My camera drops to my side.
My hands aren’t steady.
He’s already walking.
Through the whole room. The team behind him — Brody yelling, Aiden sliding on his knees, Liam with both fists up. He walks through all of it. Gets to me.
Cups my face in his hands, and looks at me.
Then he kisses me.
Right there. In front of everyone. His team, the cameras, Riley in the corner, Brody watching from three feet away like he’s been waiting for this since the grocery store.
I hold onto his jersey. He holds on.
The room keeps going around us, all that noise and celebration, and we are in the middle of it and neither of us is anywhere else.
When he pulls back, he’s looking at me. Just him. Certain. Here.
“One more,” he says.
“One more,” I say.
Brody, completely losing it: “FINALLY — wait we already did this — IT KEEPS HAPPENING AND I LOVE IT—”
Aiden, somewhere: “Brody.”
Brody: “I WILL NOT BE CALM ABOUT THIS.”
I start laughing. I can’t help it. Jax looks at me laughing and the corner of his mouth does the thing and I think —I am so in love with you— and I don’t say it out loud.
His house. Late.
Brick’s between us on the couch in the exact center, tail wrapped around his feet, positioned with the authority of a cat who has decided he is the furniture now. The city still going outside.
One game away from everything.
I open the personal notebook. Find the page. The word in the middle — my handwriting, fast and slightly slanted, the kind I use when I’m done being careful.
Stay.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I write it again. Same page. Underneath.
Bigger.
I put the notebook on the coffee table. Open.
He doesn’t look at it. Doesn’t comment. Doesn’t make it a thing. He just sits there — his arm along the back of the couch behind me, not touching me, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him anyway. The specific way he takes up space near me thatI stopped noticing three months ago because it just became the way rooms feel.
I look at the word on the page.
Then I lean back into him.
His arm comes around like it was already on its way.
We sit there while the city celebrates outside and Brick arranges himself across both our laps and the notebook sits open on the table with the word written twice.
