played better tonight because of her.”
I dried my face with the edge of a towel and looked at him.
He wasn’t smirking now.
Not really.
Just… noticing.
“Yeah,” I said after a second.
His eyebrows lifted.
That was the thing about honesty.
Once you let it in, it gets harder to shove back out.
He leaned against the locker behind us and nodded once.
