This list is easy. It pours out of me onto paper, ink dotted and smudged with stray tears. So easy, in fact, I think it was the only list I was ever supposed to write my entire life.
The only thing hard about it is keeping it down to five. All the pages are too full, and they contain all these ideas of a life I think you could only dream of.
“We have a problem.” Imani drops down onto my couch across from me, a knit between her brows.
My pen pauses mid-line. “You think my list is stupid?”
“No. But there’s a ... rumour circulating.” She wraps her hands around her coffee mug, fingers twitching nervously. “Apparently, Miller was in his GM’s office all morning.”
My heart plummets into nothing, and I feel my pulse stutter as I shake my head slowly. “He was close with Matthew. They’re just, maybe—”
“Analysts are speculating he’s waiving his no-trade clause.” Imani’s shoulders bow, and her voice wobbles. “Trade deadline is in two weeks so ... he’d be gone ... quickly.”
“Aren’t those sorts of things ... aren’t they supposed to be private?” I abandon my list, scrambling to sit upright in my chair.
“Yes . . . but things get . . . leaked sometimes,” she says weakly.
“Leaked?! Leaked where?”
“Online!” She sets the coffee mug down, flapping her hands.
“Show me your phone!” I lurch across the coffee table between us, smashing my ribs against the sharp edge, but I hold out my hand, frantic anyway.
She practically throws the phone at me, the article already open on her screen, big block letters spelling out Miller Colson-Burke scream up at me, while the rest of the words blur with the burning corners of my eyes.
“No,” I whisper. “That would mean—” I’m not sure what I was going to say next. Those words fall into nothing. I start to shake my head, voice impossibly small, and still so, so scared. “I don’t want to be where he’s not. I don’t—I don’t want to be without him.”
Imani smiles gently when she murmurs, “I see someone has finally learned the difference between can’t and want. Not a moment too soon, really.”
“It’s not funny,” I sniff.
“I’m not laughing.” She slides off the couch so she’s on the literal and proverbial ground with me, and she reaches across the table, taking my hands in hers again. “Finish your list. We have somewhere to be this afternoon.”
“What if he—”
“He won’t.” She shakes her head, firm and resolute. “It’s going to be fine, and it’s going to be the start of something very, very wonderful. You just ... have to be yourself.”
I snort. “Easier said than done.”
Imani gives me a pointed look, picks up her phone, fingers flying across the screen and making all sorts of plans.
But when I pick the tear-stained page back up, and I try again to contain the magnitude of Miller into something I can put on a page—items one through five—but when I get to the last one, I realize they might actually be the easiest things I’ll ever do as long as they’re with him.
Miller
I think I’ve started almost every game of this season asleep.
It’s easy to do, when you’ve spent months drifting under the surface of water because the most important person in the world to you sunk down to the bottom and you’ll never, ever get them back.
Easy when you’ve been doing the same thing before each game for the better part of fifteen years. Easy when you’ve been trying to avoid looking up at a memorial banner that feels anything but friendly, and even easier when you can use the convenient excuse about needing to focus on your job.
Not as easy when someone reached down and whispered kind words to you and told your heart to please, please wake up and showed you so many good things waiting for you on the surface.
Good thing the whole warmup is mechanical because she’s the only thing I’m thinking about.
All the plans I still want to have with her, this woman who leaves messes wherever she goes, and how badly I need to talkto her, because last night, we both made a mess of the house she built in my chest, and I need her help cleaning it up.
I’m halfway through when Joel jogs over from the bullpen and grins down at me, curving the brim of his hat. “Heard a rumour this morning.”
