The net cord creaked as Miles leaned his weight on it. “Youdon’t need to. Look, when I’m switched on, I play like a freight train, right? That’s what everyone says. I just keep going, and if you don’t find a way to knock me off my stride, then I’m going to win.”
“Right, so what the fuck do you expect me todoabout it?”
He clapped his hands to my cheeks, tilting my face up to meet his fierce gaze. “Play like the Matteo Russo I used to hate. Rip up my fucking tracks.”
Before I could answer or think or even breathe, he let me go and stepped back, picking up his racquet. “Six games,” he repeated as he walked toward the baseline. “You’ve got this, Russo.”
He was good to his word and left hardly any time between points once we began. Catching my breath became hard, thinking even harder, yet in the first service game he still wiped the court with me. In the second I put up more of a fight, and for a moment thought maybe I would find my swing. But by the third that brief hope had soured into embarrassment at my own naïveté.
We paused at our bags as we changed ends, taking a moment to catch our breath and rehydrate. Miles was frowning.
“I assure you, I do want to win your arse,” I said, attempting an apologetic laugh. “I guess belief just isn’t enough.”
“Not if I’m the only one believing. It’s not enough for me to believe in you.Youhave to believe in you.”
I puffed out a heavy breath, frustration cracking through. “You say that like it’s so easy! I’ve spent four years failing, Miles. What reason do I have to believe in myself now? You tell me I should play like I used to, like that’s some tap I can just turn on, but besides getting angry sometimes, I don’t know how!”
Leaning down to look right into my eyes, Miles set his hands on my shoulders like he’d done that first day at the laundromat. “Listen to me,” he said. “Danny is wrong. Or maybe you’re wrong,I don’t know which and I don’t care. Tennis isn’t a chess game – not for you. For you, it’s a boxing match, it’s not slowly working your opponent into the corner so you can hit a winner, it’s knocking them the fuck out at the first opportunity. It’s going for every opening because you can hit shots other people only dream about, you hit them harder than anyone else would dare, and even when you miss, its confidence-crushing for us to see them get even close.”
My heart thumped so hard I felt ill, every reply catching like a sticky clump on my tongue.
“You don’t believe me?” he said when my silence stretched into the grey afternoon.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just . . .” I lifted my arms and let them fall. “I’m not that player any—”
“Bullshit! Don’t give me that, Mat. I stood across the net from you at the French and thought I was going to lose.”
“Right. Now who’s talking bullshit.”
With a scowl, he dropped his hands from my shoulders. “It’s not bullshit. I don’t need to stroke your ego just so I can stroke your cock; I’ve got that one covered. But that passing shot in the fifth game? That volley? Unless you’re telling me some ghost from the past swooped in and broke my serve, that wasyou.” He jabbed me in the chest with a finger. “The old Matteo isn’t trapped in there somewhere, he’s just you and he always has been.”
His words were slowly filling my chest like air I’d forgotten how to breathe, the feeling one I didn’t know what to do with. “Me,” I whispered.
“Yes, you.” He set his hands back on my shoulders, giving me a shake. “You with your ridiculous shots and your nasty serve. Your fearless, daredevil attitude and your knock-out punches.You, the only junior I could never beat. Always tripping me up and ruining all my plans – my unpredictable, impossible Matteo.” He’d gripped fistfuls of my shirt, his eyes all I could see as they bored into me. And like a green shoot breaking through frozen earth, a hint of self-belief dared to swell my chest. I wasn’t the same Matteo Russo anymore, but maybe that didn’t have to mean what I’d made it mean for years. Didn’t have to mean I’d lost everything.
With a final shake, Miles let me go. “Nothing important has changed,” he said as though he could read my mind. “Now, let’s go. Three more games.”
Back on court, he settled into the same pattern – serving fast so I had no time to get stuck in my own head. For the first few points, it was more of the same tense failure, but as exhaustion pushed me into instinct, all that remained was the feeling of his words expanding my chest, giving me space to breathe again. And on his next serve, I let everything go and just swung.
“Forty fifteen!” Miles called and served again. And again, I let instinct win, taking the ball early and tearing it down the line.
“Forty thirty!”
I’d loved playing once, but as a fierce joy burst out of me, I realised I’d forgotten what that truly felt like. And I surrendered to it, ripping back returns and charging the net, finessing bitchy drop shots and lobbing over his head, the pair of us soon scrambling our way through rallies that left our chests heaving. With a searing ache building in my legs, I was running on nothing but adrenaline, whether my shots even went in having long since ceased to matter. And it wasn’t until Miles started grinning that I realised how long it had been since he’d called out the score.
“Did you . . .” I sucked a deep breath, hands on my knees after another glorious rally. “Stop . . . scoring?”
“Ages ago!” he called back, his smile brighter than any sunshine.
“Why?”
He spread his arms and laughed. “Why do you think? You fucking did it!”
The goal had stopped mattering, yet at those words I dropped to my knees, racquet sliding from my hand. And setting my forehead to the court, I laughed like something inside me had flown free.
When I looked up, Miles was leaning on the net, his hair damp with sweat. “You did good,” he said, soft amusement in his lopsided grin.
“Thanks,” I replied, a word wholly incapable of expressing everything I wanted to say. But it would have to do, because every other word was caught in a tangle of gratitude and sentimentality, and would surely have ended with me crying.
