“Tristan.”
I shake my head once.
“No, listen.”
My hand slides to her cheek.
Her skin is cool.
Real.
Steady under my palm.
“I wanted the game. I wanted the title. I wanted all of it.” I swallow. “But this—” My thumb strokes lightly under her eye. “The way you loved me through this season. The way you rolled out of your own ending and still stood up in mine.” Another breath. “I already have the thing I was actually missing.”
Tears gather in her eyes instantly.
She laughs once through them, watery and wrecking.
“That is so unfair to say to a girl who’s barely keeping it together in public.”
I smile then.
Actually smile.
She grips my shirt and leans into me again, forehead to my chest this time, and for a while neither of us speaks.
We don’t need to.
The game still hurts.
It will hurt tomorrow too.
Maybe for weeks.
But standing there in the ugly fluorescent after of the biggest loss of my season, I know something clean enough to build a life on:
Love doesn’t erase the pain.
It just makes the fall survivable.
Eventually she tilts her face up and says, “Come on, basketball royalty.”
I raise a brow.
“That again?”
She lifts one shoulder.
“Tonight you can be royalty.”
A pause.
Then, softer:
“Tomorrow you can be my exhausted giant again.”
That one gets me right in the center of the chest.
I bend and pick up the suit bag.
She laces our fingers together.
And when we walk out of that corridor and into the cold March night beyond the arena, it doesn’t feel like leaving empty-handed.
Not even close.
Because I know exactly what I’m carrying.
And it’s worth more than a banner ever could be.
