Page 111 of Her Player

“You know what I thought the first time she walked into practice?” Jett said.

“That she was terrifying.”

“Well yeah, obviously.” He almost smiled. “But then I looked at you.” He paused. “You went completely still. You were mid-drill and you just stopped. Like someone hit pause on you.” He picked up the cereal box again. “I’d never seen you stop before. Not for anything.”

I kept my eyes on the skyline.

“I didn’t say anything because it wasn’t my business,” Jett said. “And also because watching you pretend it wasn’t happening was genuinely one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life and I didn’t want to ruin it.”

I said nothing.

“Growling at Langley for looking at her for two seconds.” He shook his head with what I can only describe as reverence. “Truly legendary behavior.”

“Are you done.”

“Genuinely not sure.” He considered it. “Yeah, I think so.”

We sat in silence for a while. The good kind. The kind that had been building for three years between two people who didn’t need to fill every space with something.

“She’s going to be fine,” Jett said. Not performing certainty. Just stating a fact. “The committee is going to close the review and the press is going to find something else and you’re going to win this championship tomorrow and in about six months nobody is going to remember there was ever anything to write about.”

“And if they do?”

He shrugged. “Then she handles it. And you stand next to her while she does. And the two of you are so insufferably solid about it that everyone gets bored and moves on.” He grabbed another handful of cereal. “That’s how it works, Stone. You just have to not fall apart in the meantime.”

I looked over at him.

He looked back at me with that grin, the real one, not the one he deployed for chaos but the quieter version underneath it that I’d seen maybe a dozen times in three years.

“Go to sleep,” he said. “We’ve got a game tomorrow.”

I stood up.

“Jett.”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t say anything for a second. There wasn’t really anything that needed saying. He knew that. He’d always known.

“Thanks,” I said.

He reached into the cereal box. “Don’t get weird about it.”

I went back inside.

I slept for six hours straight.

38

RHETT

I heard them before I even got through the locker room door.

Not the team. The crowd outside. The damn city. Las Vegas had lost its collective mind overnight, and not entirely because of the championship game. My phone had been blowing up since five a.m. with notifications I kept swiping away without reading. Jett had texted me seventeen times before eight o'clock, which was a personal record even for him, and the string of emojis alone told me everything I needed to know about what he was texting about.

I walked into the locker room and the noise dropped to a dead stop.

Thirty sets of eyes found me at once.