lyricii

you’re eating cereal and your phone buzzes and it’s a notification from the account you follow that posts wnba news, the one that’s always faster than the press releases, the one that knows before anyone does, and the notification says dallas wings sign forward jessica shepard to multi-year deal. you read it once you read it again you set down your spoon as the milk turns pink.

you stand there in your kitchen for a long time long enough that the cereal goes soggy long enough that the morning light shifts an inch across the floor. 

you don’t call anyone, you don’t text her, you stand there with your phone in your hand and the notification still on the screen and you feel, with the particular clarity of something that has been coming for a long time and arrived anyway, that you always knew this and that knowing it doesn’t help at all.

before a tuesday in march: the thing about jessica is that she always knew how to fill a room without trying.

six-four and broad-shouldered and she moved through the world with this loose unhurried quality, nothing like the precision she had on the court on the court it was all intentional angles, practiced footwork, every movement chosen but off it she was easier in herself, more generous with the space she took up and she’d walk into somewhere and your chest would do the thing it always did, has always done since the first time, the catch-and-release, like your body had to briefly recalibrate when she was nearby like something in you said. “oh. right. her.”

you’ve never told her that you’ve thought about what it would mean to hand her that particular piece of yourself you recalibrate me, specifically you, no one else does this and every time you’ve found a reason to leave it unsaid. 

maybe because saying it out loud would mean acknowledging how far gone you were, maybe because she’d have looked at you with those eyes she keeps careful, and you’d have had to sit with being fully known by them.

it’s a tuesday in march and she’s in your kitchen making pasta and you’re on the couch with your knees pulled up, pretending to read something on your phone, not reading anything she moves through your kitchen like she knows it, because she does. two years of small habitations. 

her spoon in your drawer is her preference for the heavy-bottomed pot the way she always opens the wrong cabinet first before remembering where you keep the salt, always the one to the left, never the one to the right and the private pleasure of watching her figure it out every time. evidence of a person. evidence of this particular person, accumulated over time, living in the ordinary details of your apartment.

she’s wearing your grey sweatshirt she’s been wearing it since the second month, when everything was still new enough that borrowing a sweatshirt meant something, when she’d pulled it on and looked at you sideways with this small unreadable expression and you’d said nothing because what do you say to someone when they’ve just decided they want to exist inside something of yours. “you’re staring,” she says, not turning around. “i’m observing.”

“what’s the difference?”

“intent,” you say. “staring implies i can’t stop. observing implies i’m choosing to.” she turns around then, wooden spoon in hand, and she looks at you for a long moment. 

her hair is up, the loose kind, pieces fallen around her face, and she’s tilting her head slightly in the way she does when she’s deciding whether to believe you. “and which is it,” she says.

you look at her at the sweatshirt that’s too small for her across the shoulders at her face in the kitchen light. “observing,” you say liar as a beat passed into something moves through her expression something soft she doesn’t usually let out and she turns back to the stove. “mm-hm,” she says.

you watch the line of her back and the way she stirs too fast when she’s thinking she always stirs too fast, like the movement is a release valve, pressure finding an outlet and you don’t ask. 

you’ve learned, in two years, not to ask when she goes quiet she’ll tell you when she’s ready or she won’t loving jessica means learning to be patient with the distance between her feelings and her words.

she doesn’t say anything that night she serves the pasta and you eat at the table she made you a table person, she once said that eating alone standing up was the saddest habit she could think of and now you don’t do it unless she’s absent and she talks about nothing. 

a podcast about something funny napheesa said a restaurant that opened two blocks from the practice facility and you listen and you eat and you reach across the table once to touch the back of her hand and she turns her palm up and laces your fingers together without stopping the story she’s telling, like it’s nothing, like two years of her hands haven’t become a primary language.

later, doing dishes, she comes to stand behind you and puts her head on your shoulder and wraps her arms around you from behind while you go still as she doesn’t say anything, she just stays there.

you dry your hands you put your hands over hers as you think; she’s going to leave not in words yet not in anything you’d say out loud but somewhere in you the knowledge has been sitting for a while now, patient, waiting for you to look at it directly you think; and i will let her. and it will wreck me. and she’s still here right now with her chin on my shoulder and i will stay in this for every second i have left.

before that — how it started:

you should say, for the record, that you knew what you were getting into, because jessica had told you, early on the second date maybe, the one where you’d ended up at the bar on hennepin street because dinner had gone too well and neither of you wanted it to end yet. 

she’d been on her second drink and she’d looked at you very directly and said. “i’m not easy to be with.”

“i go away for months at a time and when i’m here i’m in my head about basketball a lot. i just think you should know that.” and you’d looked at her the long self-contained line of her, the careful honesty of her face — and you’d said. “okay.” and she’d said. “okay?” and you’d said. “i mean, i’d like to find out for myself.” she’d laughed you’d learned later that she didn’t laugh easily, that it was something she gave slowly and it meant something when it came. 

she laughed, and you thought you were done for, and you were right you knew what you were getting into it didn’t help, in the end. knowing never helps it just means you can name the thing as it happens to you.

october, after a loss:

the locker room empties out and she finds you in the parking lot leaning against your car, hands in your pockets, the cold doing what it does she doesn’t say anything she walks up and stands next to you and looks out at the empty lot and you let her. 

you’ve learned the shape of her silences, this one wants company, not conversation she’s still in her gear, jacket unzipped, and it’s seventeen degrees and you want to tell her to zip it up you don’t, because you know the look the one that means don’t mother me and also, underneath, but i 

like it when you do. “we should’ve had that one,” she says finally. “yeah.”

“i had twelve and ten.”

“team loss,” you say she makes a sound, her jaw is set, you've learned her jaw the way it locks when she’s holding something she won’t say she does this after losses, goes somewhere internal and unflinching, holds herself there. 

you’ve watched it a dozen times and it never gets less hard to witness not because it’s wrong but because you understand it the refusal to let herself off, the relentless internal accounting and you understand it because it’s part of the same person who stirs too fast and borrows your sweatshirt and laces her fingers through yours without stopping her stories.

“hey.” you put your hand on her forearm, over the jacket she looks down at it and then up at you, and something in her face does the slow thing the unhardening the thing she does for you and not for many other people. “what,” she says, not defensive, just checking. “you played a good game.”

“we lost.”

“you played a good game. both things.” she looks at you for a moment and the parking lot lights on her face are tired, genuinely tired, and the thing on her shoulders has finally dropped. “come home with me,” you say and she always does. 

she says yeah like she was waiting to be asked and you go around to the driver’s side and the whole drive she has her head against the window and you don’t make her talk and she doesn’t make herself.

later she falls asleep on your couch before ten with her head in your lap and her hand loosely around your wrist like she grabbed you in her sleep, and you stay very still, and you watch the lamp light on her face, and you think about things that don’t have words yet.

the first time you told yourself it was the last time — november:

this is the thing you haven’t told anyone, not really the first time you told yourself it was the last time was a tuesday in november. you’d been in a disagreement not quite a fight, one of the low-burning kinds, the kind where neither of you is wrong exactly, just wanting different things and neither of you able to say what those things are and she’d left without it being resolved, which she did sometimes, which you’d learned to sit with even when it cost you and you’d decided. 

that’s it. you’re done. you’re going to have the conversation and end it cleanly and go back to your life.

you’d lasted four days four days and she’d texted you not about the disagreement, just a stupid thing, a meme about a very large dog, the kind of thing she sent you sometimes because she’d stopped at some point bothering to pretend she didn’t think about you constantly and you’d laughed before you could stop yourself and replied before you’d thought about it and two hours later you were on the phone with her for ninety minutes talking about nothing and the disagreement was a background hum and you felt the decision you’d made dissolve like it had never existed.

she’s too much, you’d thought not as a complaint as a fact she is too much and i am unable to stay away from her and i should do something about that you didn’t do anything about it.

the second time you told yourself it was the last time was january, after the ultimatum that wasn’t supposed to be an ultimatum you’d said the thing, she’d flinched, you’d spent the night on her couch with her feet in your lap, and you’d driven home at seven in the morning in the grey january light and sat in your car in your parking lot and said out loud, to nobody. 

okay. that’s it. this is not sustainable and you need to stop.

you’d lasted eight days that time eight days and you’d been at a lynx game not for her, or not only, you have a life, you have friends who are fans and you’d seen her on the court and your chest had done the thing and after the game she’d found you outside, not by arrangement, just because she always seemed to know where you were, and she’d looked at you with those careful eyes and said come get food with me and you’d said yes, you always said yes.

you said yes in march, in may, in the long summer before she went overseas again you said yes in phone calls at two in the morning you said yes in november when she texted a picture of a very large dog and you felt yourself dissolve.

you’d told yourself it was the last time at least eleven times you’d kept count, somewhere, in the back of yourself where you keep the things you’re not proud of eleven times you’d decided you were done. 

eleven times something had undone her voice, her hands the specific quality of being wanted by jessica shepard, who doesn’t want things carelessly, who chose you the same way she did everything else certain and unhesitating and full.

the sex was part of it, you're not going to pretend it wasn’t she knew you in a way that still startled you sometimes, after two years knew what you needed before you asked for it, knew how to take you apart and put you back together and look at you after like you were something worth the trouble and you were you are but it was more than that, the looking. 

it was the way she stayed the way jessica, who was always a little armored, who kept things close, who took her time trusting the way she had let herself stay with you eleven times you’d decided to stop folding and then she’d call or you’d see her or she’d walk through your door and she’d look at you and you’d fold anyway.

the last time was april three days before the announcement that would come on a tuesday morning while you were eating cereal and you said yes then too.

before dallas, january:

the thing that became an ultimatum comes out of your mouth before you’ve finished deciding to say it you’d meant a conversation you’d rehearsed a conversation in the shower, in your car, in the five minutes after your alarm and before you had to be a person. 

you’d meant to say. i love you and i need to know where this is going because not knowing is costing me something. what comes out. “i can’t keep doing this like it’s enough. at some point we have to decide what this is.” she goes very still when you're in her kitchen in january. 

seventeen degrees and the city dark by four and the kind of cold that doesn’t perform itself, just sits there being relentless her apartment is warm she keeps it warm, hates the cold despite or maybe because of growing up in nebraska and you’d had a good dinner, genuinely a good dinner, and then somehow over dishes the thing that had been building pressure finally found an exit. “i know what this is,” she says.

“do you?”

“yes.”

“then tell me.” your voice is steadier than you feel. “because i don’t know if you’re staying or going somewhere else and i don’t know if i’m part of that decision or just something that exists around the edges of it.” she flinches small almost invisible but you catch it.“that’s not fair,” she says.

“i know.” and you do. “i’m not trying to be fair. i’m trying to be honest.” she crosses her arms and looks at the window where you watch the muscle in her jaw she does this goes somewhere internal, accounts for herself, decides what to say. 

you’ve watched her do it a hundred times you’ve always tried to give her room for it right now you’re not sure you have room left to give. “i don’t know yet,” she says.

“what don’t you know.”

“where i’m going to be.” a beat passed. “what i want.” you breathe through it what i want for two years and she’s still sitting with that as an open question or worse she knows and saying it out loud is the part she can’t do yet. “okay,” you say. “okay?”

“what do you want me to say to that, jessica.”

“i don’t know.” her voice has gone quieter, the edges scraped off. “i don’t know what i want you to say.” you look at her tall and tired in the middle of her own kitchen, and you love her in the way you’ve loved her for two years not a feeling, a structural thing, load-bearing and you think. she’s already on the other side of this decision. she’s just not ready to hand it to me yet.

“come here,” you say she hesitates, that's new she’s never hesitated to come to you the hesitation tells you more than anything she’s said and then she crosses the kitchen and you take her face in your hands and bring her forehead down to yours. 

she’s six-four and she folds for you, lets you do this, has always let you do this and you have never once taken it for granted, the way she bends.

“what if i told you,” she says, very quiet, “that the thing i want most and the things i’m going to do aren’t the same thing.” your chest does something that has no good word. “then i’d say it sounds like you’ve already decided,” you say she looks at you. “i hate that you know me,” she says. “no you don’t.” something almost a laugh. “no,” she says. “i don’t.”

you don’t resolve it that night you eat cold pasta on her kitchen counter and she steals off your fork and the music plays its unasked-for playlist and she falls asleep on the couch with her hand around your wrist, and you stay still and you memorize the weight of it, the sound of her breathing, the lamp light on her face.

you let yourself know, finally, what you’ve been keeping at arm’s length she loves you she’s still leaving both things, completely.

june — six months before dallas:

she calls at two in the morning you were almost asleep the grey almost-place, edges blurred and her name on the screen pulls you back. “did i wake you.”

“almost.” you push onto your elbow outside minneapolis in june here your lamp, your dark there: italy, some other clock, a different dark. “jessica two in the morning.”

“i know. i’m sorry —”

“don’t be sorry. what’s wrong.” silence is weighted but you wait eight months of long distance for eight long months of calls and the particular arithmetic of it’s time zones and care and missing someone in the specific way you miss someone you know very well, which is not a vague ache but a detailed and precise one. 

you know exactly what you’re missing the kitchen and the table, the too-fast stirring the sweatshirt the weight of her hand. “nothing’s wrong,” she says as if you think she's a liar. “okay,” you say. “i just wanted to hear your voice.” there it is six words and they land like something that bypasses all your careful management and goes straight to the center of you, you lie back and look at the ceiling. “i’m here,” you say.

“yeah.” and the tension goes out of her exhale. “yeah. okay.” you talk for ninety minute she asks what you did today and you tell her the grocery store, a dog that looked like a small bear, the coffee place under new management, worse coffee and she listens and occasionally you can hear her smiling and once she laughs, that laugh she gives slowly, and you think about load-bearing walls this isn’t sustainable i would do it for years both true both true and you’re done pretending they cancel each other out. “jess,” you say, when the small things have run out.

“yeah.”

“i’m glad you called.” a pause. “yeah?”

“yeah.”

“okay.” softer now. “go back to sleep.”

“i will.”

“i’ll call tomorrow. real hours.”

“you don’t have to —”

“i want to.” simple, final, decided as she hangs up and you lie in the dark and her voice is still somewhere in your chest and you put your phone on the other pillow and you don’t sleep for a long time.

the last night — april, three days before the announcement:

she calls at nine you’re in bed but not asleep, which you’ve been a lot lately staring at the ceiling as a hobby and her name comes up and you know the way you’ve been knowing things about jessica since year one, not from thinking but from all the accumulated knowledge of a person, their patterns, their tells, their weight in the world you know what this is. “are you awake,” she says. “yeah.”

“can i come over.”

“door’s unlocked.” you don’t ask why you don’t need to but you get up and brush your teeth and turn on the lamp the small one she gave you a hard time about when you bought it, that doesn’t do anything, and then sat reading by it every single time and you stand in your kitchen and you think. you told yourself this was the last time.

october, november, january, march but you have told yourself, in so many ways, with so much intention, that you were done folding that you were going to do the hard thing and stop returning to her, stop answering when she pulled. 

that you had enough self-respect to let this end cleanly and here you are in your kitchen with the lamp on at nine at night waiting for her and here’s the thing, the real thing, the thing you’ve been sitting with since november when you lasted four days and then caved to a picture of a large dog. 

you fold not because you’re weak. you fold because every time you decide you’re done, you remember what it feels like to be with her. 

not just the sex, though that’s yeah, we’ll get there but the whole shape of it her head on your shoulder the sweatshirt the way she stirs too fast the way she turns her palm up when you reach across the table, automatic, like she’s been waiting the way she makes you eat sitting down you fold because she made your apartment into a home without trying and you don’t know how to not want that and also, yes, the sex.

twenty minutes later she knocks even though she has a key and you open the door she’s there with the overnight bag and a jacket that’s not warm enough and she looks at you in the doorway and you look at her and there it is, the thing you can never manage your way around, the catch-and-release, oh right her.

you step aside and she comes in and sets the bag down you’re both in the entryway in the low lamp light and she’s looking at you the way she does sometimes, the direct careful way, like she’s checking you’re still real. “jess,” you say. “don’t.” her voice is low. “not yet. please. just —” she exhales, and the exhale carries a month in it, a year, years. “not yet.” so you don’t whereas you take her hand and you lead her to the bedroom.

you should talk, you know you should you have told yourself, all the other times, that this is not a solution, that going to bed with her is not the same as resolving anything, that you are making it worse every time you choose this instead of the conversation all of that is true.

you still want her so badly it has never once felt like a choice she kisses you first she always kisses you first, she has from the beginning, and you asked her once why she never waited and she said because i know what i want, just like that, matter-of-fact, like wanting was simple and acting on it the natural consequence. 

you’d thought you’d never be over that you were right she kisses you slowly not the beginning kind the kind that knows exactly what it is and takes its time with it anyway she cups your face in her basketball hands the wide palms, the long fingers, the calluses you know by heart and she angles in and you make a soft moan before you mean to and she makes a lower one back and her hands tighten.

she pulls back and looks at you and you look back and you are here’s the truth of it, the thing you’ve been managing all night, all week, the thing that makes you fold every single time you are desperate for her in a way that has never diminished, not once, not in two years and you are angry about it, a little, the anger running underneath everything at yourself, at the shape of things, at the fact that she walks through a door and your chest recalibrates and all your careful decisions evaporate like they were nothing at the particular injustice of loving someone this much and still not being enough to make them stay and she looks at you, and she sees it she’s always seen it, she knows you, she has always known you and something in her face does the soft thing. “hey,” she says.

“hey.”

“come here.” and you go you go because you always go, because this is who you are with her, because need is the word for it and always has been.

you pull her down onto you and her weight is exactly what it always is, solid and certain and overwhelming, and you put your hands in her hair and your mouth at her throat and she exhales like she’s been waiting for this all day. 

she’s braced on her forearms above you and you arch up against her and she makes a moan softly the low one, the specific one and you feel it everywhere. “jess,” you say, against her collarbone. “yeah,” she says.

“i need—”

“i know.” she pulls back enough to look at you at your face, your hands are on her and you’re looking at her and you can feel yourself going undone by the straightforwardness of wanting her, by two years of this and still feeling like there’s nothing to buffer it. “please,” you say, and you don’t care that you said it, you have never been able to be proud around her, she has always turned you into the person who says please. 

“jessica. please.” her eyes do something as she looks at you like you’ve handed her something she didn’t expect to receive. “hey,” she says. soft. “i’ve got you.” and she does, she always has that’s the whole problem.

she takes you apart slowly she’s always been thorough, jessica it’s the same quality that makes her relentless on the court, the refusal to rush, the understanding that the right thing done completely is worth more than the quick thing done carelessly. 

she’s thorough and attentive and she has two years of knowing exactly what you need, and she uses it you’re needful tonight in a way that surprises even you. 

the grief running underneath the wanting the anger underneath the grief the way you keep pulling her back when she moves to give you space because you can’t, you can’t have space right now, you need to be as close as possible, you need to be touching her everywhere, you need every point of contact because you are going to lose this. 

you already have, in the way that matters you’re three days from the press release, you're three days from standing at your kitchen counter reading about dallas while your cereal goes pink.

she knows you she’s always known you when you pull her back she comes when you make the sounds she recognizes she pays attention when you say please and you say it more than once, tonight, please and jessica and please again she gives you what you asked for and more, and she does it looking at you.

the looking is the thing you’ve thought about this. she could do all of this without looking, and it would still be a lot but she looks. she looks at you like you’re the thing she’s paying the most attention to in the world, like you’re the thing that requires her most complete focus and you know, because you know her, that she doesn’t do this carelessly jessica doesn’t look at things carelessly. “stay with me,” she says, once, when you go somewhere far away. “i’m here,” you say. “i know. stay with me anyway.”

you stay.

you come apart reaching for her hands in her hair, her name in your mouth, your whole body gone and her arms around you holding what’s left.

she doesn’t stop until you pull her up, until you’ve got your face in her neck and you’re holding onto her like she’s the stable thing, and she lets you.

“hey,” she murmurs, hand moving through your hair.

you don’t say anything you’re not ready for words she holds you, she moves her hand through your hair, slow, the same rhythm as always, and she doesn’t rush you.

here’s the other thing and this is the thing that will undo you in the kitchen on tuesday morning, standing at your counter with the notification on your screen and the other thing is that she is always good to you after always jessica, who keeps things close, who doesn’t give easily, who is armored in most situations she is always unhurried and attentive and present. 

she holds you like she wants to like it’s not a courtesy but a thing she’s choosing you have told yourself eleven times that you’re done. 

you have folded every single time and it’s not just the sex though god, yes, the sex, the way she takes you apart and puts you back together, the way she looks at you, the way you never have to ask twice, the way she says i’ve got you and means it completely it’s this the after the hand in your hair. the way she stays.

you press your face further into her neck. “i keep telling myself i’m done,” you say, into her skin you don’t mean to say it out loud. it just comes out. “every time. i tell myself it’s the last time.”

she goes still. “i know,” she says, after a moment. “and then you call or i see you or—” you stop. “and then i come back.”

“i know.” her voice is both quiet and careful. “why do you think that is,” you say not bitterly but genuinely she moves her hand through your hair she doesn’t answer for a long time. “because it’s true,” she says finally. “whatever this is. it’s true.” you lie there with that.

“yeah,” you say. “that’s the problem.” she holds you tighter for a brief moment then relaxes. “i know,” she says and she means it you can hear the weight of it.

she’s on her back and you’re half on her, your head on her chest, and you can hear her heart you’ve been here a hundred times in different configurations, different rooms, different cities, this same gravity between you.

you don’t speak for a long time as neither of you breaks the quiet her chest expands. “i have to tell you something,” she says. “i know.” a pause that holds everything.

“you know,” she says. “dallas.” the word sits in the air between you her arm tightens around you. “april,” she says. “they offered me — it’s a real role. starting role. i’d be —” she stops. “i know it’s not—”

“jess.”

“i know.”

“i know you know.” you lift your head she’s looking at the ceiling, jaw set, eyes bright in the way she gets when she’s holding something she won’t let fall. “i knew in january. probably before.”

“i should’ve told you sooner.”

“yeah.”

“i kept thinking if i didn’t say it out loud it wasn’t decided yet.” she meets your eyes the openness in hers. “and i wasn’t ready to lose the in-between.”

you look at her face. “were you ever going to tell me,” you say, “or was i going to find out from a press release.” it lands the way it’s meant to so she doesn’t flinch away from it. “i was going to tell you,” she says. “i’m telling you.”

“you’re telling me in my bed at ten at night three days before it goes public.”

“i know.”

“jessica.”

“i know.” her voice has gone very quiet. “i know. i’m sorry.” and you look at her and you believe it you have always been able to tell when she’s sorry and when she’s managing.

this is the real thing she is sorry and she chose anyway and she’ll live with both. “i know you are,” you say as you lay your head back down on her chest. 

she goes back to moving her hand through your hair. “are we —” she starts. “don’t.” soft. “not tonight.” she stops you both from sitting with the unasked question and its obvious answer.

you fall asleep like that. her hand in your hair, her heart under your ear at six in the morning the bed is empty and the light is grey and she’s in the doorway already dressed. 

overnight bag over her shoulder she looks at you when you sit up and neither of you speaks for a moment.

she crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed. cups your face in both hands and looks at you for a long time, the way she has always looked at you, like she’s taking stock of something she values.

she presses her mouth to your forehead still long her lips against your forehead and her thumbs at your cheekbones and you close your eyes. “i’ll call you,” she says, against your hair you nod she pulls back looks at you one more time.

she stands and picks up the bag and opens the door so she doesn’t look back you sit in the silence of your apartment for a long time and you think about all the times you told yourself it was the last time, and how this is, finally, actually the last time and how you didn’t decide it. 

how it decided itself you sit there until the cereal on tuesday morning.

dallas, june: 

it’s a tuesday game with wings at lynx you’d considered going you’d sat with the idea of it sitting in those stands, watching her in a different jersey, watching her move through the same arena in someone else’s colors, watching her do the thing she does and knowing you don’t get to drive her home after anymore.

you decide you’re not that strong you watch from the couch she’s on the second unit to start and within four minutes of entering the game she’s already calibrated that thing she does, figures out the geometry and adjusts. 

she’s finding her spots in a block in the lane, a screen that springs arike for an easy three, and the dallas bench reacts, and she’s already running back, already ahead of the play.

twelve points by halftime seven rebounds she’s playing with something looser than minnesota ever gave her more room, more responsibility, more.

you eat your dinner in front of the tv in the third quarter she catches a pass at the elbow and you recognize it before it happens two years of watching, you know this setup, you know the footwork  pump fake, defender bites, drives baseline, left hand finish through contact. 

the arena makes noise and she jogs back up the court and her face is the focused unsatisfied thing you know from a hundred other moments, from parking lots and postgame silences and kitchen tables.

you pause it, you sit there with her face on the screen, the lamp behind you the small lamp, the one she told you didn’t do anything, the one she sat reading by every time she was here casts a warm circle on the wall.

you unpause the game the wings win by nine fourteen and nine for jessica you sit in the quiet after and the apartment is fully yours again in the way it sometimes wasn’t, the way it stopped being quite yours when she started leaving things in it and didn’t stop until she took them all back.

you think, you’re okay you think, you’re going to be okay. you’re not sure yet. but it’s the direction you’re moving.

later — jessica, june:

she doesn’t sleep on the bus arike is out before the highway, headphones on, gone to herself, alanna’s reading the younger players in the back doing something quiet and laughing. 

the bus smells like game night and takeout bags and the specific warmth of a team still riding a win.

jessica has her forehead against the cool window she’d seen you maybe. top of the second quarter, a familiar shape, the way someone moves, and she’d done the thing she does which is register it and not react when she looked again the seat was empty could’ve been anyone, probably was anyone you’d said you weren’t going. (she’d wanted you there.)

she watches minneapolis get smaller seven years she’d played her whole career here, minus the overseas stints, minus the season she sat seven years and she knew the streets by the commute to the arena, knew the coffee place on hennepin that got her order right, knew the grocery store worth the detour. 

small habitations a city becoming hers in the accumulated detail and then the larger knowing.

you.

your apartment with the lamp, your kitchen the heavy-bottomed pot, the wrong cabinet first, the pasta, the table you ate at because she’d insisted on it. the couch. 

the sweatshirt she borrowed in month two and never really gave back the parking lots the phone calls at two in the morning when she needed to hear your voice and she’d used up all her reasons.

i keep telling myself i’m done, you’d said. every time i tell myself it’s the last time and she’d said i know because she had known. 

she’d known every time she’d known you were trying to leave and she’d known what brought you back and she’d god, she hadn’t made it easy, had she. 

she hadn’t made it easy because she hadn’t wanted to. because she wanted you back every time you tried to go. because she is selfish about you in a way she’s not selfish about many things she thinks about that.

she should call she’s been thinking about calling for six weeks she picks up her phone and goes to your name and sits there with the weight of what she’d say, where she’d even start, and puts it down not because she doesn’t want to hear you but because she does. 

because you’d pick up you told her early on that you’d always pick up and you’ve proved it every time, and she knows, she knows that if she calls right now you’d say hey and she’d hear it and she doesn’t know what she’d do with that.

she doesn’t know how to want two things at once without one of them disappearing she should’ve said that to you she should’ve said: you are the thing i want most and i’m doing the other thing anyway and i need you to know those are both 

completely true she said i know instead eleven times, maybe every time you tried to leave and every time you came back and every time after, when you were in the quiet, she said i know because it was the truest thing she had and it was not enough.

she turns her phone over in her hands, your name on the screen, and she holds it for a long time. the bus moving south minneapolis receding dallas getting closer in the abstract, in the logic of direction, even though she won’t be there for two days.

she thinks, you’re going to be okay. she thinks this about you, not herself she’s been thinking about it for weeks: some superstition, some prayer without a recipient, you’re going to be okay, let yourself be okay, you deserve to be okay.

she thinks about your kitchen in the early mornings. the grey sweatshirt you are standing at the counter eating cereal, the fruit pieces, the milk turning pink, and her telling you to sit down, the table is right there, what is wrong with you, you are laughing while you are sitting down.

the small ordinary construction of a life alongside someone how easy it was. how much it meant to her. how she took it with her every time she went away and brought it back every time she returned and somehow didn’t understand until she was already gone that it wasn’t a thing you could pack and unpack it was a thing that lived there, it lived in your apartment and your kitchen and your lamp and the wrong cabinet for the salt it lived in you.

outside, the highway, the lights going past  her reflection in the dark window, and she looks tired, she looks like someone who got what she wanted and is still learning what it cost.

she puts in her earbuds she doesn’t call but she pulls up the contact and looks at your name for a long time, the bus moving south, the city gone behind her, and she lets herself want to. 

she lets the wanting be there without managing it you’re going to be okay, she thinks she closes her eyes, she lets herself miss you until she falls asleep somewhere on i-35, the seat tilted back and the earbuds in and the phone on her knee, your name still on the screen.

the pasta water sits there unhelpfully, not boiling, and you’re standing in a kitchen that smells like garlic and olive oil and the particular warmth of an apartment that has been lived in by two people long enough to stop feeling like either of their spaces separately and start feeling like a third thing entirely.

you’ve been together long enough for that long enough that you don’t clock it anymore, the way her stuff has migrated into your shelves, the way your coffee mug is always clean because she runs the dishwasher before you wake up, the way she moves through the apartment like she knows where everything is because she does.

long enough that waiting for her feels less like waiting and more like incomplete sentences that haven't finished yet you check your phone again as the time is now five-fifteen but you think that she’s probably on her way the water starts to boil right as you hear the key in the lock.

post-practice juju is a specific kind of person; she's quieter than usual, not subdued, just internal, like the day has used up the part of her that performs when she moves on autopilot she drops her bag by the door with a sound you’ve learned to identify specifically as long day rather than bad day, kicks off her slides, rolls her neck once, and then she finds you without looking.

that’s the thing about her, the thing you noticed early and never stopped noticing her body orientations toward you like it already knows where you are and has stopped asking permission to close the distance.

she wraps around you from behind, chin dropping onto your shoulder, and the full weight of her just settles all six feet of her, tired and warm, and you feel it happen in your own body too, the thing that happens when she’s close the loosening the sigh you didn’t know you were holding. “hey,” she says into the side of your neck. she means. i’m home. i missed you. i’m glad you’re here.

“hey,” you say back, and you mean all of those things too and for a moment neither of you move you stir the sauce she breathes the apartment smells like garlic and cedar — her body wash, the warm version of it that happens when she’s been active and then showered and then pressed herself against something and the lamp in the corner is already doing its evening thing, throwing everything gold, and it’s easy.

it’s the specific kind of ease that you spent a long time not believing was available to you and still sometimes catch yourself holding too carefully, like something you borrowed and haven’t been given permission to keep. “smells good,” she says. “it’s just pasta.”

“i know.” a pause, content. “smells good.” her arms tighten briefly around your waist. not asking for anything just contact just here you let yourself lean back into her, just slightly, just enough to answer you stay like that until the timer goes off.

dinner is an easy thing she’s tired in the way that makes her more herself somehow less filtered, more direct, all the social performance peeled back and just juju underneath it, talking with her fork and telling you about practice in the abbreviated way she has where you get maybe sixty percent of what happened and have to read the rest in her face.

coach ran a new set today, something they’ve been working toward for two weeks and it finally clicked, the whole thing snapping into place in the third hour, and the way her eyes go when she describes it bright and private, like she’s replaying it in real time makes your chest do something soft.

jazzy’s been different lately, she says locked in, locked in in that particular way that lifts the whole room’s ceiling the freshmen are starting to find the pace there were two plays in the afternoon session that felt like something, the kind of something that makes you feel it in your gut, like the team is becoming.

you listen you ask the right questions you watch her hands move and think about how there are people who have watched juju watkins play and felt something seismic and you get to see this version the version that comes home and eats pasta and tells you about practice with her shoes off, and somehow this feels more like the whole of her than any version on a court.

“you’re staring,” she says, without looking up from her plate. “i’m listening.”

“you’re doing both.”

“i can multitask.”

she looks up then, and something in her expression is caught between amused and soft, and she shakes her head slightly and goes back to her pasta, and you look down at your own plate and try not to smile.

after, she cleans up, that's the deal, you cook, she cleans and you migrate to the couch in the slow comfortable way of people who have nowhere to be and no performance left to give she pulls her hair back and tuck your legs under you.

the tv is on low, nothing either of you are actually watching, just the background hum of it, and the lamp is still doing the gold thing and the apartment is warm and quiet it’s a good night it’s the specific kind of good night that doesn’t have a story attached to it, that you could not explain to anyone else but that you know you’ll think about later when practice is hard or the distance is long or things feel complicated and use it to remember that this exists. that this is a thing that happens for you.

you pick up your phone, with no conscious muscle memory, apple music is open, the queue is still running from this morning, and it rolls into the next song without you making a choice.

mean what i say, say what i mean—

you recognize it immediately, the little piano thing at the beginning, the specific texture of ariana’s voice on this track dandelion you’ve been listening to for two weeks, which you are aware is a fact about yourself that says something, and you have not been examining what it says juju’s still at the sink you can hear the water.

you could skip it, it's a very easy thing to do, one tap queue moves on, different song, none of this happens you don’t skip it but what you do instead and this is a choice that reflects something about you that you also haven’t examined is start singing along quietly.

at a volume that is technically under your breath but is in no actual way inaudible in a studio apartment where the tv is at a low murmur and another person is ten feet away a joke you’re just vibing totally casual this means nothing.

i got what you need, i’m thinking you should plant this seed—

the water cuts off.

i get this sounds unserious, but baby boy, this is serious—

you are staring at your phone with intense focus.

“what are you playing?” she’s in the doorway dish towel over one shoulder looking at you with an expression you have a whole vocabulary for by now, head slightly tilted, one brow up, the particular quality of stillness that means she heard you the first time and is waiting to see how you’re going to play this.

“ariana,” you say very naturally.

“which song.”

“dandelion.” she looks at you just looks at you, for a long moment, not moving from the doorway then she comes and sits beside you closer than she needs to given the amount of couch available, close enough that her thigh is against yours and she doesn’t say anything, which is a specific kind of torture you’ve come to recognize the song keeps going in the space between you.

and yes i promise, if i’m being honest, you can get anything you’d like. you contemplate your phone screen with tremendous focus. can’t you see i bloom at night?

“so,” juju says.

“so.”

“dandelion.”

“it’s a good song.”

“yeah.” a beat, calibrated. “what’s it about.” and the thing is she knows what it’s about you know she knows the question isn’t a question, it’s an invitation to either walk through the door or pretend there isn’t one, and you both know which one you’ve been doing and you both know she’s not going to let you do it this time.

“it’s—” you gesture at nothing in particular. “you know. it’s an offering. like, here i am, here’s everything i have, make a wish. i’ll be your—”

“dandelion.”

“yeah.”

silence as the bridge comes in, ariana’s voice dropping quieter instead of going bigger, and it does the thing in your chest it always does the thing you haven’t been examining.

boy just don’t blow this—

juju turns her head. “were you singing that to me.” not a question, barely even an inflection but just the words, laid flat on the table.

“i was—” you laugh, and the laugh is a tell and you both know it, and you watch her register it— “i was just singing along. i wasn’t — it wasn’t directed at anyone specifically.”

“anyone.”

“anyone in the room.”

“anyone in—” she tilts her head slightly— “the room. that you’re sitting in. with me.”

“yes.”

“so you were singing it at—”

“the air,” you say. “into the void. at no one. as one does.”

“as one does,” she repeats.

“juju.”

“i’m just trying to understand,” she says, and the smile is starting now, not big, not mean, just that specific controlled thing she does when she has you and is in no hurry about it like she could sit here all night. “you were sitting here, next to me, singing a song about being someone’s dandelion. making them whatever they want. blooming at night.” a pause. “at the air.”

“at the air,” you confirm.

“into the void.”

“yes.”

“not at me.”

“correct.” she looks at you for a long moment you look back, or try to, and then look away first, which is information. “okay,” she says she doesn’t say anything else she just sits there, thigh still against yours, warm and unhurried, and lets the silence do its work.

you can feel her looking at you, that specific quality of juju’s attention, which has always felt like being studied by someone who has already reached their conclusion and is just enjoying confirming it when the song ends something else comes on it doesn’t matter dandelion is still in the room. “you know,” she says eventually, “you do that thing.”

“what thing.”

“where you get right up to the edge of saying something and then you make it a joke.” she’s not accusing she says it the way she says most things observationally, like she’s describing weather. “you’ve been doing it since we started. you’ll be right there, right at the thing, and then—” she clicks her tongue softly— “you slide out.”

“that’s not—” you start. “it’s okay,” she says. “i’m not saying it to make you feel bad. i’m just saying i see it. and i’m saying you don’t have to.”

the apartment is very quiet for a moment. “it’s embarrassing,” you say, which is the most honest thing you’ve said in the last ten minutes.

“why.”

“because—” you look at your hands— “because you’re you. and the song is—” you make a face— “really sincere. it doesn’t leave a lot of room for—”

“plausible deniability.”

“yeah.”

“and you like having an exit.”

“i like having an exit,” you agree, quietly juju is quiet, the lamp is still gold, her hand finds yours on the cushion between you and just rests there, not gripping, not doing anything, just present and something about that the not asking, the just landing makes your chest ache a little in a way you’re not going to say out loud.

“what if i told you,” she says, “that you don’t need one. with me.” she pauses. “not with me.” you look at her, she's already looking at you she almost always is, you’ve noticed like you’re a thing worth looking at, which you have never entirely been able to receive without deflecting.

“you were singing it to me,” she says. gently. not a trap, not a gotcha, just — naming it. “and i’m telling you that you can just say that.” the room is very still. “yeah,” you say, after a moment. quietly. “i was.”

something shifts in her face not surprise she knew, you both knew but something like relief, or like the specific tenderness of watching someone do something that costs them something. “yeah,” she says softly, like she’s receiving it carefully. “it made sense,” you say, once you’ve started. “the song. it kept coming on and it just — it’s what i’d say, if i could. i’m not good at the saying. but the song was—”

“the song said it.”

“the song said it.” she looks at you for a long moment then she says, soft and certain and with no performance in it whatsoever. “you’re my dandelion.”

“please never—”

“you are though.” she squeezes your hand once. “you make sure i eat when i forget. you know my schedule better than i do. you do that thing when i come home tired where you just make the room easy. you don’t need me to be on. you just—” she tilts her head— “you make space. you’ve been doing it since almost the beginning. like it’s natural. like you don’t even notice.”

“i notice,” you say. “i just — i like doing it. it’s not a sacrifice.”

“i know it’s not,” she says. “that’s the thing. that’s exactly the thing.” she looks at you. “you give because you want to. not because you’re keeping score. not because you want something back. do you know how rare that is?”

you don’t have anything to say to that not because you don’t believe her, but because being seen that clearly by another person does something to your ability to form sentences. “okay,” you say finally, which means nothing and everything. “okay,” she agrees and then she kisses you as this is not a small kiss.

this one has been sitting in the room all evening, patient, waiting for the conversation to clear space for it it’s warm and unhurried and she cups your jaw in one hand and angles you exactly where she wants you, and you feel it land in your chest the way her kisses always do, this particular one especially like being held still like being confirmed.

when she pulls back you’re leaning after her before you register it, and she sees it, and the look on her face does not help. “you were saying?” she says, soft.

“i’ve completely lost it.”

“mm.” her thumb traces your cheekbone, slow. “so. wish list.”

“juju.”

“you said whatever i want.”

“i said the song said—”

“same thing,” she says, voice dropping into that register that is specifically unfair, low and easy, and she is looking at you with the focused patience she usually reserves for the third hour of film study. “i want to know yours.”

“you,” you say, finally, helplessly. “just — you. that’s the whole list.”

something happens in her face, something that moves fast and then settles into warmth so complete it’s almost unbearable and she says, “that’s convenient,” and kisses you again, deeper this time, her hand sliding from your jaw into your hair her other hand finds the hem of your shirt fingers spread warm against your waist not pushing, just landing claiming.

you make a sound you weren’t planning on making. “yeah?” she says against your mouth. “yeah,” you manage.

she uses the hand at your waist to pull you closer, into her, and you go easily you always go easily, that’s always been the thing and she kisses you deeper and her thumb drags along the skin just above your waistband and your brain goes quiet in the best possible way. “i’ve been thinking about this since i got home,” she says, mouth at your jaw, your throat.

“the dandelion thing?”

she laughs low, breath warm against your pulse point. “no.” she pulls back just enough to look at you, dark-eyed and half-smiling, the wanting underneath it entirely real. “you, in that shirt, not looking at me like you weren’t thinking about it.”

“i wasn’t—”

“you were,” she says simply and yet so certain. “and i ate dinner and i waited.”

“for an opening.”

“the song was an opening.” her hand slides further under your shirt, palm flat against your stomach, and you feel your breath catch. “and now i’m done waiting.”

she kisses you again before you can respond, and her hands are moving now, sure and unhurried, and your shirt comes up and her mouth follows the hem and by the time she walks you to the bedroom your legs are not entirely reliable and she knows it, and the look on her face when she does is not smug exactly, just satisfied like everything is proceeding according to a plan she made hours ago.

the lamp in the bedroom is off, she doesn’t turn it on, city light comes faint through the curtains, enough to see by, and she undresses you the rest of the way slowly not as a tease, just as a fact, because this is how juju does this, thoroughly and without rushing.

she takes you in when she’s done. actually looks, unhurried, and you’ve been together long enough that you don’t try to fill the silence of it anymore you just let her look. “hi,” she says.

“hi,” you say back she laughs, warm and low, and pulls you onto the bed she starts slow that’s juju’s whole thing she starts slow and she means it, it’s not a performance of patience, it’s actual patience, the kind that comes from being genuinely interested in every stage of the thing.

her mouth finds your throat and drags down, unhurried, learning the sounds you make at each stop collarbone the curve of your shoulder. the soft skin just below your ear that makes you inhale sharply, which she notes and returns to.

her hands move with the same deliberateness, no wasted motion, no hesitation. she palms up your side, your ribcage, and you arch into it without meaning to. “still embarrassed?” she murmurs, mouth at your sternum. “about wanting.” she looks up at you dark-eyed and patient. “about saying it.”

“no,” you say, and you mean it all the way down you’re past the point of deflection, stripped down to just this wanting her, wanting this, not pretending otherwise. “not even a little.”

“good,” she says, and moving lower takes her time her hands hold your hips loosely, not rough, just grounding and she works you open with the focused patience she brings to everything she cares about.

you feel it build the way the song builds, patient and layered, quieter than you expect and then suddenly overwhelming you’re gripping the sheets inside of two minutes. “juju—” her name comes out unsteady. “mm.” not stopping.

“please—”

“please what.” her mouth, devastating and deliberate, pausing just long enough to make you aware of the absence.

“you know—”

“i want to hear it,” she says, and looks up at you, dark-eyed and certain. “no exits, remember?” and that lands exactly where she means it to the whole evening in two words.

so you say it clearly, specifically, with nothing held back and she smiles like you’ve given her something she’s been waiting for, and says there you go, low and close, and gives you everything you asked for.

she is meticulous in a way that dismantles you piece by piece she knows which things make you go still and which ones make you gasp and she uses both, alternating, building and pulling back and building again until you’re fisting the sheets and your thighs are shaking and her name is the only coherent thing left in you.

you come the first time with her name breaking in your throat and your hand gripping her hair and she works you through every wave of it, patient and steady, staying until you’ve gone loose and oversensitive and are pulling at her to come back up she does easy unhurried.

“hi,” she says again, settling over you.

“that was—” you don’t finish the sentence you pull her in instead, kiss her deep, and she makes a sound against your mouth soft and wanting and that’s what does it the sound of her wanting. that’s what tips it you roll her over.

she goes, which she doesn’t always juju has a center of gravity that’s hard to move but tonight she lets you, goes easy, lets you push her back into the pillows and looks up at you with an expression that’s fond and hungry and a little like it took you long enough. “hi,” you say.

“hey,” she says back, and smiles, the real one, the unguarded one and you feel it in your chest and then set it aside because you have things to do.

you take your time at her throat the way she took her time at yours her jaw, the long line of her neck, the place where her pulse is quick under your lips.

she’s quieter than you when she wants something that’s juju, always but you know her sounds by now the small ones, the sharp intake, the way her hand moves to find you when you hit something right. “there?” you say, against her collarbone.

“yeah,” she says. low. “there.” you stay there you feel her trying to hold her composure, feel the effort of it, and that, that specifically makes you want to take it from her.

you move lower she makes a sound she wasn’t planning on. “yeah?” you say. “don’t—” she starts.

“don’t what.” a pause her hand finds your hair. “don’t stop.” so you don’t juju lose her patience in pieces that’s the thing you’ve learned, the thing nobody else gets to know — she goes less steady and grips harder.

her breathing changes first, then her jaw, then the careful composure just — goes, fully, and underneath it is just her, wanting, not performing anything, just present and needing and yours.

you stay until her thighs are shaking and she’s stopped being quiet about it, until she’s saying your name the way you said hers like it’s the only word left and then you stay a little longer just because you can.

she comes with her hand in your hair and her back arched and your name in her mouth and you work her through every second of it, and after, and after that too.

when you come back up she pulls you in immediately you go for a moment you just breathe together, her heartbeat fast under your ear and slowing, both of you wrecked and warm and unhurried. “okay,” she says, eventually to the ceiling.

“okay,” you agree. “so,” she says.

“juju, i swear—”

“you’re definitely my dandelion.” you make a noise into her shoulder she laughs the full one, the whole-body one and holds you tighter through it, and you feel that laugh the way you feel everything about her, right in the center of you, like a frequency you’ve been permanently tuned to and stopped fighting.

“round two?” she says entirely casually that you lift your head and look at her.

“you’re insane,” you say. “is that a yes.”

round two is less tender the first time had all that weight behind it: the song, the conversation, the saying of the thing and this time that’s still there but underneath, and what’s on top is just heat just want the clean uncomplicated wanting that’s been between you since almost the beginning, the pull that doesn’t need a reason.

she pins your wrists above your head this time, easy and certain, and you don’t bother pretending you don’t love it she knows she’s always known. “still got your wish list?” she says, low, mouth at your ear. “juju—”

“because i’ve got mine,” she says, and tells you what’s on it, and your brain whites out a little at the specifics, and then she makes good on every item methodically and without mercy and you are loud in a way you’ll be privately embarrassed about tomorrow and she is thorough in a way that makes embarrassment feel like a distant concern.

at some point the city outside goes quieter, that deep late-night hush, and in here there’s just the two of you and the heat and the dark and her voice, low and close, asking you things and receiving answers.

you come apart again and she holds you through it, steady and certain and warm, and stays until you’ve gone fully loose and soft and somewhere entirely outside of language after, she pulls you in and you stay there both of you wrecked both of you home.

much later when the room has gone fully quiet and she’s mostly asleep, her breathing long and even and her arm thrown heavy across you she says it into the dark. “what’s your wish list.”

barely awake just keeping the lyric company you think about the kitchen the gold lamp her fork moving when she talks.

the way she found you without looking at all of it, all of tonight, all of every night that came before it and the ones that will come after. “don’t have one,” you say. “this is it.” she hums already almost gone. “me either,” she says. “everything’s already here.”

you’d seen her argue passionately with a vending machine for four full minutes after it gave her extra chips, not complaining, celebrating, giving it a genuine speech about integrity and reward.

you’d seen her walk into a film session fifteen minutes late with a breakfast sandwich and no apology and somehow make geno laugh anyway you had known, intellectually, what you were getting into but this, this is something new.

“you’re mic’d up,” you remind her during the first timeout of the second half you’re down four it’s a home game, gampel loud and close around you, and geno is at the whiteboard drawing out adjustments with the focused energy of a man who does not have time for anything that isn’t basketball.

paige is standing next to you with her elbow propped on your shoulder like you are a piece of furniture she has personally claimed like this is just where her elbow lives now. “i know,” she says pleasantly.

“paige. the whole country can hear you.”

“i know,” she says again, same tone, zero concern, and then she turns slightly toward her own collar and says, louder, with the deliberate energy of someone making an announcement: “my girlfriend is the prettiest player on this team and i will not be taking questions at this time.”

the timeout explodes nika loses it first full body, hand over her mouth, turning away like she can hide it. aubrey makes a noise that is not a basketball player noise.

ice throws her head back completely, done, gone, not coming back kk pulls her jersey up over her face. azzi, who is famously the most composed person on this roster, makes a sound in the back of her throat that is, without question, a wheeze.

even aaliyah, still operating under the impression that she should probably be professional, covers her face with both hands geno does not look up from the whiteboard.

“bueckers.”

“coach.”

“are you done.”

“yes sir.”

he keeps drawing, sets it up, taps the board twice a full five seconds of blessed silence while he walks through the adjustment and everyone pretends to be paying attention then, quieter so quiet it’s almost just for you, just breath and words and the weight of her elbow still on your shoulder: “she really is though.” and the mic catches every single syllable of it.

it airs on the espn feature two weeks later, tucked between a segment on the team’s defensive rating and a profile on geno’s coaching philosophy.

they give it a title card they use it as the closer the producer, you will later find out, fought for thirty seconds to include it and won unanimously as your phone doesn’t stop buzzing for four days.

your mom calls, your mom never calls during the season she calls to say, and these are her exact words she seems very nice, honey. paige, who is sitting next to you when you take the call, hears this and looks extremely smug about it for the rest of the evening.

the second incident and yes, there is a second incident, there is always a second incident with paige, this is what you have come to understand about your life during warmups before the villanova game.

it’s a road trip, a night game, the gym still mostly empty when you’re running shooting lines forty minutes before tip.

it’s routine catch, shot, rotate, the lights are up, the music is going, kk is talking too loud about something that happened at dinner and aubrey is responding with equal volume and it’s just it’s normal.

it feels like every other pregame warmup you’ve had for three years and then paige, who is supposed to be on the other end of the court working pull-ups with the assistant coach, cups both hands around her mouth and shouts across half court: “that’s my girlfriend.”

you do not look at her. “number —” a pause, like she’s checking, which she is absolutely not doing, she knows your number, “— that one. right there. she’s mine.”

there are maybe fifty people in the building, students filtering in early, a few parents, the opposing team still in their locker room, every single one of them looks at you.

“paige.” you catch the pass you do not look at her. “i’m just saying.”

“you’re always just saying.”

“because it’s always true.” a beat. “also she just made that shot which, statistically, proves my point.” nika, rotating behind you, makes a sound that she converts very quickly into a cough.

you make the next shot you rotate you are a composed and serious basketball player who is completely unbothered by her girlfriend’s complete lack of social self-regulation you are not smiling you are the picture of calm.

you are absolutely smiling, it is a losing battle and you know it aubrey catches it on your way back through the line and bumps your shoulder without a word.

nika raises both eyebrows so high they nearly leave her face entirely, a gesture that communicates i see you and i will never let you live this down without a single syllable.

you point at her in warning she holds both hands up innocent, uninvolved, completely blameless and she is also smiling, everyone within fifteen feet is smiling, this is what paige does, she walks into a space and somehow makes the whole room.

“still mine, by the way,” paige calls out from half court, just to make sure you haven’t forgotten.

“oh my god,” you say, to the basket.

“i love you,” she adds, bright and easy, and she’s already turned back to her pull-up, already mid-motion, like she didn’t just say that into the open air of a villanova gymnasium with witnesses present.

the ball comes to you, you hold it for a half second longer than you need to. “i love you too,” you say quietly, almost just for yourself.

almost.

azzi appears at your shoulder on the next rotation; she doesn’t say anything for a full beat, just exists there in that steady azzi way, and then. “you are so down bad.” delivered with great tenderness like a eulogy like she is sorry for your loss.

“i know,” you say. “it’s kind of sweet,” she allows, after a moment. “don’t tell her that.”

“she already knows.”

you look over without meaning to paige is on her pull-up again, mid-motion, and she’s not looking at you, but she’s smiling.

that specific smile, the one that means she’s aware of exactly what she just did and she’d do it again in a heartbeat you make the shot you make the next five shots you win by twelve.

the third incident is the one that ends up on twitter and you want this on the record, stated clearly, with full acknowledgement from all parties it was not your fault. not entirely.

you were running on adrenaline and forty minutes of game time and the specific kind of exhaustion that only comes when something matters, when the stakes are real and your body has been spending itself against them for the better part of an hour.

you had just hit the go-ahead layup forty seconds left, three-point game, you had taken the feed from paige on the baseline and gone up and kissed the glass and the crowd had come completely apart around you and then paige had come flying in from the perimeter like she’d been launched, full speed, arms already open, and you had caught her on pure reflex, no thought just hands, just instinct, both arms around her before your brain had even processed what was happening and she had said, right into your ear, warm and immediate. that’s my girl.

like it was the most natural thing like it was just a fact she was confirming and you had turned your head, and she was right there, and you had kissed her temple.

on the court with eleven thousand people watching and three cameras in the building and forty seconds still on the clock.

it lasted maybe one second, maybe less paige pulled back, and the expression on her face was something you’d never seen before not the grin, not the smug look, not the performed unbothered cool.

something quieter something that sat behind her eyes and didn’t have a name yet, something that made your chest do a thing you weren’t prepared for in the middle of a basketball game with forty seconds left and then nika was there, and aubrey, and the crowd was still going, and paige tapped your hip once and said let’s close this out in her captain voice, and the moment folded itself back into the noise.

you closed it out after, in the handshake line, two opposing players told you that was the cutest thing they’d ever seen on a basketball court but one of them said it twice as you didn’t know what to do with that information so you just said thank you and kept moving.

the clip is eleven seconds long whereas someone caught it from the student section, slightly shaky, the sound of eleven thousand people underneath it.

it opens on you going up for the layup and ends three seconds after the kiss just long enough to catch paige’s expression, that unnamed thing, before she pulls back and taps your hip and the camera loses you both in the crowd.

four hundred thousand likes by morning six hundred thousand by noon the caption is just a string of emojis a star, a flame, a broken heart, repeated and the quote tweets are a disaster, a beautiful unhinged disaster, and you watch the whole thing spiral from the hotel bed with your phone held above your face while paige showers.

she comes out in a t-shirt and sweats, hair damp, and looks at you, looks at your phone and reads the expression on your face. “how bad,” she says.

“it’s not bad,” you say. “it’s — there’s a compilation. someone made a compilation of every time you’ve done something like this on camera. it’s four minutes long.”

paige is quiet for a moment. then. “is it a good four minutes?”

“paige.”

“i’m asking.”

“it has eight hundred thousand views.”

she takes this in with the equanimity of someone who has long since made peace with being perceived then she crosses the room, takes your phone gently out of your hand, sets it face-down on the nightstand, and gets into bed with the decisive energy of someone who has made a decision and is not revisiting it. “go to sleep,” she says.

“my mentions are —”

“they’ll still be there tomorrow.”

“paige, there’s a thread. someone made a whole thread. they went back through like two years of footage and found every —”

“babe.” she turns toward you and there’s that thing again, that unnamed quiet, closer now and easier to see without eleven thousand people around it. “let them. okay? let them find every single one.” a pause. “i’d do all of it again.”

you look at her, the room is dim, just the glow from the parking lot through the curtain gap somewhere down the hall you can hear nika laughing at something, full and easy, the way she laughs when she’s really gone.

“you are the most embarrassing person i have ever met in my life,” you tell her.

the corner of her mouth lifts. “yeah,” she says, like this is not new information, like she has heard this before and filed it correctly. “but i’m yours.”

the city hums outside nika laughs again, further away now you look at her for another second two three. “yeah,” you say.

“you are.”

she reaches over and turns off the lamp in the dark, she finds your hand under the blanket and holds it with the easy certainty of someone who has decided and doesn’t need to keep deciding.

you fall asleep like that your phone buzzes twice on the nightstand you don’t check it until morning.

the twitter thread has a title now: someone with a uconn fan account with forty thousand followers and apparently a lot of free time has been updating it in real time since the villanova clip went viral.

it is called paige bueckers cinematic universe: a love story (documented) it has seventeen entries and is pinned to their profile; they update it within hours of any new incident.

you know this because kk told you kk told you while showing you her phone at breakfast with the expression of someone delivering genuinely important news, which, to be fair, she seemed to believe it was.

“seventeen,” she said. “and they’re not even counting the vending machine speech because you weren’t there for that one.”

“i was there for the vending machine speech.”

“then they should count it.” she scrolled. “look, they have timestamps.”

you had looked you had immediately regretted looking entry number fourteen was the temple kiss, and whoever ran the account had captioned it simply case closed. the court adjourned. we can all go home.

you showed it to paige paige read it, nodded once like it was a reasonable conclusion, and went back to her eggs this is your life now geno finds out about the thread on a tuesday.

you are not there when it happens you hear about it secondhand from kk, who was there, who describes it with the reverence of someone recounting a historical event.

apparently one of the assistant coaches mentioned it during a film session, offhand, the way you mention something you assume everyone already knows.

geno had stopped the film and asked, in the specific voice he uses when he is gathering information before forming an opinion, what exactly a twitter thread was and why it had seventeen entries about his point guard’s romantic life.

the assistant coach explained that geno had been quiet for a long moment then he looked at paige and said. “are you done.”

paige, who had not been the one to bring it up, who had been sitting there completely innocent for once in her life, said. “coach, i didn’t —”

“are you done,” geno said again.

“…yes sir.”

he had restarted the film kk tells you this in practice, in a whisper, while you’re waiting for the drill to reset, and you have to press your mouth together very hard to keep it from becoming something audible.

“he wasn’t even mad,” kk says. “that’s the thing. he just looked at her. and then he moved on.”

“that’s worse,” you say.

“so much worse,” kk agrees.

across the court, paige is running a ball-handling drill with complete focus and zero apparent awareness that she is being discussed.

she looks like an athlete, she looks like a professional, she looks, in this specific moment, like someone who has never in her life caused a four-hundred-thousand-like moment on twitter.

she catches you looking winks you look away. “entry eighteen,” kk says quietly, and you say “kk, i will actually end you,” and she smiles like she’s been waiting for that.

the road trip to providence is a six-hour bus ride and paige sleeps for approximately forty-five minutes of it before waking up restless and deciding that your shoulder is a better pillow than the window.

this is not unusual; this is, in fact, so usual that you don’t even clock it anymore, just shift slightly to give her a better angle and keep your headphones in and go back to whatever you were watching.

azzi, across the aisle, glances over and makes a face that communicates that you two are genuinely unbearable with great efficiency. “don’t,” you tell her. “i didn’t say anything,” azzi says.

“you had a whole sentence on your face.”

“i have no idea what you’re talking about.” she looks back at her phone. a beat. “she’s literally asleep on you.”

“she’s tired.”

“she slept the whole flight to the last road trip.”

“azzi.”

“i’m just noting,” azzi says, with the precise innocence of someone who is noting on purpose. “for the record. for the thread.”

“do not put this in the thread.”

“i don’t run the thread.”

“you know who runs the thread.” azzi’s expression does something complicated and she goes back to her phone very quickly and you narrow your eyes at her and she does not look up and you make a mental note to investigate this later.

paige shifts against your shoulder, resettles her hand, finds your arm without waking up, just pulls it slightly closer on instinct, and something in your chest does the thing it always does, the thing you’ve stopped trying to name.

azzi, from behind her phone screen, says nothing but she’s smiling you can tell.

the providence game is not close, you go up by eighteen in the second quarter and never really let it back, and by the fourth it’s the kind of game where geno is rotating deep into the bench and the starters are on the sideline in their warm-ups watching the younger players get minutes.

you’re sitting next to paige this is normal you’re always near paige on the bench when you’re both out, it’s just where you end up, gravitational, the way water finds level her knee is against yours this is also normal.

what is not normal is that kk, two seats down, is watching you both with the focused attention of a naturalist observing something in the wild. “kk,” paige says, without looking at her. “hm?”

“stop.”

“i’m watching the game.”

“you’re watching us.”

kk considers this. “i’m watching the game,” she says again, with no additional information, and goes back to looking exactly where she was looking.

paige looks at you, you look at paige some wordless agreement passes between you and you both look back at the court.

two minutes later, your team’s freshman point guard makes a ridiculous no-look pass that results in a layup and the bench erupts and in the chaos of everyone standing and reacting, paige leans in and says into your ear. “you played really well tonight.”

it’s quiet it’s just for you no broadcast, no audience, no mic it still gets you the same way it always does more, maybe, because it’s not a performance, it’s not for the thread or the clip or the eleven thousand people.

it’s just her voice close to your ear and her knee against yours and the noise of your teammates around you. “yeah?” you say.

“yeah.” a pause. “that drive in the third. that was you.”

“that was the play call.”

“the play call doesn’t hit the shot.” she pulls back enough to look at you properly and there it is again that thing behind her eyes, the unnamed one, the one you saw in the villanova gymnasium and again in the dark of the hotel room easier to see now that you know to look for it. “you hit the shot.” you hold her gaze for a second.

“you’re being normal,” you say.

“i can be normal.”

“you literally have a twitter thread.”

“that’s not my fault.”

“paige —”

“seventeen entries,” she says, like this is a reasonable defense, “is a reflection of the documentation, not the behavior.”

you stare at her she looks back at you with complete sincerity kk, two seats away, makes a noise that she converts into a cough so badly it doesn’t even almost work. “i hate you,” you tell paige.

“no you don’t,” she says easily she’s right she’s completely right and she knows it and that’s the worst part, that she has always known it, that from the very beginning she somehow knew exactly where this was going before you did, and she had just waited.

let you figure it out given you all the time you needed and not a single second of pressure. “no,” you say. “i don’t.”

she smiles not the grin, not the performed one the real one, the smaller one, the one that only comes out in the quiet moments that belong just to you the buzzer sounds uconn wins by twenty-two.

the locker room after is loud the way locker rooms are always loud after wins music up, everyone talking at once, the particular chaos of twenty people in a confined space all feeling good at the same time.

geno comes in, does his thing, says what he needs to say, and then pauses at the door on his way out he looks at you then at paige then back at the room in general.

“seventeen,” he says, and nothing else then he leaves the locker room and goes completely silent for approximately two full seconds then nika absolutely loses it.

ice is right behind her aubrey is gone kk is sitting on the bench with her face in her hands making no sound but shaking azzi is the only one who looks unsurprised, which you are filing away for later.

paige, for the first time in recent memory, looks genuinely caught there is something happening on her face that is almost, almost embarrassment she looks at you and you look back at her. “geno knows about the thread,” you say.

“geno knows about the thread,” she confirms.

“are you done,” you say, in your best geno voice, which is not very good something breaks open on her face she laughs, real and full, head back, and it’s the laugh you like best, the one that doesn’t have any performance in it, and you think distantly that you would do a lot of things to keep hearing that laugh, that you have been thinking this for a long time without saying it, that maybe you don’t need to say it because she already knows she already knows she has always known.

“come on,” she says, when she’s done, still grinning. she holds her hand out. “bus leaves in twenty.”

you take her hand kk, from the bench, says. “entry eighteen,” at a volume she clearly thinks is under her breath.

it is not under her breath. “kk,” you say. “congratulations on the win,” kk says.

you leave the locker room hand in hand and the music follows you all the way down the hall.

the thing about the final four is that nothing prepares you for it, not the practices, not the film sessions, not geno standing at the whiteboard drawing it out like a map you can follow if you just pay close enough attention.

not the two years you spent getting here, not the recruiting rankings or the expectations or the weight of what this program means to people who were wearing uconn blue before you were born.

none of it prepares you for the specific feeling of walking into an arena that size with something real on the line and understanding, in your body, that this is it this is the one you’ll remember.

you’ve been in big games you’ve been in games that mattered but this is different in a way that lives in your sternum, a low persistent hum that’s been there since the bus pulled into the parking lot and hasn’t left.

paige, walking beside you through the tunnel, bumps her shoulder against yours. “you’re in your head,” she says. “i’m focused.”

“you’re making the face.”

“i don’t have a face.”

“you have a face,” she says, easy and certain, the way she says everything. “you’ve had it since warmups, your jaw does the thing.” you consciously unclench your jaw.

she watches you do it and doesn’t say anything, which is somehow worse than if she had said something you walk another twenty feet in silence, the noise of the arena building around you, and then she says. “hey.” you look at her.

“we’re here,” she says just that we’re here like it’s the whole point, like it contains everything the two years and the practices and the film sessions and the vending machine speech and the seventeen entries and the hotel room in providence and all of it, every single piece of it, compressed into two words.

something in your sternum settles. “yeah,” you say. “so let’s go play,” she says, and she’s already moving, already ahead of you, already in it the way she’s always in it completely, without reservation, like she was made for exactly this floor.

you follow her you always follow her the game is everything it’s everything in the way that the best games are not clean, not easy, nothing handed.

you go up by six in the first half and lose it in the third and claw it back point by point in the fourth, and it’s the kind of basketball that takes something from you even when you’re winning, that spends you down to the last reserve of yourself and then asks for a little more.

paige is everywhere this is not unusual paige is always everywhere but tonight it’s different, tonight it’s the version of her that you’ve only seen a handful of times, the version where she’s fully unlocked, where every decision she makes is half a second faster than it should be possible for a human person to think.

she finds you twice in the fourth quarter in ways that shouldn’t work, passes that require her to know where you’re going before you’ve decided to go there, and both times you make the shot and both times you look at each other for exactly one second before the game pulls you back with forty-three seconds left you’re up two.

with eighteen seconds left you’re up two with four seconds left, after a stop and two made free throws, you’re up four.

the buzzer sounds and for a moment just a moment, maybe two seconds, maybe less the arena is so loud it becomes a kind of silence a wall of sound so complete it cancels itself out and leaves you standing in the middle of it feeling like the only still thing in the world then paige finds you.

she doesn’t come flying this time, no running start, no full-speed collision she just crosses the court and gets to you, and when she does she puts both hands on either side of your face and looks at you for a long moment without saying anything and her eyes are bright and she’s breathing hard and you are too and the confetti is starting somewhere above you and neither of you are looking at it.

she doesn’t say that’s my girl she doesn’t say anything for the record, nothing for the broadcast, nothing that will end up in the thread.

she just looks at you like you are the thing she wanted to see most at the end of all of this you put your hands over hers.

“we’re here,” you say, because it’s her words and they’re the right ones and there’s nothing else that fits.

something moves through her face that thing, the unnamed one, the one from villanova and the hotel room and the bench in providence except now it has more room, now it isn’t compressed into a single second between plays, now it can just be there, open and unhidden, and you can look at it as long as you need to.

you think maybe you know what to call it now. “yeah,” she says, low and certain. “we are.”

later much later, after the celebration and the trophy and the interviews and the photos and geno’s speech, after nika has cried twice and tried to pretend she didn’t, after kk has documented everything extensively, after azzi has said entry twenty-six with great satisfaction into what she thought was an empty hallway but wasn’t.

later, you find each other in the quiet it’s a hallway off the main locker room, not glamorous fluorescent light, the distant sound of music from wherever the team has migrated.

paige is sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and her legs stretched out and her medal around her neck and her eyes closed she looks like something poured out and left to rest you sit down next to her, your shoulder against hers. she doesn’t open her eyes. “hey.”

“hey.”

a long beat the music somewhere the hum of the building. “kk’s going to make a whole post,” she says.

“i know.”

“with pictures.”

“i know.”

“the thread is going to be unhinged tomorrow.”

“i know.” a pause. “azzi runs it, by the way. i figured it out.”

paige is quiet for a moment then, slowly, a smile. “i know,” she says you stare at her. “you knew?”

“since entry four.”

“paige —”

“she asked me before she started it,” she says, still with her eyes closed, still smiling. “she wanted to make sure i was okay with it.”

you sit with this for a moment, the specific image of azzi pulling paige aside, probably in the dining hall, probably with her phone already open, asking permission to document your entire relationship for forty thousand followers. “and you said yes,” you say.

“i said yes.”

“why?”

she opens her eyes then turns her head to look at you, unhurried, the way she does everything when there’s no game to get back to, no clock running.

the medal sits heavy and gold next her chest, the fluorescent light is unflattering and she looks like the best thing you’ve ever seen.

“because it’s true,” she says simply. “everything in it. every single entry. it’s all just — true. and i didn’t want to hide any of it.” a beat. “i never wanted to hide any of it.”

you look at her for a long moment the music is muffled the light hums somewhere nika laughs again, her real laugh, the full one.

“i know,” you say, finally and you do.

you have always known, maybe from before you had the language for it, that paige was never going to be someone who hid things.

that choosing her meant being seen, consistently, in front of everyone, with no take-backs and no footnotes.

that the thread and the mic and the warmup announcement and all of it were never really about showing off they were just her.

all the way through. no performance, no edit just paige, pointing at you in a half-empty gymnasium and saying she’s mine like it was the most natural thing in the world because to her, it was. “i love you,” you tell her.

not quiet this time, not almost, just for you just said, clear and easy, in a fluorescent hallway off a championship locker room.

she smiles, the real one, the small one and the one that has always been yours. “i love you too,” she says she leans her head on your shoulder.

you stay there for a while, the two of you, while the celebration goes on without you somewhere down the hall.

the medal is cold when it brushes your arm her breathing evens out slowly, the way it does when she’s finally letting herself come down.

you don’t need to say anything else you don’t need to entry twenty-seven, posted at 2:47am by a fan account with forty thousand followers, is just a blurry photo taken through a doorway. two figures sitting on a hallway floor, shoulder to shoulder, one of them with a gold medal catching the light.

sarah sat third row, end seat, close enough to the screen to catch the angle shifts but far enough back that she could see auriemma’s face when he was about to say something that would change the way she thought about basketball forever.

that seat was hers in the way that certain things become yours through repetition through showing up and you were in it paige was next to you, talking with her hands the way she always did when she was excited about something, and you were leaning back in sarah’s chair with one arm slung over the empty seat beside you, laughing at whatever paige had just said, completely unbothered, like you’d been in this building a hundred times before. like it was easy. like you belonged.

sarah stood in the doorway for a moment longer than she needed to. “strong.” azzi waved her over from the second row. “come meet y/n.”

sarah came, she didn’t have much of a choice up close you were she didn’t finish the thought you looked up when she stopped in front of you and you had that kind of easy, unhurried attention that some people carry like a natural condition, like you’d never once in your life felt the need to perform being calm because you simply were.

notre dame warm-up she caught the logo before she caught anything else and something in her chest that she might have called territorial if she was being honest with herself did a slow, irritated rotation.

“sarah,” paige said, gesturing between you both with the energy of someone who had been waiting for this specific moment. “this is y/n. we grew up together. y/n, this is sarah, she’s—”

“i know who she is,” you said not unkindly, just certain as you looked at sarah the way people looked at someone they’d studied from the other side of a scouting report, and sarah felt the back of her neck go warm in a way she chose not to examine. “strong. four blocks against tennessee last march. that sequence in the third quarter was kind of filthy.”

“kind of,” sarah said as you smiled. “very.” paige looked between you both like she was watching something she couldn’t quite name and had decided to enjoy regardless.

sarah sat down in the row in front of you, one seat to the left, which was not her seat but was available and also meant she wasn’t looking directly at you, which felt like a reasonable compromise.

the thing about being paige’s childhood best friend, sarah would come to understand over the next forty-eight hours, was that it came with a particular kind of access not earned, exactly just granted.

the way certain people move through spaces that aren’t technically theirs and somehow make everyone around them feel like a guest you knew where the good dining hall line opened first you knew that aubrey’s pregame playlist had changed three times since october and you had thoughts about each iteration you sat in the middle of team dinners like you’d been there all season, and nika passed you the bread basket without being asked, and azzi stole from your plate the way she only stole from people she’d already decided she liked, and you let her, and somehow that was the thing that irritated sarah most of all.

she watched you from across the table and tried to locate the specific source of the irritation it wasn’t jealousy; she didn’t do that; it wasn't that you were notre dame, though she reserved the right to revisit that it was something closer to the feeling of finding an unfamiliar piece of furniture in your apartment not threatening but just wrong-place off by a degree she couldn’t measure.

“you visit a lot?” sarah said she hadn’t meant to ask anything the question came out flat, almost clinical, like she was gathering data you looked up from your food across the table, paige’s mouth curved in a way sarah didn’t trust.

“when i can,” you said. “usually a couple times a semester. paige’s been trying to get me up here since we committed.”

“notre dame and uconn both,” azzi supplied, unnecessarily. “we almost had y/n.” she said this to sarah specifically, which meant she knew something sarah didn’t, which sarah also filed away.

“you recruited?” sarah asked.

“auriemma called,” you said simply. “i liked notre dame better.” something about the way you said it: no performance, no apology, just fact made sarah sit with it for a moment.

most people who turned down uconn had a whole story about it, a reason they’d constructed carefully to justify the choice. you’d said it the way you’d say i like this restaurant better about two places that were both fine.

“good for you,” sarah said. “thank you,” you said, and the way you looked at her when you said it was almost like a question like you were asking her something she hadn’t figured out yet.

aubrey kicked sarah under the table sarah looked at her aubrey looked at the ceiling but the practice gym the next morning was supposed to be a team thing optional shoot-around, a few of the girls, no coaches sarah had been planning to go since tuesday she had not been planning on you.

you were in notre dame shorts and a worn-in long sleeve and you were already on the floor when she got there, running through a series of pull-up jumpers from the elbow, and the rhythm of it was she stopped in the doorway again.

she was doing that. stopping in doorways because of you she added it to the list of things she was going to think about later. “paige said ten,” you said, without looking away from the basket you released, watched it drop, turned to catch the bounce-back yourself. “it’s nine fifty.”

“i know what time it is.”

“just saying.” you looked at her then, and there was something in it that wasn’t quite a smile warmer than a smirk more careful than a grin. “i’m early. you can pretend i’m not here if you want.”

“i don’t pretend,” sarah said.

“okay,” you said and then you turned back to the basket and went back to your pull-ups, easy as that.

sarah went to the opposite end of the court she ran her own warm-up, her own rhythm, she did not watch you she watched you probably forty percent of the time, which she was willing to call acceptable given the circumstances, given that you were the only other person in the building and humans were naturally alert to movement.

after a while she heard your sneakers on the hardwood getting closer and looked up to find you on the wing, ball on your hip, watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite read. “play me,” you said sarah looked at you for a long moment. “for what.”

“i don’t know. bragging rights. the satisfaction of it.” you tilted your head slightly. “you look like someone who needs to compete in the morning.”

“i look like—” she stopped, you were smiling now barely, but it was there she had a sudden vivid understanding of why paige had been friends with you her entire life. “fine,” sarah said.

you played one-on-one for twenty minutes before the rest of the team showed up it was not a gentle game. you were quick and low to the ground and you had no interest in making it easy for her, and she had no interest in making it easy for you, and at some point around the fourth or fifth exchange she stopped thinking about what she was supposed to be doing with her legs or her hands or the space between you and just played.

the way she played when it mattered. when it was real you didn’t let her win she didn’t let you win either when paige pushed through the gym doors at 10:04am with azzi and nika behind her, the score was tied at seven and both of you were breathing hard and standing about three feet apart with a basketball between you on the floor like some kind of unresolved argument.

“oh,” paige said, stopping short. she looked between you both. “you already—”

“we were just warming up,” sarah said.

“sure,” nika said, in a tone that made sarah want to throw the basketball at her you picked it up and held it out to sarah with one hand, something in your expression that was not quite neutral and not quite anything she had a word for yet.

“good game, strong,” you said.

“don’t call me that,” she said, which was not what she meant to say her name was strong, people called her that constantly and she didn’t know why it sounded different when you said it you looked at her for one beat longer than necessary.

“sarah,” you said, like a correction like you’d been waiting for permission and had decided this counted she took the ball the afternoon went the way uconn afternoons went when paige was in a good mood too much food, someone’s speaker too loud, a movie that nobody was actually watching, the particular comfortable chaos of a team that lived close enough together that they’d stopped being careful around each other.

sarah sat on the floor with her back against the couch and told herself she wasn’t tracking where you were in the room you were on the couch directly behind her she could hear you talking to aubrey about something notre dame’s season, the notre dame point guard situation, something about a teammate you clearly liked but didn’t fully trust on the court, and the way you talked about basketball was the way sarah talked about basketball, which was seriously, precisely, with genuine emotional investment that you didn’t bother dressing up as anything else.

at some point aubrey got up to get something from the kitchen and you shifted on the couch and for a moment the only sound near sarah was the movie and your breathing. “you’re quiet,” you said. “i’m watching the movie.”

“you haven’t looked at the screen in eleven minutes.” sarah tilted her head back without thinking about it and found you looking down at her and the angle was she looked back at the screen. “are you timing me.”

“i noticed,” you said, which was different. “what are you thinking about.”

“nothing.”

“that’s not a thing people think about nothing.”

she wanted to say i’m thinking about why you make this place feel different when you’re in it and she wanted to say i’m thinking about the way you play basketball like it matters even when the stakes are nothing and she wanted to say i’m thinking about the fact that you knew my name before i walked into that film room and you knew my block sequence from march and you looked at me like that and i don’t know what any of that means yet .

“i’m thinking about notre dame’s defensive scheme,” she said you were quiet for a moment. “liar,” you said softly, and it had no edge in it at all.

sarah looked back up at you she didn’t know how to explain the specific problem of your face from this angle, the way the light from the television moved across it, the way you were looking at her like she was something you’d been trying to understand for a while and had made recent progress on.

she didn’t know how to explain the fact that you’d been here less than thirty-six hours and she already knew the pace of you, already knew you’d be early to the gym and honest to a fault and easy in every room except this one, except whatever was happening in the space between you right now.

“you don’t like me being here,” you said, not an accusation like you were working it out alongside her. “it’s not that,” sarah said.

“what is it.” she should’ve looked away she didn’t. “you fit,” she said. “that’s the thing. you walk in and everybody just — you fit. and you’re notre dame.” she paused. “you shouldn’t fit.” something moved across your face quietly and carefully.

“and that bothers you,” you said. “i don’t know what it does yet,” sarah said, which was the most honest thing she’d said to you.

the movie played somewhere in the kitchen aubrey was opening a cabinet. nika said something to azzi that made her laugh, low and easy the room held all of it at once, all of them, the ordinary noise of a saturday with people you loved, and sarah was on the floor with her head tilted back looking up at you, and you were looking at her the same way you had in the film room when she hadn’t known your name yet. “sarah,” you said.

“yeah.”

“i’m going to—” you stopped whereas the corner of your mouth moved. “can i sit down there.” she blinked. “the floor.”

“next to you.” she should have said something that created distance she said “yeah” instead, and watched you unfold from the couch and settle onto the floor beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of you without either of you touching, and you looked at the screen like you were actually watching the movie now, and she looked at the screen too, and neither of you said anything for a long time.

it was paige who ruined it, because it was always paige, because paige had been watching the two of them all weekend with the patient, delighted expression of someone who had put something in motion a long time ago and was waiting to see it land. “are you two—”

“we’re watching the movie,” you and sarah said, at the same time, in almost exactly the same tone paige looked at azzi, azzi looked at nika, nika said nothing and held her water bottle up like a shield.

the last night of your visit the team went to get food off-campus, a place aubrey had found that had good breakfast-for-dinner, and sarah ended up beside you in the booth without making a decision about it, which was becoming a pattern she had not yet decided how to address.

the meal was loud and warm and the kind of good that comes from people who genuinely like each other you had paige on your other side, the two of you falling into an old easy shorthand that made it clear just how long you’d been in each other’s lives, and sarah watched it sidelong and felt something she identified eventually as: wishing she was inside something that old. that certain.

“you grew up together,” she said, at a lull you glanced at her. “since we were seven.”

“what was she like.”

“paige?” you smiled, and it was different from the smiles you’d given sarah before older, softer. “she was exactly like this. just smaller.” you looked at paige who was currently stealing food off azzi’s plate with no remorse. “it’s been continuous.”

“it sounds nice,” sarah said, before she could stop herself. “having someone that long.”

you looked at her, the smile didn’t leave exactly, but it changed and maybe settled into something quieter. “yeah,” you said. “it is.”

the check came the team spilled out into the cold, november air sharp and biting, and sarah had not worn enough layers because she’d thought they were driving, they were supposed to drive, but someone had gotten the idea to walk back and now it was dark and thirty-four degrees and she had a pullover and insufficient commitment to this decision.

she was doing a reasonable job not showing it she was almost certainly showing it.

“here,” you said, behind her, and before she could respond you’d pulled your jacket off notre dame jacket, she registered distantly, she was being given a notre dame jacket and settled it around her shoulders sarah stopped walking.

you kept going for two steps before you noticed, turned around, and looked at her the team was moving ahead, paige saying something to azzi, nika with her headphones half on, aubrey talking to herself about something. “you’re going to be cold,” sarah said.

“i run warm,” you said. “you know that already.” she did know that she’d noticed it this morning in the gym, the fact that you’d been working in a tank while she’d been fine in a long sleeve, the small unconscious accounting of someone else’s body that she’d been doing for two days.

she pulled the jacket closer and did not say anything and you looked at her in the dark for a moment with that expression she’d been collecting, cataloguing, unable to name. “i have to drive back tomorrow,” you said. “i know.”

“notre dame’s twelve hours from here.”

“i know,” sarah said as you took a step back toward her just one the rest of the team had turned a corner and for a moment it was just the two of you under a streetlamp, your breath visible in the cold air, her wearing your jacket and you with your hands in the pockets of your warm-up pants and the night sitting quiet around the edges of all the things neither of you had said yet.

“sarah,” you said she was so tired of being careful. “yeah,” she said, which was not a response to anything you’d asked, but you looked at her like it was an answer to exactly the right question and you closed the distance.

it was not a long kiss, it was not dramatic, no hands on faces, no pulled-together, none of the things movies made of it, it was your mouth on hers, soft and decided, and her hands found the front of your sweatshirt without her telling them to, and she felt the warmth of you that she’d been aware of for two days finally, finally, resolve into something she could hold onto, and for a moment she forgot it was november, forgot to be careful, forgot that you were notre dame and she was uconn and that this was either the beginning of something that complicated everything or you pulled back not far just enough your forehead didn’t quite touch hers but almost.

“twelve hours,” you said quietly like you were reminding both of you she looked at you and at your face in the lamplight, the careful consideration of it, the way you were watching her for something she didn’t know how to give you a name for yet.

“yeah,” she said, her voice coming out lower than usual. “twelve hours.” somewhere around the corner aubrey called both their names, impatient and unsuspecting, and sarah let go of your sweatshirt; she kept your jacket whereas you let her.

the morning came in gray and quiet, the kind of november sunday that had no opinion about anything, and sarah woke up with your jacket on the chair beside her bed and the specific, unresolved weight of someone who had kissed a notre dame player under a streetlamp the night before and was not yet sure what category of decision that was.

she lay there for a moment just looked at it the notre dame logo looked back she got up checkout was nine. you’d said it the night before, practical and straightforward, the same way you said most things, and sarah had filed it away without meaning to, the way she’d been filing away small facts about you since friday afternoon.

you ran warm, you were early to everything you took your coffee without anything in it and then complained about it anyway you played basketball like the outcome mattered even when it didn’t you kissed her like you’d thought about it before you did it.

she found you in the common room at eight fifty, your bag already by the door, sitting on the arm of the couch talking to aubrey in low voices about something that made aubrey laugh and cover her face.

you looked up when sarah walked in and something in your expression did a small, quiet shift not obvious, not performed, just a recalibration she caught because she’d been watching your face for two days and had gotten good at the vocabulary of it. “morning,” you said. “morning,” she said.

aubrey looked between them and stood up with the energy of someone who had been given information and was removing herself from it responsibly. “i’m going to go,” she said, to no one, and left.

sarah sat down on the couch you stayed on the arm of, which meant you were looking down at her slightly, which she was aware of in a way she couldn’t entirely justify. “paige still asleep?” sarah asked.

“paige has been asleep since we got back,” you said. “she said goodbye to me last night. she’s very efficient.

“that’s one word for it.” the corner of your mouth moved, the quiet settled back around them, and it was not uncomfortable that was the thing, sarah thought, that was the thing she couldn’t find the edge of you made silence easy.

you made most things easy except the specific thing of knowing what to do with you. “the jacket,” you said as she looked up. “what about it.”

“you still have it.”

“you let me keep it.” you looked at her for a moment. “i did,” you said, like you were confirming something to yourself as much as to her. “yeah.”

she wanted to ask what that meant she wanted to ask what last night meant, what twelve hours meant, what notre dame meant when she kept forgetting to hold it against you she wanted to ask a lot of things and she was a person who asked for what she wanted and went after what she needed and had never once in her life had trouble locating the right word. “text me when you get back,” she said. “so i know you made it.”

something moved across your face soft and a little undone. “yeah,” you said. “okay.”

paige appeared in the doorway at eight fifty-eight, hair everywhere, wearing the expression of someone who had been awake for longer than she was pretending.

she looked at both of you and her mouth did the thing it did when she was holding something back. “you’re leaving,” she said to you. “i was going to say goodbye.”

“i know.” paige crossed the room and hugged you, and you held her the way you held someone you’d known since you were seven, full and certain, and sarah watched it from the couch and felt something that was not hers to feel and felt it anyway. “drive safe,” paige said into your shoulder. “text me.”

“always do.”

you let paige go pick up your bag and looked at sarah one more time as she stood up she didn’t know why. her body just decided you looked at her standing there and something flickered behind your eyes and then you said, very quietly, “i’ll text you.”

“you said that already,” sarah said. “i know,” you said. “i meant it both times.” and then you left, and the door closed, and the room was the same room it had always been and also completely different, and sarah stood in the middle of it holding that for a moment before she sat back down.

paige was already watching her. “don’t,” sarah said. “i didn’t say anything,” paige said.

“you were about to.”

paige sat down beside her, tucked her feet up under herself, and was quiet in the particular way she was quiet when she was giving someone room to get there on their own.

it was one of the things sarah had come to understand about paige bueckers she was louder than anyone in a room until she decided you needed space, and then she became the most patient person alive sarah lasted about forty seconds. “the jacket,” she said.

“i noticed,” paige said. “it doesn’t mean—”

“sarah.” sarah stopped, paige looked at her, and her expression was not teasing now, not the delighted watching-something-unfold face from the dinner table; it was something gentler, more careful.

“y/n doesn’t do things without meaning them,” paige said. “that’s like. the main thing about them. if you want to know one thing.” sarah looked at the chair across the room where the jacket was.

“that’s either very good or very complicated,” she said. “probably both,” paige said. “usually is.”

the drive back took twelve hours and fourteen minutes and you spent most of it not thinking about sarah strong, which meant you spent most of it thinking about sarah strong, which you’d expected, which didn’t make it easier.

you knew what you’d done, you'd gone to connecticut to see paige and you’d walked into a film room and sat in someone’s seat without knowing it was someone’s seat and then spent two days being slowly and comprehensively undone by a person you were not supposed to find this interesting.

you were notre dame she was uconn in february those two things would be on opposite sides of a court with stakes attached and you had just kissed her under a streetlamp and given her your jacket and told her to text you and meant it in a way that had nothing to do with road safety.

you drove the miles went by as your phone buzzed somewhere around the connecticut-massachusetts border you didn’t check it until you stopped for gas in worcester, standing in the cold with the pump running, and it was paige which was a voice note forty-seven seconds you put your headphones in.

“okay so i’m not going to make a whole thing out of this,” paige said, which meant she was absolutely going to make a whole thing out of this. “i just want to say — i’ve known you since we were seven and i know your face and i saw your face this morning and i just — y/n. i’ve also known sarah for two years and i know her face too and i’m just saying. i’m just. i’m not saying anything. i’m just saying i see you both and i think you should maybe — i don’t know. i don’t know what i’m saying. drive safe. text me when you’re back. also she still has your jacket which she definitely noticed and definitely isn’t going to admit she noticed. okay. bye.”

you stood at the gas pump in worcester, massachusetts, in the cold, and listened to it twice then you got back in the car somewhere around the new hampshire border and your phone buzzed again. made it back okay?

it was from a contact you’d added friday night, after the film room, after paige had grabbed your phone to put on a playlist and you’d noticed sarah’s number already in it from some team group chat logistics, had looked at it for probably two seconds longer than you should have, had still driving, you typed at the next red light.

couple more hours.

the response came fast, definitely faster than you expected as you said three hours.

i said about. three hours traffic.

it’s sunday morning.

connecticut has opinions about sunday morning traffic apparently.

a pause longer than the last one you drove through two more lights.

okay. let me know when you’re back.

you looked at that for a moment at the next red light the way she’d said it the exact same words you’d said to her in the common room, returned, and you didn’t think sarah strong did anything without knowing what she was doing.

yeah, you typed. okay.

the voice note came at nine seventeen that night, when paige was ostensibly studying and was actually lying on sarah’s floor eating pretzels and not studying sarah was at her desk and she heard the pretzels stop. “paige.”

“i didn’t say anything.”

“you stopped chewing.”

a pause the sound of paige sitting up. “i talked to y/n today,” she said, in a tone that was carefully calibrated to sound casual and was not sarah turned around in her chair. “and.”

“and nothing. i just — talked to them.” paige pulled her knees to her chest. “they got back safe.”

“i know,” sarah said. “they texted me.” paige’s face did several things in quick succession that she did not bother hiding. “they texted you.”

“i asked them to.”

“you asked — sarah.”

“what.”

“you asked a notre dame player to text you when they got home.”

“for safety reasons.”

“sarah.” sarah turned back to her desk. “go back to studying.”

“i’m not studying.”

“i know. go back to pretending.” paige was quiet for a moment sarah heard her lie back down on the floor, heard the pretzels resume, and thought that was the end of it, thought she’d gotten away with the deflection, thought. “you like them,” paige said, not a question, not teasing, just a fact, delivered to the ceiling, gentle enough that it couldn’t be argued with sarah’s pen stopped moving. “they’re notre dame,” she said.

“that’s not what i said.”

“it’s relevant.”

“is it.” paige turned her head to look at sarah’s back. “because you have their jacket on your chair and you asked them to text you and you’ve looked at your phone four times in the last hour and we both know it’s not because of anything i’m doing.”

sarah said nothing. “you like them,” paige said again, softer. “and i think she likes you. and i think you both are going to do the thing where you make it complicated because it’s easier than admitting it’s simple.” she paused. “i’ve known y/n for fifteen years. they don’t give their jacket to people.”

the room held it sarah looked at the jacket on the chair. “the game is in february,” she said. “i know.”

“notre dame versus uconn.”

“i know, sarah.”

“we’re going to be on opposite sides of that court.” paige was quiet for a long moment. “yeah,” she said finally. “you will.” another pause. “doesn’t mean you have to be on opposite sides of everything else.”

sarah didn’t answer, paige went back to her pretzels and sarah looked at her phone the weeks went the way weeks went in season — practice and film and travel and the specific exhausted tunnel vision of a team building toward something, and sarah let it take her the way she always did, let the rhythm of it crowd out the things that didn’t have a place in the schedule.

she was good at this she had always been good at this but basketball was the clearest thing in her life and she trusted it to stay clear the problem was her phone was not a problem but well an observation.

a pattern she’d noticed without intending to, the way you noticed a change in the weather before you could name what had shifted it started with the text when you got home made it thanks for the jacket and then somehow kept going, the way conversations sometimes did when both people kept finding reasons to continue them nothing dramatic nothing that announced itself just notre dame won tonight.

i know. i watched.

a pause, longer than usual. then. you watched notre dame.

i watch film on everyone. it’s not personal.

sure.

it’s not.

sarah.

what.

it’s a little personal.

she’d stared at that for probably longer than was reasonable they talked about basketball mostly; it was the easiest language they shared and also, she suspected, the one where they were both least able to hide.

you had opinions about defensive rotations and transition offense and the specific way certain programs ran their sets that were detailed and unguarded and she found herself texting back things she’d normally only say in film sessions, things she kept close.

you texted back the same way it felt like an exchange like something being built incrementally, piece by careful piece, in the margins of two schedules that didn’t have room for it.

how’s the knee you sent, one night in december, after uconn’s game against ohio state where she’d landed wrong in the third quarter and come back out for the fourth anyway.

she’d stopped.

you watched uconn.

i watch film on everyone, you sent it back. it’s not personal. she’d laughed in the dark of her room, alone, at eleven thirty on a tuesday, which felt like information.

it’s fine, she sent. just stiff.

take care of it.

i know how to take care of myself.

i know you do. a pause. still.

she took care of it.

paige found the jacket in january not finding it had been on the chair the entire time, it had never moved, but paige looked at it one afternoon with the expression of someone who had been watching a slow development and had just received confirmation of a hypothesis.

“it’s still here,” paige said.

“it’s a jacket.”

“it’s y/n’s jacket.”

“she said i could keep it.”

paige sat on the edge of sarah’s bed. she had the look she got before she said something she’d been holding for a while — the slight forward lean, the careful breath sarah had learned to brace for it.

“the game is in three weeks,” paige said sarah knew she had known for months, had known in the abstract since the schedule dropped in october and then with increasing, specific weight as february approached.

notre dame versus uconn she’d watched your game film with the same attention she brought to every opponent and also with something underneath it that she didn’t name, couldn’t quite separate from the attention she brought to everything that had your name attached.

“i know,” sarah said.

“y/n starts,” paige said. “they’ve been starting since november.”

“i know.”

“so you’re going to be on the court at the same time.”

“paige.”

“i’m just—”

“i know,” sarah said. “i know all of it. i’ve thought about all of it.”

paige looked at her. “and?” sarah was quiet for a moment as she looked at the jacket she thought about a streetlamp in november and the three hours of distance and forty-seven seconds of paige’s voice and eleven texts about defensive rotations and one about her knee sent at eleven thirty on a tuesday by someone who watched uconn film and said it wasn’t personal.

“and i don’t know yet,” she said honestly, which was the most she had paige nodded, slow. “okay,” she said. “okay.” she stood up, paused at the door. “for what it’s worth — i’ve never seen y/n text anyone the way they text you. and i’ve known them fifteen years.” she didn’t wait for a response and just left.

sarah sat with her phone on the desk she picked up.

tomorrow, she typed that the response came in under two minutes, which meant you’d been near your phone, which meant something she didn’t let herself finish the thought on.

i know, you sent it back.

you ready?

a pause longer than usual she watched the typing indicator appear and disappear twice before your message came through.

are you asking about the game.

her thumb hovered over the keyboard and the room was quiet but outside, she could hear someone in the hallway, the ordinary noise of a dorm in the evening, the world continuing its business around the edges of this specific, loaded moment.

i don’t know, she typed. are you.

the typing indicator came back this time.

sarah.

yeah.

i’ve been not ready since november.

she stared at that for a long time, the word sitting in her chest like something that had been waiting for exactly enough room.

me too, she finally sent.

tomorrow’s going to be complicated.

probably.

i’m still going to try to win.

i know, she sent. so am i.

another pause she could feel the weight of through the phone, the strange particular intimacy of two people in separate states at eleven o’clock the night before they had to be opponents.

sarah, you sent.

yeah.

the jacket.

she looked at the chair at the notre dame logo she’d stopped being bothered by somewhere around december without noticing exactly when.

what about it.

nothing, you sent. just — keep it.

she held the phone for a moment outside, someone laughed in the hallway inside, the room held the jacket and the quiet and the specific weight of tomorrow, the game and the court and the version of this that had rules and boundaries and a scoreboard and underneath it eleven texts. a voice note. a streetlamp. a kiss she’d been carrying for three months.

get some rest, she sent finally.

you too, you sent back. strong.

she almost corrected it but she didn’t.

she didn't sleep well, not badly, not the kind of sleeplessness that left her hollow and slow, just the shallow, surface kind where she kept waking at odd intervals and lying in the dark with her thoughts arranged in a loose, restless pile she couldn't settle.

the jacket was still on the chair she'd moved there in november and never found a reason to move it again, and sometime around two in the morning she looked at it and had the clear, uncomplicated thought: i don't want to play against you today.

she had that thought and then she had the thought immediately after it, which was: i'm going to anyway. and so are you. and that's exactly why. she got up at six she was always better when she was moving.

gampel in game mode was a different building sarah had played in it two seasons now and she still felt it every time the way the energy changed hours before tip-off, the specific charge in the air that meant something was happening here today, something that would matter.

she loved it, it was one of the cleanest things she knew, the way competition clarified everything, the way stepping onto that court meant all the noise resolved into a single clean frequency win.

she was lacing up in the locker room when paige sat down beside her. "you okay?" paige asked.

"i'm fine."

"you have your game face on."

"it's a game day."

"you have your other game face on." paige paused. "the one that means you're in your head about something that isn't basketball." sarah pulled her lace tight. "i'm not in my head."

"sarah."

"paige."

paige looked at her for a moment, and sarah looked back, and something passed between them in the particular silent language they'd built over two years of shared court time and late nights and knowing each other well enough to not need full sentences.

"they're really good," paige said finally. not cruel. just honest. "y/n. they've been playing like — all season. you've seen the film."

"i've seen the film," sarah said. "so you know."

"yeah." she stood up. shook out her legs. "i know." paige watched her. "and?"

"and we're going to win," sarah said not because she was certain of it but because she needed to say it out loud to someone who would take it seriously, and paige always took it seriously paige nodded once. "okay," she said. "yeah."

they went out together and you were already on the floor sarah saw you from the tunnel entrance notre dame warmups, moving through a layup line with the loose-limbed efficiency of someone who had been doing this specific thing their whole life.

she watched you for exactly three seconds before she looked away, which was two seconds longer than she should have allowed herself, which she filed without comment the building was filling up the student section was already loud, the band somewhere in the upper bowl running through something that echoed in the rafters.

all of it normal, all of it familiar, all of it exactly as it always was except for the fact that you were in it she went to her own warmup line she did not look back azzi fell into step beside her. "they're here."

"i know."

"notre dame's got a good squad this year."

"i know that too." azzi bumped her shoulder, gentle. "we're better." sarah almost smiled. "yeah," she said. "we are." across the court she heard your voice not words, just the sound of it, directing something, the particular tone you used when you were locked in and she let it go, let it pass through and out the other side, and put her attention where it needed to be.

the warmup was good she felt it in her legs, felt the rhythm come up through the floor the way it did when her body was ready before her mind fully caught up she ran her sets and hit her shots and let herself settle into the familiar dark of pure preparation.

when the horn sounded for teams to clear the floor she was at the three-point line, and she turned, and you were at the three-point line on the other end, and for one moment across the full length of the court, through all the noise and bodies and february afternoon light you looked at each other.

you didn't smile nor did she it wasn't that kind of moment but you held it for a half second, and then you both looked away, and sarah went to her bench, and the game began.

you were something else she'd known it from the film she'd known from the gym in november, from the forty-seven point game in december she'd watched with her feet tucked under her on her dorm bed, from every stat line she'd pulled up and looked at too long.

she'd known it intellectually, analytically, the way she knew everything about an opponent before she stepped on the court with them knowing it and watching it happen in front of her were different things.

you played like the game was a problem you'd already solved and were just demonstrating the solution not arrogant it wasn't arrogance, she'd watched enough arrogant players to know the difference.

it was something quieter, a certainty in the body. the kind that only came from spending so many hours on a court that the court had become an extension of something internal she recognized because she had it too.

the first quarter went notre dame's way not by much four points, and uconn had answers for most of what you ran, but you had answers for their answers, and twice in the first twelve minutes she watched you make reads that she would have made, the exact same reads, the instinctual geometry of it, and something in her chest did a complicated thing that she didn't have time for and pushed down.

halftime notre dame by six auriemma was calm in the locker room he was always calm when he was about to say something important. "strong," he said, looking at her. "you know what she's doing in transition."

"yes."

"so we stop it."

"yes."

she stopped it the third quarter was different uconn made adjustments and sarah made herself the adjustment, the physical fact of her presence in spaces you wanted, the constant pressure of someone who had done their homework and was turning in the exam in real time.

she got a hand on two passes she forced you left twice on drives when you wanted to go right she felt the game tightening around you, felt you felt it too not panic, you didn't panic, but a recalibration, a shift in how you were reading it.

good, she thought. let's see it.

she scored eleven in the third uconn pulled to within two the fourth quarter was the kind of game that happened maybe once a season, the kind where both teams had run out of adjustments and all that remained was will.

sarah played every second of it she was everywhere she was supposed to be and some places she invented on the fly, and across the court she could feel you doing the same, the two of you in some kind of parallel locked intensity that had nothing to do with november and everything to do with the fact that both of you needed this and knew the other one did too.

with four minutes left notre dame up by three, you got the ball at the top of the key sarah was on you, you looked at her just for a half second not a pause, not a hesitation, just a register.

she was close enough to see your eyes and the focus in them and something underneath the focus that she'd seen before, in a film room, under a streetlamp, on a dorm room floor then you were moving and she was moving with you, tight and certain, and she stayed with you through the first two dribbles and then you pulled up.

the shot went up clean, the kind of release that looked effortless because you'd shot it ten thousand times in every gym you'd ever been in, every morning session, every late night sarah had her hand up it didn't matter the net moved notre dame by five with three minutes left.

she caught the ball on the outlet and pushed the pace and hit azzi cutting baseline and uconn got two back two minutes notre dame answered uconn answered the clock came down and sarah held the ball at halfcourt with seventeen seconds left and notre dame up three and the math was simple and merciless and she'd known it since the pull-up, if she was being honest, she'd known it when the net moved.

she drove and got fouled she made the first free throw and the second rimmed out the horn sounded.

notre dame 71, uconn 68.

the noise of the building landed on her all at once the particular quality of a home crowd that had just watched something close, the sounds of both benches, the rush of bodies she stood at the free throw line for a moment while it all moved around her and let herself feel the loss the way she always did, clean and direct, no flinching.

she'd given it everything she had the game had gone the other way those two things could both be true she turned to find her teammates across the court, you were in the middle of your celebration teammates, coaches, the rush of a road win at a place like this and you were smiling, genuinely, the kind of smile that came from somewhere real, and sarah watched it for a half second and thought: you played the game of your life today. she thought it without bitterness just fact she went to her teammates.

the handshake line was the handshake line she moved through it the way she always did present, direct, meaning it, because the other team had earned it and she was not the kind of person who phoned it in she got to you near the end you looked at her and she looked at you. "good game, strong," you said quietly, under the noise not the version from the gym in november no tease in it just real.

"good game," she said back. "that pull-up in the fourth."

"i know."

"i had a hand up."

"i know." the corner of your mouth moved, not a smirk something softer. "it went in anyway."

"yeah," she said. "it did." the line kept moving and you moved with it and she moved with it and then you were past each other and she had her team around her and you had yours.

the locker room took as long as it took coaches, cooldown, the quiet specific grief of a loss that close, and then gradually people moving, showering, the slow return of ordinary noise paige sat beside her for a while without saying anything, which was the right call, which sarah appreciated.

she dressed slowly she was in no particular hurry; she was almost to the tunnel when aubrey appeared at her elbow. "hey," aubrey said, carefully. "um."

"what."

"there's — y/n is outside. like, in the hallway. notre dame's team is on the bus but they're — they stayed." sarah stopped. "okay," she said, after a moment. "okay?" aubrey said.

"okay," sarah said again, and kept walking.

you were in the hallway outside the visiting locker room, back against the wall, notre dame bag at your feet, still in your warmups you'd showered hair still a little damp at the edges.

you looked up when she came around the corner and straightened off the wall, and for a moment neither of you said anything, the corridor quiet and fluorescent and completely ordinary around the fact of you being in it. "your team's on the bus," sarah said. "i told them i'd catch up."

"in uconn's building."

"in uconn's hallway," you said. "technically." she looked at you the game was still in her body legs heavy, the particular exhausted clarity of someone who had spent four quarters at full capacity.

you'd played forty minutes and won and you'd stayed in her building anyway and she didn't know what to do with you, had not known what to do with you since november, was maybe done pretending she was going to figure it out from a safe distance. "you played well today," she said.

"so did you."

"we lost."

"by three." you looked at her steadily. "you kept us honest the whole second half. you know that."

"i know." she exhaled. "i wanted to beat you."

"i know you did." a pause. "i wanted to beat you too."

"you did."

"yeah." your voice was quiet. "i did." the hallway held it. somewhere deeper in the building a door opened and closed and the sound echoed and faded and then it was just the two of them again, the fluorescent hum of it, your bag at your feet and the fact that you'd stayed. "the jacket," sarah said you looked at her. "what about it."

"i've had it since november."

"i know."

"i wasn't going to give it back." something in your expression shifted, soft and careful and certain all at once. "i know that too," you said. "i never asked for it back." she looked at you for a long moment the game, the loss, the pull-up in the fourth quarter, the three months of texts about defensive rotations, the streetlamp in november, all of it sitting in a pile that had been accumulating since she walked into a film room and found you in her seat. she thought about what paige had said: y/n doesn't do things without meaning them.

she crossed the distance not dramatic she closed the three feet between you and you went still, watching her come, and when she reached up and held the front of your jacket the way she'd held your sweatshirt in november you let out a breath, slow and quiet, like you'd been holding it for three months. "hi," you said, very softly. "hi," she said and this time she kissed you.

it was different from the first one the first one had been yours decided, deliberate, a question she hadn't known she was answering until she already had.

this one was hers she held the front of your jacket and kissed you in the hallway of gampel pavilion forty minutes after you'd beaten her team, and you kissed her back the same way you did everything present, certain, like you'd thought about it before you did it and were glad you had.

she pulled back after a moment not far your hands had found her waist somewhere in the middle of it, light and careful, and you didn't move them. "i lost

today," she said. "i know."

"i'm not happy about it."

"i know that too." the corner of your mouth the one she'd been collecting since november. "you can be unhappy about it and also—"

"and also," she said you looked at her, close enough now that she could see the exact expression she'd been cataloguing since a film room in november — the careful, specific attention of someone who had been figuring something out for a while and had just arrived at the answer.

"notre dame's got three more games this season," you said. "and then it's offseason."

"okay," she said. "twelve hours is twelve hours."

"you keep saying that."

"i keep meaning it." your hands were still at her waist. "sarah."

"yeah."

"i'm going to come back." she looked at you the game still in her legs and the loss still in her chest and your jacket on a chair in her room and three months of texts and one streetlamp and now this hallway, this moment, your hands and the certain quiet way you said things when you meant them all the way down. "okay," she said simply like it was easy.

"okay?"

"yeah," she said. "okay." somewhere at the end of the hallway a door swung open and paige's voice carried through it — "sarah, we're — oh" — and then silence, and then the sound of the door swinging carefully, deliberately closed again.

you both heard it your expression broke into something that was entirely unguarded, warm and a little undone, and sarah felt it move through her chest like the first clean thing she'd felt all day. "she did that on purpose," you said. "obviously," sarah said.

"fifteen years and she's still—"

"you love it."

"i love it," you agreed, soft sarah letting go of your jacket. she didn't step back you didn't move your hands the hallway was exactly what it was fluorescent and ordinary and completely unremarkable and none of that mattered at all. "go catch your bus," she said.

"yeah." you didn't move immediately. "text me tonight?" she looked at you at the notre dame warmups and the damp hair and the expression she finally had a name for. "yeah," she said. "i'll text you."

you picked up your bag. you were almost to the end of the hallway when she said it. "y/n." you turned.

"good game," she said, meaning it completely you looked at her one more time the full weight of it, the whole november-to-february arc of it, everything that had been building since a film room chair and a streetlamp and a jacket that was still on her dorm room chair and smiled.

the real one the old one, the one she'd seen you give paige, the one that went all the way. "good game, sarah," you said and then you were gone, and the hallway was empty, and she stood in it for a moment with her hands in her pockets and the loss still in her legs and something else entirely in her chest.

it is maybe the thing you are best at, the ability to look unbothered while your pulse does whatever it wants underneath so when dallas takes azzi fudd first overall, you are unbothered genuinely azzi is one of your favorite people in this draft class, has been since the nike summit when you were seventeen, and you watch her walk across that stage in her orange dress and you are nothing but happy for her.

when minnesota takes olivia miles second, you recalibrate quietly, fine okay, olivia is a generational passer, everyone knows it, you've known it since she was dismantling notre dame's press in a big east matchup three years ago you adjust. you wait.

seattle takes awa fam third, and this is the one that makes your stomach do something, because you were not expecting that, and now you are doing math in your head and the math leads somewhere that makes your hands go a little cold under the table and then.

with the fourth overall pick in the 2026 wnba draft, the washington mystics select—

your name, your name in that sentence coming out of the commissioner's mouth in a building full of noise that becomes, for about three seconds, something you can't quite hear because your own heartbeat is too loud.

you walk to the stage you shake hands, the commissioner holds a mystics jersey as you hold the other side and it holds slightly crooked and you don't fix it because you are not fully present in your body yet someone takes photos. 

you hold the jersey you smile, and the smile is real, it just comes from a place that is very far away from where you are standing fourth you are fourth washington it takes until you are backstage, in the low-lit corridor where the earlier picks are gathered waiting for the press availability, for the recalibration to finish and when it does, what you are left with is something quieter than disappointment and more complicated than relief fourth overall. 

washington mystics georgia amoore you know her game you've watched her since she was at kentucky, have three of her highlight reels bookmarked in a folder on your phone you would never admit exists. 

point guard with a handle that makes defenders look slow and a court vision that borders on unfair. sat out last season with a knee injury back now your new teammate you are thinking about this about backcourt pairings, about pick and roll chemistry, about playing alongside someone whose game you have studied the way some people study a language when the door to the corridor opens and she walks in.

georgia amoore in person is approximately the same as georgia amoore on film except that on film there is a screen between you and whatever she is doing and in person there is not.

she scans the room the way athletes do, this quick efficient inventory, and then her eyes land on you and something happens that you don't have a word for yet. 

it's a fast flicker she looks at you for maybe two seconds before she looks away, and when she looks away she finds something very interesting to look at on the opposite wall whereas you assume she's just oriented, it's loud, there's a lot happening.

the mystics do a rookie introduction thing in june, three weeks before training camp officially opens, where they bring in the new class and run them through the facility and feed them and take photos for social media. 

lauren arrives first because she is always early angela is next, still in her travel clothes, headphones around her neck cotie is on the phone with someone who must be her mother because she's saying yes ma'am every few seconds you arrive fourth, which feels like a pattern forming.

georgia is standing by the water station when you walk in she's mid-sentence with sonia, gesturing at something, and sonia is laughing and then she sees you and the sentence just well stops, not trails off stops like someone cut the audio.

sonia looks at where georgia is looking, then she looks back at georgia then she picks up her own water bottle and takes a long sip that is mostly about giving herself time to compose her face. hey, you say, because someone has to. i'm —

i know who you are, georgia says, and it comes out a little sharp, a little fast, like she said it before she meant to she blinks something moves across her face. notre dame. shooting guard. a pause that lasts slightly too long. welcome to washington. and then she picks up her water bottle and walks away at a pace that is not quite normal.

sonia watches her go then she looks at you her expression is the careful neutral of someone who has decided, very quickly, to stay out of something. she's excited you're here, sonia says. she mentioned it.

she seems excited, sonia says firmly. very excited.

by the second week of camp you have an inventory you are good at observing it's part of what makes you a good shooting guard, the ability to read the floor before the play develops — and what you observe is that georgia amoore will flirt with anyone; this is not an exaggeration she compliments lauren's footwear and means it. 

she does this thing with cotie where she uses a voice that makes cotie dissolve into giggles every time she texted kiki rice you were robbed about a play from kiki's college season and kiki screenshot it and showed everyone. 

she charmed the facilities manager into getting the good coffee stocked in the players' lounge by bringing him a muffin one morning and looking at him like he was the most important person in the building she says eleven words to you per day you counted.

the words are always fine. practical. good screen. nice catch. your left is getting sharper. compliments about basketball, not about you professional appropriate completely unlike the version of georgia amoore that exists when she is talking to literally anyone else.

you have replayed every interaction looking for the thing you did you come up empty every time by wednesday of the second week, kiki who has been in the dc area long enough to have opinions about the mystics slides into the seat next to you at lunch.

can i ask you something, she says.

yeah.

do you think georgia doesn't like me, you say, before she can kiki pauses. that's not what i was going to ask. another pause. but since you brought it up.

she talks to everyone, you say. she brought the facilities manager a muffin.

i know.

she made cotie laugh so hard she choked on her water yesterday.

i was there.

she says eleven words to me. kiki is quiet for a moment she has the expression of someone choosing very carefully between honesty and diplomacy. have you considered, she says slowly, that eleven very deliberate words might mean something different than you think they mean?

you look at her. i have to make a phone call, kiki says, and leaves.

it is sonia who calls it an intervention this is, everyone agrees later, a strong word for what is essentially four people eating takeout on kiki's hotel room floor, but sonia has always had a gift for framing.

the attendees are sonia, kiki, angela who got pulled in because she came to borrow kiki's charger and then got curious, and cotie who technically wasn't invited but heard georgia and intervention through the door and let herself in.

the subject of the intervention is not present; she is in her own room, forty feet down the hall, probably watching film and not thinking about you at all, which is the thing that sonia is finding most frustrating.

she thinks about her constantly, sonia says, gesturing with a spring roll. constantly. i've heard her say your name in conversations you weren't part of. she watched a notre dame game from last season when she thought no one was looking.

the whole game? cotie says. the highlights, sonia says. but with a focus that i found genuinely concerning. kiki is lying on the floor with her knee up. the thing is she has no game when it comes to her specifically, she says. like she has infinite game in every other direction. she flirted with the woman at the hotel front desk for ten minutes just out of habit and then she saw her in the hallway after the lobby thing and said — what did she say?

'morning,' sonia says. with a period. not even an exclamation point. just. morning.

she needs to say something, angela says she is the most recent addition to this conversation and therefore still has perspective. or she's going to spend the whole season finding things to look at that are not her face.

we know, kiki says. someone has to tell her, cotie says.

they all look at sonia. i'm not doing it, sonia says. i love her but she's going to say something sarcastic and then i'm going to say something back and then it's going to be a whole thing.

they look at kiki. she doesn't listen to me, kiki says. i told her to just talk to her last week and she said 'i do talk to her' and i said 'eleven words is not a conversation georgia' and she said 'eleven is a lot of words' and i had to walk away.

angela raises her hand slightly. i've known her for three weeks.

that might be why she'll listen to you, cotie says.

what actually happens is that angela catches georgia in the gym the next morning, forty minutes before anyone else arrives georgia is going through her ball-handling warm-up, headphones in, and angela sits down on the baseline and waits until georgia notices her.

what, georgia says, pulling out one earbud. the girls wanted me to talk to you, angela says. about her.

georgia goes very still for a moment then she resumes dribbling. i don't know what you mean.

georgia.

i talk to her.

eleven words.

eleven is — georgia stops. bounces the ball once. did kiki tell you that.

kiki told sonia. sonia told cotie. cotie told me. it was a whole thing. angela pauses. she thinks you don't like her.

the ball bounces twice, unevenly. i— georgia starts and stops the dribbling slows. that's not— she pushes her hair back. it's not that.

i know it's not that, angela says. that's why i'm here. georgia is quiet for a long moment she's looking at the free throw line like it said something offensive. i don't know how to be normal around her, she finally says. 

it comes out quieter than everything before it. it's like — with everyone else i just talk. it comes out. but with her everything i want to say sounds wrong before it gets to my mouth and so i just don't.

so you give her eleven words.

they were good words, georgia says, defensive. they were relevant.

angela stands up brushes off her shorts. i'm telling you this from a place of love, she says, because i've known you for three weeks and i already find you exhausting. she picks up her bag. she watches you too.

georgia looks up from the free throw line. when you're talking to other people, angela says. she watches. i've seen it. she starts toward the exit. eleven words, she says, over her shoulder. genuinely. that's not normal behavior from someone who doesn't care.

the gym door swings shut behind her georgia stands at half court for a long moment and she bounces the ball once twice. okay, she says, to no one.

the thing is you are not built for ambiguity notre dame's program runs on directness — coach niele ivey does not have time for passive communication and neither do you, after four years in that system. 

you read the floor and you make decisions and you don't second-guess the read once you've made it kiki's comment sits in you for a week, alongside the image of georgia amoore going very still every time you walk into a room she's already in, and by the end of week three you have made your decision.

you find her after evening practice, in the corridor outside the locker rooms, where she is toweling off her hair and looking at her phone with a focus that you are now fairly certain is performance.

georgia.

she looks up that thing happens again the thing where she looks at you and everything in her face does a quick reorganization. hey, she says, and you can see her counting, you swear you can see her counting. good practice.

three words, you say.

she blinks. what?

that's three today. you've been running low. you lean against the wall, arms crossed, looking at her directly. you flirt with literally everyone in this building. you had a ten minute conversation with the ball boy about his college apps. you brought the facilities manager a muffin. you pause. you give me three words and a lot of eye contact with the floor.

georgia opens her mouth and closes it the towel in her hands is getting a lot of attention. so i'm asking you directly, you say, because i'm a direct person and i've been going crazy trying to figure out what i did. what's going on.

the corridor is empty, the sounds of the locker room filter through the door georgia looks at you and this time she doesn't look away, she just looks, for a long moment, with an expression that is the most unguarded thing you've seen from her. you didn't do anything, she says.

okay.

*it's — * she exhales. you know how i am with people.

yes, you say. that's what i'm asking about.

it's different with you, she says. that's the problem. the towel stills in her hands. with everyone else it just comes out. it's easy. but you— she stops. the first time i saw you was at the draft and you were sitting at that table and you weren't even nervous, everyone was nervous but you looked like you were just — waiting. like you already knew where you were going. and i thought—

she stops again she is doing the thing with her jaw that you've seen her do when she's working out a play. i thought, okay, that's someone i want to know, she says, quieter. and then you got to washington and i wanted to— she gestures, vague and helpless. and everything i thought to say sounded stupid so i just didn't.

the corridor is very quiet. eleven words instead, you say. they were considered words.

georgia.

they were. a pause then, softer. yes. eleven words. you look at her really look, the way you look at the floor when you're reading a defense, taking the full picture in georgia amoore who charms every room she walks into, standing here in this corridor with damp hair and a towel and the most undefended expression you've seen since you arrived in washington.

say something, you say. say what you actually want to say. a beat she wets her lip the corridor light is doing something warm to her face.

i think you're the best player in this draft class, she says. i've thought that since your junior season. i watched the notre dame-uconn game from february twice. 

a pause. i think you're going to be the best shooting guard in the league. i think when we figure out our timing in pick and roll it's going to be something that people talk about. she stops. and i think you're — i've been trying to find the right word for three weeks and i haven't.

try anyway, you say she looks at you. a lot, she says finally. you're a lot. in a way where everything else gets quieter.

the locker room door swings open twenty feet down the corridor — cotie, not seeing you yet, heading for the water fountain and georgia takes half a step back and you let her, the moment shifting into something that can be picked back up later, set down carefully, not dropped but later that night she texts you. sorry about the eleven words thing.

you write back. don't be. i liked knowing they were deliberate.

three dots then. they really were. i'll do better. you set the phone down and look at the ceiling of your hotel room and think about georgia amoore at the draft saying i know who you are before you could finish your own name.

you were already a lot to her then you just didn't know it yet.

weeks pass.

the pick and roll timing clicks in week six, on a tuesday, during a five-on-five drill when you curl off a screen and georgia threads a pass through a gap that shouldn't exist and it hits you in stride so perfectly that you pull up for the jumper without thinking and it goes. 

the gym makes the sound it makes when something works georgia points at you from half court, not a word you point back to that evening she knocks on your hotel room door. 

you open it and she's standing there in practice clothes, hair up, and she has the expression of someone who has made a decision and arrived on the other side of it. i had more than eleven words, she says. i've been saving them.

you step back from the door to let her in. i know, you say.

the first time you kiss her you are both still in your practice clothes, standing in the kitchen of the apartment you've just signed the lease on, takeout containers on the counter between you, her mid-sentence about something she saw in film, and you decide the way you decide on the floor, quick and committed once you've read it right and close the distance.

she stops mid-sentence there's a breath of a pause where neither of you moves then georgia kisses you back with the focus of someone who has been composing this for a long time and has finally found the right moment to say it, and her hand comes up to your jaw and everything she never said in eleven words a day is somewhere in there, unhurried, patient, finally.

i had a whole plan, she says, when you pull back her thumb is still on your jaw. i was going to say something good. i had the words ready.

how were they?

good, she says. really good. the ghost of a smile. you didn't let me use them.

say them now. she shakes her head slowly. no, she says, soft. now i want to show you instead. the takeout goes cold on the counter.

later deep into the season, after a home win, the capital one arena is still loud somewhere above you she is lying with her head on your chest in the quiet of the training room and you are thinking about draft night, about fourth overall, about the way the math in your head led to washington.

i was projected second, you say, to the ceiling she hums her hand stills on your sternum. i know, she says. i watched the coverage. a beat passed. were you upset?

i was recalibrating, you say. for about a minute. and then i thought — washington. georgia amoore. and the recalibrating stopped.

she's quiet for a moment. you thought about me, she says.

i thought about backcourt chemistry, you say. and your assist numbers.

sure, she says, and you can hear the smile in it without looking. very practical.

very.

she tilts her head up and you look down the look between you is the look from that corridor, from that hotel room, from every moment she found something to look at that wasn't your face before she learned to just look. fourth overall, she says, quiet. best thing that ever happened to this franchise.

you kiss the top of her head. tell me the words, you say. the ones you had ready.

now?

now she's quiet for a moment and then she says to them, low, just for you, all the ones she held back and prepared and counted out so carefully in the beginning and this time there are a lot more than eleven.

the mystics are in chicago for a friday night game against the sky, which means a thursday afternoon flight and a hotel that books two players per room, which means you find out at 3pm via the team groupchat that your roommate is georgia.

sonia sends a string of dots and nothing else, kiki sends a single. interesting.

cotie sends a gif you don't look at closely enough to identify but which makes angela, next to you on the plane, cover her mouth georgia, sitting one row ahead, does not look back. but the tips of her ears go pink in a way that you have learned to read.

the thing about you and georgia is that it is not yet a thing, technically what it is in the training room, late into the season, her head on your chest and words said low in the dark that you have not talked about since. 

a week of practice where something between you shifted into a new register more careful in one direction, less careful in another. her hand finding yours in the film room tuesday, just for a moment, just long enough, before she took it back. eleven words replaced by something that does not have a number yet, that you are both still figuring out how to count.

the unresolved part lives in the gap between what happened and what you have said about what happened, which is nothing which is very unlike you which is, you suspect, the georgia effect she makes you want to be patient with the timing the way she was patient with the words but you are still a direct person this has not changed.

three days before chicago, sonia texts the group chat she has named the powerpuff girls — you, her, kiki at ten in the morning. matcha noon. the place on u street. georgia's coming.

kiki: noted

you: sure

then, privately, kiki to you: she's been wanting to hang outside practice for weeks and keeps not asking. sonia is doing a thing.

you stare at your phone. what kind of thing, you write back kiki sends the dots then. a sonia thing. just come.

the place on u street is small and warm and smells like oat milk and something floral, and by the time you arrive sonia and kiki are already at the corner table and georgia is standing at the counter ordering, back to the door, and does not see you come in.

you see her first this has become a pattern you have noticed there's always a moment, before she knows you're there, where you get to see her unguarded. 

she's in a cream crewneck and her hair is down and she is having what looks like a detailed conversation with the person taking her order, hands moving, and the barista is laughing the usual then she turns and sees you and the hands still and she does the thing the reorganization, fast, like a screen refresh and says. hey.

hey, you say sonia, from the corner table, is watching this with the focused attention of a scientist observing a reaction you order. 

georgia moves to wait at the end of the counter and you move with her and stand beside her and the silence between you is the kind that has texture, that means something, that both of you are aware of. you good? you ask.

yeah, she says a beat passes between you and her. you?

yeah.

the barista calls her name and she reaches past you for her cup and her arm brushes yours and she says sorry very quietly and you say don't be and she looks at you sideways for just a second before she takes her matcha and goes to the table.

sonia, watching says nothing, kiki watching says nothing they are both doing the very specific nothing of people who have clocked everything.

the four of you at the table are easy, mostly this is the thing about sonia and kiki they are the kind of friends who arrived fast and stayed, who knew your order and your moods and your shot selection habits within the first month. 

sonia has a theory about every player in the league and shares them without being asked kiki sends you film clips at midnight with no context except look at this angle. you love them in the way you love good teammates, which is to say a lot, and practically, and with a specific kind of trust.

georgia with them is different from georgia with you she's loose, easy, she's making sonia laugh within five minutes, is doing a bit with kiki about something that happened at shootaround that you only have half the context for but which is clearly very funny. 

she is, in this context, completely herself the version that exists when she is not counting her words and then she'll glance at you and something shifts, just slightly, just a half-step, and she catches herself and looks away.

kiki sees it of course kiki sees it she says nothing, but she meets your eyes once across the table with an expression that is very precisely yeah, i know.

at some point sonia says, very casually georgia, remember what you told me about notre dame's offensive system? georgia looks at her. what?

you were saying, sonia says, about the way they run their two-guard sets. you were very detailed about it.

i don't know what you're —

you had thoughts, sonia says serenely. specific thoughts. about her specifically. she nods at you without looking at you as you said. what was it something about the way she reads the secondary option before the play develops.

the table is quiet georgia looks at sonia with an expression that is a very contained version of fury. i say that about a lot of guards, she says. you do not, kiki says, from behind her cup.

i watched film on a lot of people in this draft —

twice, sonia says. you watched notre dame-uconn twice. you mentioned it.

i–

the february game, sonia says georgia puts her cup down. i'm not doing this.

she already knows, kiki says, very gently. that's the thing, g. she already knows.

georgia still goes and she looks at kiki then slowly she looks at you and you look back you don't rescue her you let her look. you knew, she says, finally. it's not quite a question.

i read the floor, you say. it's what i do.

something moves through her face not embarrassment, exactly — something softer than that, and more complicated. 

she picks up her cup, sets it down again and her thumb moves along the edge of the cardboard sleeve. right, she says quietly sonia stands up very suddenly. i need a water, she says. kiki come help me.

the waters are self-serve, kiki says. kiki, sonia says kiki comes.

you and georgia at the corner table the ambient noise of the café, her thumb still on the sleeve of her cup. how long, she says.

the corridor, you say. when i asked you outright. i had a pretty good read before that but the corridor confirmed it.

she exhales not quite a laugh. great.

georgia.

i know, she says. i know, i just — she stops looks at the table. i had it so composed for so long. the eleven words were a system. and then you just walked up and asked and the whole system—

fell apart, you say.

completely, she says. yeah.

you look at her at her hands on the cup, at the way she's not quite meeting your eyes, at the version of georgia amoore that exists in the space before she's decided how to say a thing. the training room, you say as she looks up.

i haven't stopped thinking about it, you say. about what you said. i want to make sure we're — i want to know where we are.

she holds your gaze for a moment the café does its thing around you, indifferent.

i don't know how to do this carefully, she says. with you. everything else i can do carefully. i can manage how i come across, i can read the room, i can — she stops. with you i just say the actual thing before i mean to. it keeps happening.

that's not a problem, you say.

it feels exposed.

i know. you reach across the table and your hand covers hers, just briefly, just for a moment. say the actual thing.

she looks at your hand then at you.

i want to figure it out, she says. whatever this is. i want to figure it out with you. a beat. that's the actual thing.

okay, you say.

okay?

yeah, you say. me too.

sonia, from the water station eight feet away, makes a sound kiki puts a hand over sonia's mouth you don't look over neither does georgia but the corner of her mouth does something, quiet and private, that you are going to think about for the rest of the day.

so, chicago thursday night one room, one bed, discovered at check-in when the team liaison hands you a keycard and a room number and georgia, next to you, says sorry? in the tone of someone who has heard correctly but is hoping they haven't.

we're fully booked, the liaison says. it's a king. should be fine. should be fine, georgia looks at you, you look at georgia behind you, somewhere in the lobby, you hear kiki say something to sonia in a voice too low to catch but which is definitely about this.

the room is on the fourteenth floor you take the elevator up in a silence that is a different kind of textured than the one at the matcha place, less complicated and more aware, the kind that comes from standing close to someone in an enclosed space and being conscious of every inch.

the room is nice, the bed is, as advertised a king georgia sets her bag on the chair by the window and looks at it like it said something. i can sleep on top of the covers, she says. if you want. like a line down the middle, i —

georgia, you say.

yeah.

it's fine.

she turns around and you are sitting on the edge of the bed, shoes already off, looking at her she looks back. okay, she says.

okay.

she gets ready for bed in the bathroom while you set an alarm and check the game notes on your phone and try to be a normal person in a normal hotel room and not think too carefully about the georgia-shaped shift happening in your chest. 

she comes out in a notre dame t-shirt — i stole it, she says, preemptively, last week from the laundry pile, i was going to give it back — and you say you can keep it and something about that makes her go very still for a second before she gets into bed.

the lights go off, the dark settles, you lie there, both of you, not touching, a few inches of hotel sheets between you, and the quiet has the weight of two people who are very aware of each other. georgia, you say, to the ceiling.

yeah, she says.

you still have words saved up. a pause. a few, she admits.

say one.

the dark, the ambient hum of the hotel outside the window, chicago going about its thursday night.

i'm glad you went fourth, she says. i know that's — i know you were projected higher and i know it's not the same thing as being glad for you, because i am glad for you, i want everything for you. but selfishly. a breath. selfishly i am so glad you went fourth.

you turn your head on the pillow. she turns hers in the dark you can just make out the shape of her face, the line of her jaw, the way she is looking at you with the full version of her attention.

washington, you say.

washington, she says.

you close the last few inches between you and she meets you there, unhurried, and it is nothing like the kitchen — that was decision and momentum, quick and committed. 

this is slower her hand finds your face in the dark the way it did in the training room and you think about all the words she held, all the ones she counted out so carefully, and how none of them are necessary right now.

later, much later, she's quiet in the way that means she's still awake, her head on your shoulder, the notre dame shirt warm against your arm. the february game, you say.

don't, she says.

both halves?

i'm going to sleep.

georgia.

a long pause.

yes, she says, very quietly. both halves.

you stare at the ceiling outside, chicago tomorrow, the sky right now, her breathing slowing into something even, the weight of her against you, the particular quiet of a hotel room that has stopped being temporary and started being somewhere you want to stay.

both halves, you say, soft she doesn't answer but her hand, resting on your sternum, curls just slightly.

you fall asleep to the sound of her breathing and think, in the last moment before you go under. fourth overall. best thing.

the morning is ordinary in the way mornings before games always are — alarm at seven-thirty, georgia already half-awake when it goes off, the two of you moving around the room in the careful choreography of people who are new to sharing a space and still learning its geometry. 

she takes the bathroom first you find your shootaround clothes she comes out with her hair up and toothpaste still on her bottom lip and doesn't notice until you point at your own lip and she goes oh and disappears back into the bathroom and you stand there in the middle of the hotel room and feel something embarrassingly warm about the whole thing.

breakfast is the team floor, the long table, cotie and angela already there with plates piled high, sonia arriving two minutes after you with the specific expression she wears when she has clocked something and is choosing not to say it yet kiki sits down across from you and looks between you and georgia once, carefully, and then pours her orange juice.

good sleep? kiki says.

great sleep, you say.

mm, kiki says.

georgia is talking to cotie about something on her phone and is not looking at you but the tips of her ears are doing the thing sonia sees this sonia drinks her coffee in the particular way of someone savoring a private victory.

you eat your eggs and think about the sky's defensive scheme and try to be a professional.

shootaround is clean coach johnson runs through the chicago sets, the pick and roll coverage, who to watch — raven johnson's handle, the way the sky likes to push in transition you take notes on your phone. 

georgia is two seats down, doing the same, and at one point she leans over without looking and taps your knee once, quick, pointing at something on her own screen. watch her left hand on the drive, she murmurs. she telegraphs it every time.

you watch the clip she's right she's always right about things like this. got it, you say she leans back the knee tap lingers more than it should.

the united center is loud in the way away arenas get loud when the home crowd smells a competitive game not hostile exactly, just charged, the particular energy of a building that wants something from the night. 

you go through warmups with your headphones in, your routine locked, notre dame muscle memory carrying you through the layup lines.

the game starts well georgia finds you on the second possession, a quick pocket pass off the pick and roll that you catch in stride, one dribble, pull-up jumper over the closeout good she points. you jog back.

through the first quarter you are in it like really in it, the kind of game where the floor opens up and you can see everything, every gap, every rotation, the reads coming fast and clean. 

sixteen points by halftime georgia has nine assists coach johnson says keep doing exactly what you're doing and you believe him the third quarter is where it happens.

you are curling off a screen at the elbow, georgia feeding you the entry pass, and you catch it and take one hard dribble baseline and the sky's two-guard trying to cut off the angle, moving fast, a little desperate comes in from the side and her knee catches your ankle at a wrong angle and the world tips.

you go down hard the sound the building makes is the particular sound of something stopping. not silence exactly a held breath, collective and instant.

you are on the floor and your ankle is sending signals that are urgent and unambiguous and you know before the trainer gets to you, know the way you know reads before plays develop, that this is not something you play through you've rolled ankles before this one has a different quality to it, something deeper, and you lie there for a moment just taking inventory.

the trainer reaches you coach johnson is on the floor. someone is saying your name. you look up at the lights and breathe, steady, the way niele ivey taught you. hurt is not the same as broken, take the inventory, report accurately — and you do you report ankle right side moderate probably not structural but definitely done for the night.

okay, you say to the trainer. okay, yeah. help me up.

you don't look for georgia immediately you're focused on getting upright, on not putting weight on it wrong, on the logistics of exit. 

the trainer and one of the assistant coaches get you to your feet and you hop once and establish that the ankle will bear partial weight and the crowd does the thing crowds do a wave of acknowledgement, the sound of a building releasing its held breath you look up then.

georgia is standing at half court she has the ball in her hands from when play stopped and she is not moving her face is the composed face, the one she wears in film sessions and post-game press conferences, the one that gives nothing away. she is looking at you and her face is doing exactly nothing and you know her well enough now to know that this means the opposite of nothing.

sonia is beside her saying something georgia nods once looks back at you, you raise your chin slightly. i'm okay and she nods again, and then play is called to resume and she turns back to the court and that is the last you see of her before the tunnel.

the training room under the united center is fluorescent and cold and smells like every other training room you've been in your entire career. 

the mystics' athletic trainer, dominique, runs through the assessment with efficient hands while you sit on the table and stare at the ceiling and listen to the muffled sound of the game continuing above you. ligament? you say.

i don't think so, dominique says. feels like a high ankle sprain. significant but not structural. she wraps it with practiced efficiency. we'll get imaging tomorrow to confirm. you're done tonight.

i know, you say.

you're going to want to stay off it —

i know, you say she gives you the look trainers give athletes who say i know in that tone, which is the look of someone who knows that you know and also knows that knowing doesn't always translate.

you sit in the training room for the rest of the third quarter and most of the fourth, your phone filling up. cotie, a row of prayer hands angela, how bad. kiki, staying or going to hospital? sonia, tell me immediately if you need anything i'm watching the medical staff like a hawk.

georgia, nothing which is fine she's playing she doesn't have her phone this is normal and expected and you are not reading anything into it.

the buzzer sounds above you the mystics win you gather this from the sound, the particular quality of noise that is visiting team celebration, and dominique confirms it when she comes back through. 88-79. amoore had a triple double.

of course she did, you say.

the locker room is where you see it georgia comes in with the rest of them, sweat-damp and still running the elevated energy of a road win, and sonia is talking at her about something and cotie has her arm around angela and the room has the warmth of a good game in it. 

georgia peels off her warm-up jacket and reaches for her water bottle and then she looks up and finds you on the bench by the lockers, boot on your ankle, and the room keeps going around her but she goes very still.

three seconds five then she crosses the room and sits down beside you not too close, not away-game-we-are-professional close, somewhere in the middle. dominique's assessment? she says her voice is composed. high ankle sprain. imaging tomorrow.

timeline?

two weeks minimum. maybe three.

she nods, her hands are in her lap and she is looking at the boot and her jaw is doing the thing where she's working something out the locker room goes on around you both, loud and warm. georgia.

yeah.

look at me.

she looks at you there it is what the composed face was covering not panic, not quite, but something adjacent to it. 

something raw sitting just below the surface of the controlled expression you recognize because you know what her face does when she's actually fine versus when she is managing. i'm okay, you say. high ankle sprain. i've had worse.

i know, she says.

you don't look like you know.

she exhales, slow. when you went down— she stops and starts again. i was right there. i saw the angle and i — her hand tightens in her lap. i know you're okay. i knew on the floor when you raised your chin that you were okay. i kept playing because you were okay. a beat. it just didn't stop the — she gestures, vague, at her own chest. whatever that was.

the thing, you say. yeah, she says. the thing.

the locker room goes on around you someone's playing music from a bluetooth speaker cotie is doing a bit with her water bottle that angela finds funnier than it probably is. georgia, you say. mm.

i need you to help me to the bus.

she looks at the boot then at you the composed face shifts into something that is still composed but has a different quality to it the kind of composed that comes after, not before. yeah, she says. obviously.

and then, you say, i need you to tell me what was actually in your chest when it happened. in the room tonight. when it's just us.

she's quiet for a moment the locker room hums the bluetooth speaker. okay, she says. yeah. i can do that.

the hotel room is quieter than last night the lamp on the far side is on and everything else is off and you are on the bed with your ankle up on two pillows and georgia is sitting at the end of the bed with her knees pulled up, and the window shows chicago at night, the lake somewhere out there in the dark.

she's been quiet since the bus, not the eleven-word quiet, something more internal than that, something she's working through you wait you are learning her rhythms.

when you went down, she says finally, the first thing i thought was — not what you'd think. not ligament, not timeline, not anything practical. she looks at her hands. *the first thing was just — her. just your name. just — * she stops. and i've spent my whole career being the person who doesn't do that. who keeps the game in the game. i've had teammates get hurt and i've stayed level because that's what you do, that's what the team needs. a pause. and then it was you and i felt the floor go out from under me a little bit. on the inside. just for a second.

and you kept playing, you say. you were okay, she says. you told me you were okay.

i did.

and i kept playing. she looks up. but the whole fourth quarter i was — it was different. the way i was playing was different. i don't know if anyone clocked it.

triple double, you say. i know what i do when i'm — when i need to put something somewhere, she says. i put it in the game. i always have.

you look at her at georgia amoore at the end of the hotel bed, hair down, chicago light on her face, telling you what she does with the things she can't say out loud. you put it in the triple double, you say.

yeah, she says. and then i came in here and you're — you're fine. you're fine, you're on the pillows, you look fine, and i sat down and my hands wouldn't — she looks at them again. they were shaking a little. for about a minute. i didn't want you to see.

i saw, you say.

i know you saw.

georgia. she looks at you. come here, you say she moves up the bed, carefully, mindful of the ankle, and settles beside you and you pull her in and she goes, and this, this is different from last night, less charged and more essential, the kind of close that isn't about want so much as about need, about reassurance moving in both directions at once.

her hand finds your sternum same as the training room same as last night like she's taking inventory. i'm here, you say.

i know, she says, muffled against your shoulder. that's the thing. you're here and i can feel that you're fine and i'm still — it's still doing something.

that's allowed, you say.

is it.

yes, you say. georgia. that's allowed.

she's quiet for a moment outside chicago somewhere below, the city going about its friday night, indifferent and continuous.

i had a plan, she says, eventually. for how this would go. between us. i was going to be — measured. i was going to take my time. not come on too strong. a breath. and then you went down on that floor and my first thought was just your name and i think the plan is — i think it's probably —

gone, you say. yeah, she says. pretty thoroughly.

she presses her mouth to the top of your head you makes a sound that is very small and very real and nothing like the composed face at all. the february game, you say, quiet. both halves.

you feel her exhale against your shoulder. both halves, she says. the whole season before that. your junior highlights. i have a folder. a pause. don't say anything.

i'm not saying anything, you say.

you're smiling.

you can't see my face.

i know you, she says. you're smiling. you are smiling, you don't bother denying it. a folder, you say.

i will leave, she says.

you won't.

she won't put her hand on your sternum and doesn't move her breathing slowly, gradually, the way it did last night, from the elevated thing it's been since the game into something even and settling. the imaging tomorrow, she says. i'm coming.

georgia —

i'm coming, she says. that's not a question. you think about arguing on principle you decide against it. okay, you say.

and if it's not structural —

it's not.

if it's confirmed not structural, she says, then i'm getting you the good food after. not the hotel food. actual food from somewhere that isn't the team caterer.

what if i want hotel food?

you don't.

i might.

you don't, she says, and you can hear the smile in it, and something in your chest does the thing it has been doing since the training room months ago, since the corridor, since fourth overall and welcome to washington with the tips of her ears going pink.

georgia, you say.

mm.

say something else from the folder.

a long pause in the chicago dark outside her hand on your chest.

in the notre dame-uconn game, she says, quiet, there was a play in the second half where they ran the same set three possessions in a row and the third time you read it before it developed and you went under the screen instead of over and it shouldn't have worked because you were giving up the corner three and it worked anyway because you knew she wasn't going to shoot it. 

a breath. nobody else in that game read that. i watched it four times. another breath. i thought — i thought, whoever she ends up playing with is going to be so lucky. the way she sees things. she pauses. and then seven months later it was me. and i thought —

she stops. what, you say. i thought, she says, oh. of course it's her.

the lamp on the far side of the room, the dark chicago her breathing going slow and even against your shoulder while your ankle throbs dully against the pillows and the night settles around you both like something that was always going to happen. of course, you say.

yeah, she says.

okay, you say and she says. yeah. okay. and that is enough, that is, in fact, more than enough you lie there in the dark with georgia amoore's hand on your chest and her words still in the room, all the ones she saved, all the ones she counted out so carefully and is now spending freely and you think. fourth overall. washington mystics. georgia amoore.

she comes out holding two pieces of ivory structured jacket in each hand, held up level like she's presenting evidence. "what do you think," she says when you look at them you look at her you say immediately "yes."

"you didn't let me finish."

"yes anyway."

she gives you a look, the one that means you're doing that thing and you sit up properly and look at the jackets with the seriousness they apparently deserve they're beautiful, they're the kind of piece that costs more than it looks like it does and looks like it costs exactly what it does, which is a particular kind of expensive thing that you've been learning about since you started spending time in her orbit.

the color reads ivory in her bedroom light but you know in the arena it'll go the softest shade of cream, warm, tonal, the kind of palette that photographs clean from twenty feet away and from a hundred feet away still reads as coordinated. "we're going to look insane," you tell her.

she hangs them both carefully on the back of the door and sits down next to you on the edge of the bed close enough that her knee presses into yours. "we're going to look good," she says, which is a correction, and she says it the way she says most things not like she's being arrogant, like she's just stating the geometry of the situation she is usually right about the geometry it's one of the more annoying things about her.

you look at the jackets on the door you look at her profile you say "they're going to lose their minds."

"probably."

"you know that, right? you know exactly what you're doing."

she turns her head and looks at you, and something in her expression settles into a register that doesn't have a name but that you've been cataloguing for three years, the one that means she's being precise on purpose, choosing her words the way she chooses her shots not rushed, not careless, just very clear about what she's going for. "yeah," she says. "i know."

you hold that for a second. "okay," you say.

"okay?"

"okay," you say again, and lie back down, and stare at the ceiling fan, and try to keep your face entirely neutral, which you fail at, and which she clocks and doesn't mention, because she is also, sometimes, merciful.

you've known maya since sophomore year at ucla, which means she predates lauren by about four months and has watched the entire arc of this from front-row seats with the specific energy of someone who invested early and is still waiting to cash out.

she texted you last week when you mentioned coming to the game does she know you're coming. you said yes maya sent back three emojis in a row and then nothing for six hours and then i'm wearing something neutral so you two can have the whole bit.

you love her you also, sometimes, want to close a door in her face she's waiting for you outside the arena in a cream blazer of her own — different, paler, clearly chosen to orbit your orbit — and when she sees you coming she puts a hand over her mouth and then takes it away and says "you actually did it."

"we're just wearing jackets."

"you're wearing the same jacket."

"it's a popular jacket."

"it came out three weeks ago." she falls into step beside you she's looking at you with an expression that you would describe as clinical admiration. "how long did she plan this."

"it was both of us."

maya stops walking for approximately one step and then resumes. "she planned it," she says, "and you went along with it immediately."

you don't answer maya takes this as confirmation, which it is.

"i want you to know," she says, as you push through the entrance, "that i have been waiting three years for you two to do literally anything publicly and this is exceeding my expectations. this is this is a statement. you understand that. without either of you saying one word this is a statement."

"we're just going to a basketball game."

"in matching designer jackets that are three weeks old—"

"complementary—"

"that you coordinated the night before—"

"we live close—"

"that are going to be photographed and posted within forty-five seconds of you sitting down." maya looks at you with the patience of someone who has known you long enough to wait for you out. "are you nervous?"

you think about lauren asking you the same thing in the hallway this morning, both of you standing in front of the mirror, jackets on you thinking about how you said no and she smiled like she didn't believe you.

you think about how she reached over and adjusted your collar, just barely, just with two fingers, fixed something you couldn't see was crooked, and then stepped back and looked at you the way she sometimes looks at you like she's confirming something she already knew.

"no," you tell maya maya says "you are such a liar," and links her arm through yours, and that's how you walk to your seats.

the arena fills around you and you learn something about yourself, which is that you are better at composure in the abstract than in practice in the abstract, standing in lauren's hallway last night saying yes, sure, we're going to look good, you were calm about this.

in practice, sitting courtside while the warmup music plays and the lights come up and someone three rows back says loudly to their friend wait hold on in practice you are exercising every social muscle you have.

maya is completely unhelpful she's on her phone already, watching something load, and she tips it toward you with a clip from the tunnel someone got a photo of you both coming in but the angle is not unflattering the jackets are extremely visible, it already has four hundred likes and it was posted eleven minutes ago. "put that away," you say.

"the comments," maya says reverently, scrolling, "are unwell."

"maya—"

"someone says and i quote: 'she has been wearing lauren's clothes on her body since at least 2022 but this is the first time they matched and i am going to need a minute.'"

you face forward with great dignity.

"another person says: 'the way they styled it differently so it's not costume-y but you can still absolutely tell they got dressed together. i'm not normal about this.'"

"i don't need a live update—"

"oh, this one—" maya presses her lips together. "this one says 'lauren betts has been looking at this girl from half court every home game for a season and a half and now they show up in coordinated fits and we're supposed to just watch basketball?'"

you open your mouth, you close it, you look at the court lauren is on the three-point line mid-stretch, one arm pulled across her chest, head tilted slightly she looks over finds you immediately she always finds you immediately, you stopped being surprised by this sometime in february and her expression does the thing where it shifts registers so fast that if you didn't know her you'd miss it.

something settles something confirms she raises her eyebrows well? you raise yours back they're losing it she already knows she lets her mouth curve just slightly, the version of her smile that belongs to a specific radius, the one that's been yours for three years, and turns back to the drill.

maya, who has witnessed this entire exchange in silence, says "i need you to understand that i saw that from two feet away."

"saw what."

"that whole — the eyebrows — the thing you just did."

"we were just—"

"that was a full conversation," maya says. "with your faces. you had a full conversation with your faces across a basketball court."

@bricksbylb — wait wait wait is she wearing the same jacket as the girl in the third row

@dcmysticstan — THEY ARE IN THE SAME COLORWAY. THE SAME. I AM GOING TO NEED EVERYONE TO LOOK AT THIS

@halfcourtshots — the girl who's always courtside for lauren's home games. been clocking her since the preseason. they did NOT do this by accident. that jacket is three weeks old.

@hoop.diaries — okay but they came in together through the tunnel. someone just sent me the photo. the way she's walking next to her like it's the most natural thing in the world.

@bricksbylb — WAIT THE JACKET. SAME JACKET. DIFFERENT STYLING. THEY LITERALLY PLANNED THIS AND THEN STYLED IT DIFFERENTLY SO IT WOULDN'T LOOK PLANNED BUT IT STILL LOOKS PLANNED I'M GOING TO LIE DOWN

@w.bballworld — can someone explain to me how lauren betts is out here doing a full pregame warmup and also somehow looking directly at the same courtside girl every thirty seconds. how is she doing both

@dcmysticstan — they've been doing this since ucla. i have receipts going back two years. this jacket is just the first time they stopped pretending we weren't all watching.

your phone has ninety-three notifications you turn it face-down on your knee and fold your hands on top of it and watch lauren catch a pass, pivot, go up for a mid-range that goes clean through maya, next to you, is vibrating with the contained energy of someone who is being very good by not saying anything you let her have it for about forty-five seconds. "fine," you say quietly. "i knew. i knew exactly what was going to happen and i did it anyway."

maya exhales like she's been holding it. "okay," she says carefully. "okay, and?" you watch lauren move through the lane, easy, like she takes up exactly as much space as she's supposed to and not one inch more. you watch her glance toward you again without meaning to, or maybe meaning to, you've never been entirely sure. "and nothing," you say. "that's it. i knew and i wanted to."

maya is quiet for a moment. then she says, very softly: "yeah. i know."

the buzzer sounds the warmup music shifts the lights come all the way up and the arena gets loud and you sit in it and feel, underneath the composed surface of yourself, something that has been building for three years and that has no particular name and that tonight, without a single word, you put on like a jacket deliberately, in the right color, styled to be unmistakably yours.

they win by nine you watch all of it every run, every adjustment, every timeout huddle where you can see her listening with her hands on her knees, head down, and then looking up like something clicked and maya is good company, the kind who knows when to be loud and when to let things breathe.

you feel, for most of the game, approximately normal you feel like yourself you feel like someone who has been doing this for long enough that the courtside part is ordinary, the watching-her-work part is ordinary, the fact of her in your life is ordinary, which is its own kind of extraordinary when you think about it too hard, which you mostly try not to.

your phone never stops buzzing, you leave it face-down the entire second half after, you wait in the corridor outside the locker room with maya, who has finally run out of tweet updates and is just standing quietly eating a pretzel and being decent about it.

other people filter through. some of them glance at your jacket, one of them is a beat reporter you've seen at maybe a dozen of these and she looks at you and looks at the jacket and looks at maya and then very professionally looks at her phone instead you appreciate that.

the door opens and lauren comes out still in warmup gear, hair re-done, face already clear of the game the way she gets after she processes fast, always has, moves on while you're still sitting in whatever just happened.

she spots you and maya immediately and the expression she lands on is the good one, the unguarded one, the one you got a long time ago in a parking lot at two in the morning and have been quietly carrying ever since.

she comes over, looks at you, looks at the jacket, then at her own jacket draped over her bag. "so," she says. "so," you say.

maya says "great game, lauren," and takes a large bite of pretzel and looks very pointedly at the middle distance lauren looks at you like she's asking a question you both already know the answer to.

you hold out approximately four more seconds of composure and then because she's looking at you like that, because maya is right there making no effort to leave, because ninety-three notifications became two hundred and you spent the whole second half not looking at your phone and feeling something warm and certain and entirely deliberate sitting in your chest like it had always been there, waiting you say "i loved it."

lauren tilts her head slightly waiting. "the whole thing," you say. "i loved it. i knew exactly what we were doing and i wanted to do it and i'd do it again."

she looks at you for a moment that sits long and quiet over the noise of the corridor then something in her face does what it does that particular settling, that confirmation of something she already knew and she says, soft enough that it's just for you."yeah. i know you did."

and she reaches over, just like this morning, just with two fingers, and fixes your collar again though you're pretty sure it wasn't crooked and then doesn't move her hand away immediately, leaves it there at the edge of your jaw for just a second, and you let yourself feel all of it.

the warmth of it, the length of it, three years of this building into an evening where you put on a jacket knowing full well and said yes anyway maya finishes her pretzel she doesn't say a single word.

she is, for once in her life, exactly the right amount of quiet you walk out of the arena together, all three of you, and somewhere behind you someone absolutely gets a photo, and tomorrow it will be everywhere, and you already know you won't mind.

you already know because you knew last night, in her hallway, when she held up two jackets and said what do you think and you said yes, obviously, before she finished the sentence on purpose both of you.

lauren pov:

she's already there when lauren comes out of the tunnel; this is not unusual; she is almost always already there early in the way that people are early when they care about something but don't want to make a thing of it, which is a quality lauren recognized immediately and has been quietly cataloguing ever since.

she sits in the same seat every home game, third row, slightly left of center, and she watches warmups with the focused stillness of someone who actually understands what she's watching, which is rarer than people think and which lauren noticed the first time and every time after.

tonight maya is with her lauren expected that what she didn't expect though she should have, because she knows her is the way she's sitting upright with a composed jacket on.

looking at the court with an expression that is doing a tremendous amount of work to appear casual, which means she's nervous, which means she's aware of exactly what tonight is, which means the yes from last night in the hallway was real and not just her being agreeable the way she sometimes is when she doesn't want to examine something too closely.

lauren goes to her spot on the three-point line and starts her stretch and finds her, the way she always finds her, the way that stopped being a conscious act sometime around november of last year she just looks over and there she is, it's that simple, it has always been that simple and something in lauren's chest settles into place like a mechanism clicking.

she raises her eyebrows: well?

she gets them back: they're losing it.

lauren lets herself smile, the real one, and turns back to the drill behind her she can hear, faintly, maya saying something emphatic she does not need to hear the words she has known maya long enough to know that whatever she is saying, it is accurate and slightly too loud and entirely deserved.

flashback westwood three years ago:

the party was at someone's apartment near campus, the kind where you know four people and spend most of the night finding corners maya had dragged you and then immediately disappeared with someone she'd been texting for a month, which was fine, which was genuinely fine, you were used to being left to navigate these things on your own and you were good at it in the specific way of someone who learned young how to seem comfortable in rooms where they don't entirely belong.

you were in the kitchen getting water when she walked in.

you noticed her the way you noticed weather not because you were looking for it but because the pressure in the room changed she was tall and she moved like she had decided exactly how much space she was going to occupy and had made her peace with that amount, which was more than most people and which she wore without apology.

she was with two other players you recognized from the women's basketball roster, and she was laughing at something one of them said, and then she stopped laughing because she looked up and saw you, you looked back this was probably your first mistake.

"excuse me," she said, navigating toward the counter. "sorry — is this—" and then she stopped she was close enough now that you could see her actually look at you, not the cursory social glance but the other kind, the one that takes inventory.

"never mind," she said, and leaned against the counter next to you instead of past you, and reached over your head for a cup you said."that was a committed redirect."

she looked down at you. "it was," she agreed, in a tone that offered no further explanation, and filled her cup, and didn't leave.

you talked for forty minutes in that kitchen you talked about nothing important the season, the campus, the specific social physics of parties where you only know four people and she was funny in a dry way that snuck up on you, and she listened the way very few people listened, like she was actually building a picture of you and not just waiting for her next sentence.

at some point her friends came through and she introduced you without breaking the conversation at some point your drink was empty and she handed you hers without being asked then someone needed her for something and she said hold on, two minutes, and was gone for fifteen, and when she came back you were gone.

you'd found maya and the night had moved and you'd told yourself it was fine, you were being practical, tall basketball players at late-night parties are exactly the kind of thing you don't follow up on if you're being sensible about your life.

three weeks later you were at a film screening for a class you hadn't expected to be in and she was there too, taking the seat next to you before she'd seen your face, and when she turned and realized she said. “you left.”

not an accusation just a fact just her, being precise you said. “you were gone for fifteen minutes.” but she said, “i came back.”

you didn't have an answer for when the lights went down you watched the film next to each other in the dark and afterward she said are you hungry and you said yes and that was the beginning of eight weeks of pretending you weren't both doing what you were clearly doing, which ended in the parking lot outside someone's end-of-semester party at two in the morning when you'd both run out of reasons to be anywhere else.

the parking lot was badly lit and the music from inside was still audible and she was leaning against a car that wasn't hers because the actual car she'd arrived in had left an hour ago with someone else and she'd stayed anyway, which you both understood the significance of and neither of you acknowledged directly.

you were sitting on the curb it was the kind of night that had already been long in the best way, the kind that sits loose and warm, and the conversation had gone somewhere real — families, what-you-want, the specific weight of being expected to already know the shape of your own future — and you were somewhere past the performance of it, both of you, which was new.

she said, at some point in the two-o'clock hour: "i kept looking for you. at things. after that party." you said. "you have my number."

"i know."

"you didn't use it."

"i know." a pause the music shifted inside. "i was being careful." you looked up at her from the curb you thought about the kitchen counter the film screening the fifteen minutes and the coming back.

you thought about eight weeks of careful and how it felt lately like something with too much pressure in it, something that was going to find its own release regardless of how sensible you tried to be. "about what," you said.

she looked at you for a long moment something in her face did the thing that settled, that confirmation of something she'd already worked out and she slid down the car until she was sitting on the curb next to you, shoulders touching, and said. "you."

that was all that was the whole sentence and you sat in it together until the sky started to go pale at the edges and eventually you went home and she texted you at eight a.m. the next morning like she'd been waiting for a reasonable hour, which she probably had, which was so entirely like her that you laughed out loud in your kitchen and maya came in and said what and you said nothing and you were smiling for the rest of the day.

that was three years ago that was before the draft, before dc, before courtside seats and pregame fits and ninety-three notifications and the jacket on the door before tonight

now:

the second half passes the way good games do fast, loud, with the particular momentum that makes the arena feel smaller and hotter, everyone leaning in maya has abandoned her phone this is how you know the game is good; maya has opinions about basketball that she normally drowns in running commentary but when it really gets going she goes quiet and just watches, and she's quiet now, both of you leaning forward in the third quarter when the mystics go on a seven-nothing run and the crowd gets loud enough to feel it in your sternum.

lauren gets six of those seven points when you watch her work and feel the thing you always feel watching her work, which is a kind of specific pride that you don't have a clean word for not possessive, not vicarious, just close like being near something that's operating at its full capacity and knowing you've seen it in every other mode too, have seen it tired and uncertain and funny at two in the morning, and understanding that those things are not separate from what you're watching now, they're part of the same whole.

she drives baseline in the fourth and you're on your feet before you've decided to be, and maya grabs your arm and you grab hers back and the shot goes in and the arena erupts and lauren jogs back up the court and doesn't look at you and you love her for that too, for the discipline of it, for the way she keeps those two things clean while she's working and then she does look, just for half a second, not the eyebrow thing, just a glance, just confirming, and you're already looking back.

maya makes a noise next to you that she would deny if asked.

@halfcourtshots — update: they have been making eye contact at regular intervals for two hours and the girl hasn't looked at her phone once. she is LOCKED IN. she is watching every single possession. i need to know who she is

@dcmysticstan — okay so her friend (brown blazer, has been on her phone all night) just grabbed her arm on that lauren betts baseline drive and she grabbed it back and i think i need to sit down

@bricksbylb — the way lauren betts has not once looked at the courtside girl during actual gameplay but the SECOND it goes dead ball she finds her in under a second. the SECOND.

@w.bballworld — someone in my mentions is trying to tell me the jackets are a coincidence and i just want to say: look at them. look at them and tell me that with your whole chest.

@hoop.diaries — it's the intentionality for me. it's not loud. it's not a show. it's just — they got dressed together and came here together and have been in each other's peripheral all night and none of it is for us. we're just allowed to see it.

lauren pov:

postgame is loud and fast and she moves through it on autopilot press availability, locker room, the particular comedown of a win which is different from a loss in that you have to perform being happy while also wanting very badly to be horizontal and quiet.

she answers three questions and thanks her teammates and changes and is out the door in twenty minutes because she has been doing this efficiently for long enough that it doesn't cost her much anymore.

the corridor outside is the corridor outside, same as every home game fluorescent and concrete and smelling like an arena, which is a smell she has known since she was twelve years old and that still, on good nights, feels like hers.

she sees the jacket before she sees the face of that particular ivory-cream against the gray concrete wall, and next to it maya's blazer, and between them the specific posture of someone who has been composed for several hours and is considering the cost of it.

she knows that posture she also knows has always known, since a parking lot at two in the morning that the composure is not dishonesty it's just the way she carries things she holds them close and steady and private until she decides to put them down, and when she puts them down she means it, and lauren has learned to wait for that because what's on the other side of it is worth whatever patience it takes.

she comes over she looks at her and at the jacket, at her own jacket draped over her bag she says."so."

she says. "so."maya is already looking at the middle distance, which lauren appreciates four seconds five and then something in her expression shifts releases and she says. "i loved it."

lauren waits. "the whole thing. i knew exactly what we were doing and i wanted to do it and i'd do it again."

lauren looks at her, she thinks of the parking lot, 2 a.m., the way the sky went pale she thinks of a film screening, the seat next to her in the dark she thinks eight weeks of being careful and then both of them giving it up at the same time she thinks about last night, standing in the hallway holding two jackets, watching her decide, and the yes that came before she'd even finished the sentence, which told lauren everything she already knew.

she says, soft: "yeah. i know you did."

she reaches over and fixes her collar, doesn't need fixing, she just needs to be touching her for a second, needs to close the distance by exactly that much and lets her fingers stay at the edge of her jaw a beat longer than necessary and watches her let it land.

both pov:

the beat reporter's name is diane chen she covers the mystics for a mid-size outlet, has done it for four seasons, and has seen approximately everything there is to see in a team corridor after a nine-point win.

she is a professional she has a professional relationship with the word no comment and uses it regularly she is standing fifteen feet down the corridor when lauren betts comes out and crosses to the two women waiting by the wall, and she watches the exchange with the practiced peripheral attention of someone who got into this job because she actually loved the sport and has spent several years learning to see the other things too the texture around the game, the things that don't end up in box scores.

she clocks the jackets she clocked them an hour ago, actually, when she was walking to her press seat and saw the third row, and made a small mental note that she filed under not my story, not tonight.

she watches lauren fix the collar she watches the way neither of them looks around to check who's watching.

she watches the friend who has been barely holding it together since at least the second quarter based on the body language finally exhale she makes another mental note and files it in the same place.

she has a player available to file in forty minutes she looks back at her recorder, clicks it on, and writes: betts: 24 pts, 8 reb, 6 ast. team-high in all three. said after: "just doing my job." she does not write anything else, some things are better witnessed than reported.

you walk out of the arena together, all three of you, and the night air hits you after hours inside and it's the good kind of cold, the kind that wakes you back up, and maya is on your left and lauren is on your right and somewhere behind you someone absolutely gets a photo you don't hear the shutter but you feel it, some sixth sense you've developed for being in lauren betts's peripheral, some calibration that comes from years of knowing what it means to be where she is — and you think okay. fine let them.

maya says. "i want it on record that i have been waiting for this specific evening for three years." lauren says."noted."

maya says. "i was there for the parking lot thing. i heard about it the next morning. i have been very patient."

"you have not been patient," you tell her. "you have been relentless."

"relentlessly patient." maya puts her hands in her pockets she is smiling the smile of someone who invested early and is finally watching the return. "i want it acknowledged."

"acknowledged," lauren says, and she sounds amused, genuinely, the low version of it that she saves for things she actually finds funny, and you feel it in the same place you felt the game, somewhere in the sternum, somewhere central.

you walk to the car the city is doing its late-night thing around you, traffic thinning, restaurants still lit, the specific urban quiet that isn't actually quiet, just a lower register of everything.

lauren's hand finds yours somewhere between the arena doors and the parking structure, easy, unhurried, not making a thing of it you don't make a thing of it either.

you just let your fingers close around hers and walk maya sees it she doesn't say anything she looks straight ahead and her jaw does a very small thing that means she is choosing silence as an act of tremendous willpower and you love her for it.

tomorrow it will be everywhere — the jacket photo, the corridor photo, probably the walking-out photo, all of it assembled into the narrative that people have been building in pieces for three years, finally given enough material to finish the picture.

there will be posts and reposts and the comments will be unwell and you'll probably read some of them in bed and feel the warmth of it, the particular warmth of something private going just barely public in exactly the amount you chose.

tonight, though tonight you're walking to a car in the cold and maya is on your left being very dignified about everything and lauren's hand is in yours and you're wearing the jacket, the one she held up in her hallway and said what do you think, and you said yes before she finished, and you meant it, and she knew you meant it, and you both knew exactly what you were doing and did it anyway.

she does it in the morning when she rolls over and reaches for someone who isn't there, her arm moving across the cool left side of the bed with the particular stupidity of a body that keeps expecting something that isn't coming.

she does it in the locker room when her phone buzzes and her heart does the small embarrassing jump it does every time now, and then it's her mom or it's her trainer or it's a brand email and her heart has to climb back down from wherever it went.

she does it during film sessions when the footage shows her making the right read, the smart play, the clean assist, and all she can think is seventeen more.

seventeen more days and veronica will be here seventeen more days and this city will feel like it belongs to her again instead of just being a place she happens to sleep in.

the sparks are playing the valkyries in los angeles. she has had this date circled in something that isn't quite a calendar more like the inside of her chest, a bruise that keeps finding its own edges in the dark when everything else goes quiet.

the schedule came out in february and she had looked at it the way she looks at everything involving veronica now, which is carefully and with her whole chest, and she had found the date and sat with it for a long moment before she let herself believe it was real.

home game los angeles veronica on the floor in front of her veronica doesn't know she's been counting or maybe she does.

veronica has always known things about kate that kate hadn't said out loud yet, which is either the best thing about her or the most terrifying, depending on the day and how much sleep kate has gotten.

in their two years of whatever this is which has been called everything from complicated to long distance to, once, by veronica's teammate on a drunk facetime kate was not supposed to be part of, the situation veronica has demonstrated a consistent and slightly unnerving ability to know when kate is struggling before kate has admitted it to herself.

it's not magic kate has figured out, it’s just that veronica pays attention in a way most people don't she listens to the pauses, she clocks the things kate says around what she actually means.

kate has found this both the most comforting and the most exposing thing about being loved by her, this sense of being known so completely that there is nowhere to put a lie even if you wanted to tell one.

kate texts her after practice “staples is going to be loud.” she sends it without thinking about it too much, standing in the parking lot with her bag over one shoulder and the los angeles evening warm and pink around her she means i've been thinking about this game for three months she means i'm already thinking about after she means a lot of things she doesn't know how to put in a text message and probably wouldn't even if she did.

veronica texts back three minutes later good and then, after a beat i like it loud. kate puts her phone in her bag and stands in the parking lot for another thirty seconds doing absolutely nothing then she gets in her car and drives home and does not think about the fact that she's already at sixteen.

here is what nobody prepares you for the way distance gets physical kate had expected the missing, the ache of absence, the particular loneliness of a city that is beautiful and full of people and somehow still manages to feel like a waiting room.

what she hadn't expected was the way it settles in the body. the way she reaches for her phone in the middle of the night not because she needs to call anyone but because the weight of it in her hand feels like something.

the way she keeps her apartment colder than she needs to because veronica runs warm and kate has spent enough nights pressed against her to have calibrated her sleeping temperature around someone else's body heat.

she doesn't tell her teammates that she doesn't tell anyone this, actually, because she doesn't fully have words for it yet and the words she does have feel too large for a locker room conversation.

her teammates know about veronica the way you know about a weather system in another part of the country they're aware it exists and they know kate checks her phone too often and they have the decency not to make it weird.

dearica has said, once, gently she's gonna come for your neck on the floor, you know that right. kate had said that she knew but she had not said i'm counting down the days.

the facetimes help and don't help they help because veronica's face on a screen is still veronica's face, still the particular stillness of it, the way she listens with her whole body even through a camera, the way she laughs at kate's bad jokes with this small reluctant brightness that kate has spent considerable energy trying to provoke on purpose.

they don't help because kate can see her and can't touch her, which is its own specific cruelty, and because sometimes the connection goes bad at exactly the wrong moment — mid-sentence, mid-laugh — and kate is left sitting in her kitchen holding a frozen image of veronica's face and feeling something she doesn't have language for yet.

she learns veronica's schedule the way she learns opposing defenses; she knows when veronica has morning shootaround and when she has film and when she has the two-hour recovery window in the afternoon where she will actually answer texts instead of leaving kate on read for six hours.

she knows veronica prefers to call late, after ten, when the day has settled into something quieter she knows that when veronica is tired her voice gets lower and slower and more honest, like fatigue strips away the last of whatever professional distance she keeps around herself during daylight hours.

kate is very much looking forward to being in the same room as that voice again.

she doesn't sleep well this is not new kate has never been a good sleeper before big games, her body treating stillness like a problem to be solved, her brain cycling through possessions and rotations and the film she watched three times that afternoon — but tonight is different, tonight the insomnia has a specific shape and it is not shaped like basketball.

she lies in the dark of her culver city apartment and thinks about the last time she saw veronica, which was four months and three weeks ago, which was after a preseason game in phoenix that neither of them should have been playing in — both teams were running their second units, going through motions in october heat, and it had felt vaguely unreal the whole time, like a rehearsal for a play nobody had finished writing.

afterwards they had found each other in the corridor outside the visiting locker room, no plan no plan

arrangement just the particular gravity that operates between them, the one that has been operating since northwestern, since the first time they guarded each other and kate had thought oh, this is going to be a problem.

veronica had pressed her hand flat against kate's sternum, right over her heart, and held it there not a hug not a kiss, just the weight of her palm against kate's chest like she was checking something, like she needed to confirm for herself that the heart was still going kate had stood very still and let her the corridor had emptied around them and veronica had not moved her hand for a long time.

kate had said i'm okay veronica had said i know. i just wanted to feel it. kate turns onto her back now and stares at the ceiling, which is the color of nothing as she thinks tomorrow she also thinks one more sleep, which is something you say to children about christmas morning but apparently also something you say to yourself when you are twenty-three years old and a professional basketball player and in love with a woman who lives eight hundred miles away and is going to beat you tomorrow in front of your own crowd and has been pressing her hand against your heart for two years in one form or another.

she thinks about the game she thinks about the matchup, about what the valkyries will run against her, about the way veronica sees the floor which is unlike the way anyone else sees it, unhurried and total, like she has access to a version of the game that plays slightly slower than the one everyone else is in.

kate has guarded veronica enough times to know that the only way to do it is to stay with her for the whole possession, not to guess, not to anticipate, just to stay, because the moment you commit to a read is the moment veronica has already moved somewhere else.

she wonders if veronica is lying awake right now in whatever hotel room the valkyries have her in she thinks probably not veronica sleeps with the specific discipline of someone who has decided that rest is a form of preparation, who has organized her entire relationship to her own body around what it needs to perform.

kate has always admired this about her and also found it slightly irritating, in the way you find irritating the things about someone that expose your own failures by contrast.

she picks up her phone it's 1:17 a.m veronica's last message is still there from three hours ago which was her saying get some rest. i mean it. kate types and deletes can't sleep types and deleted it thinking about you. types and deletes then finally texts her what hotel you are in she puts the phone back down she stares at the ceiling.

she thinks one more sleep and she falls asleep sometime after two with her phone on the pillow beside her she dreams about iowa she dreams about a gym she doesn't recognize, wooden bleachers, the particular smell of a practice facility before anyone else has arrived.

she dreams about veronica at half-court, alone, putting up shots in the dark, and every one goes in, and kate stands at the baseline and watches and does not interrupt, and in the dream this feels like the most important thing she has ever done.

she wakes up at five forty-seven as the city outside the window is the gray-blue of a very early morning and the wanting is already there, already sitting on her chest, patient and absolute she lies still and lets it. she has gotten better at this at not fighting it, at letting the feeling do what it needs to do and then setting it aside so she can be a basketball player today, which is what today requires.

tomorrow she can be everything else but today she gets up, makes coffee, and starts thinking about the game.

she sees her during warmups this is the part kate has been both dreading and constructing elaborate mental scenarios around for three weeks — the first sighting, the moment when all the counting and the waiting and the 1 a.m. insomnia resolves into an actual person standing on an actual floor.

she has been trying to prepare herself for it the way you prepare for a hard defensive assignment which was by studying the film, by anticipating the reads, by deciding in advance what she will do and how she will feel.

all of that work is immediately useless veronica comes out of the tunnel in golden state purple, which is a color kate now has complicated feelings about, and she is laughing at something one of her teammates has said, her head tipped back slightly, and kate is standing at half-court and she forgets for a moment that she is at work.

she forgets the game plan and the matchup and the four months and three weeks and the eight hundred miles and she just looks the way you look at something that belongs to you even from a distance the way you look at a city from an airplane window when you're finally coming home.

veronica doesn't look at her not yet as she goes through her warmup with the same focused efficiency she does everything with, moving through her layup lines and her stretches and her shooting series with the unhurried precision of someone who has done this ten thousand times and is doing it exactly right.

kate watches in her peripheral vision, pretending to focus on her own shot preparation, hitting mid-range jumpers with the automatic quality of muscle memory while her brain is somewhere else entirely, then veronica straightens up from a stretch and looks directly at her.

it is not a long look it is not dramatic it is maybe three seconds of direct eye contact across the width of the court, and in those three seconds kate's body does about fifteen different things at once.

veronica's expression doesn't change much — it never does, in public, she maintains this quality of composure that kate has spent two years learning to read past — but there is something in the set of her eyes that says i see you. i know you're there. i've been counting too but then her teammate calls her name and she turns away and kate goes back to her warmup and the arena starts filling around them and kate hits seven shots in a row without thinking about any of them.

the thing nobody tells you about playing against someone you love is that you can feel where they are at all times. not in a mystical way — in a basketball way, the game sense that has been calibrated by years of study and repetition, that tells you where the pressure is coming from and where the help is late and where the gap is opening in the defense.

that sense has always been reliable it has helped kate in every gym she has ever played in it goes wrong when it's her it goes sideways in a way kate can't fully explain and would be embarrassed to try.

she knows where veronica is on the floor without looking. she knows when veronica is bringing the ball up before she hears the PA, before the commentators say anything, before the defense has even set it's not supernatural it's just that kate's body has been paying attention to veronica for two years and apparently that kind of attention leaves a mark.

the first quarter is professional kate is proud of herself for the first quarter she does her job, she runs her actions, she makes the right decisions, she does not do anything embarrassing like watch veronica run a pick-and-roll with her mouth slightly open she plays basketball which is fine.

veronica plays basketball too drops eight in the first quarter, which is a problem for kate's teammates but kate is having trouble generating the appropriate level of distress about it because eight points means veronica is in rhythm and veronica in rhythm is one of the better things in the world to watch even when you are supposed to be stopping her.

they don't make eye contact until the second quarter kate is coming off a curl, using a screen on the elbow, and she turns the corner and veronica is right there, two feet of air between them, and for a half-second the game falls entirely out of both of them.

it is so brief that kate isn't sure anyone else would have clocked it half a second where they are not basketball players but just two people who have spent four months apart standing close enough to touch and not touching, and kate can see the small thing that moves across veronica's face not quite a smile, not quite relief, something that lives in the space between those two things and then the ball swings wide and kate cuts hard and the moment closes like water over a stone and they are back in the game.

the second quarter is harder kate's focus keeps doing the thing she told it not to do, which is locate veronica on the floor and then stay there she catches herself twice watching a veronica possession when she should be transitioning, standing at half-court for half a beat too long, the part of her brain that is supposed to be running offense temporarily hijacked by the part of her brain that has been thinking about nothing but this for seventeen days.

halftime the locker room her coach says things kate processes with the surface of her attention she drinks water she thinks about adjustments she thinks, briefly, about the fact that veronica is forty feet away in another locker room right now, and she buries that thought under the professional layer of herself that is going to go back out there and compete.

the third quarter is the best kate has played all season she doesn't fully understand why until it's over something about the halftime reset, or the adrenaline climbing now that the game is real and close, or maybe just the simple fact that veronica is on the court and kate has always, even when it was inconvenient, raised her game in her presence.

she drops twelve in the third and the crowd gets loud for long stretches she is just a basketball player, just in the game, just doing what she's spent her whole life learning to do, and it feels clean and good and right.

veronica drops seventeen in the second half kate watches two of them go in once on a pull-up mid-range that is so unreasonably pretty it makes kate briefly furious, and once on a drive where veronica simply decides she is getting to the rim and does, with three defenders in her way, with a calm that looks less like confidence and more like inevitability — and feels something she can't name cleanly proud, probably sick with pride, a little.

the specific disorienting feeling of wanting your team to win and wanting the person you love to be unstoppable and finding that these two things are fundamentally at odds with each other.

the valkyries pull ahead with four minutes left kate is running back on defense and she hears veronica's voice calling out a coverage adjustment to her teammates m not loud, not commanding, just precise, just the exact right information delivered to the exact right people and kate has to look at the scoreboard to remind herself which team she's on.

golden state wins by six kate finds out the final from the jumbotron before the horn even finishes echoing through the arena; she is not surprised she had known somewhere in her body since the third quarter that this was where the game was going.

she had played well really well, actually, the kind of game that will show up in the box score in a flattering way and they had still lost, because veronica had been better, which is a thing kate has made a complicated peace with over the course of two years.

veronica is often better kate is the only person in veronica's life who finds this genuinely beautiful instead of threatening she shakes hands down the line. she says the right things.

she is professional and composed and gracious, and the whole time she is doing all of this correctly she is counting the minutes until she can find the tunnel.

the tunnel smells like concrete and sweat and the industrial cleaner they use on the floors after games and kate is standing in it in her warmup jacket with her hair still damp from the shower and her heart doing something complicated in her chest when the visiting-team door opens and veronica comes through it.

she stops they are maybe ten feet apart in the narrow corridor and the tunnel is moving around them staff with equipment carts, a beat reporter kate recognizes talking into a phone, two valkyries assistants laughing about something all of it flowing past like they are two fixed points in a current.

veronica is in her travel clothes now, golden state blue on the bag over her shoulder, her hair pulled back, and she looks she looks like herself, which sounds like a useless thing to say but isn't, because kate has been looking at her through a screen for four months and the specific thing about veronica in person is that screens don't get all of her.

they don't get the way she takes up space, the stillness at the center of her that you can feel when you're close enough, the way she looks at you like you are the most solved problem in the room she is looking at kate like that now.

kate crosses the distance first, because kate always crosses the distance first, and she has been thinking about this moment for seventeen days and in none of the versions she imagined did she say anything, and this one is no different.

she just closes the ten feet between them and veronica's arms come up and around her and kate exhales something she has been holding since phoenix, since the last time veronica's hand was on her chest, something that has been accumulating in her sternum for four months and three weeks and releases now all at once like a pressure valve finally given permission.

veronica is warm she is always warm, always running a few degrees hotter than the people around her, and kate presses into that warmth with the unselfconsciousness of someone who has stopped pretending she doesn't need it.

veronica's hand goes to the back of her neck, fingers spreading against her hairline, holding kate's face goes into veronica's shoulder veronica smells like the same shampoo she has been using since iowa, since the first year, and kate's entire nervous system does something involuntary and enormous in response to this fact, something that says home this is home you found it again.

the tunnel keeps moving around them; nobody says anything to them this is professional sports and everyone has seen everything and a long hug in a tunnel after a game is not remarkable kate is grateful that she is not ready to move yet.

"you counted," veronica says into her hair it is not a question, it has the quality of something she already knew and is only saying out loud now that they are close enough for it to land correctly kate pulls back enough to see her face and does not release her grip on the back of veronica's jacket.

"i didn't," she says and then, because she has never successfully lied to veronica about anything that mattered "seventeen i was at seventeen when the schedule came out and then i stopped at —" she does the math, which she has already done — "i stopped keeping track around day nine."

"you didn't stop," veronica says. "no," kate agrees. "i didn't stop." veronica exhales, slow and a little uneven, the specific exhale of someone releasing a breath they have been holding for longer than they admitted.

she reaches up and pushes a piece of kate's hair back from her forehead, a gesture so quiet and familiar it makes kate's chest do something it does not have a name for. "i was at twelve when i booked the travel," veronica says. "then i made myself stop. then i started again at twenty-two." a pause. "then nine."

"nine," kate repeats. "nine days out i just — couldn't stop anymore. it would've taken more energy than i had." veronica looks at her with the expression that kate has been trying to describe to herself for two years and still hasn't found the right word for, the one that is not soft and not fierce but occupies some specific territory between the two. "you played well tonight."

"you played better."

"yes." not a brag just a fact veronica has always been comfortable with her own excellence in a way kate finds quietly extraordinary not arrogant, just accurate. "i always play better when you're watching." kate stares at her. "you can't say things like that."

"i just did."

"in a tunnel. you can't say things like that in a tunnel where people can see me react to them."

the corner of veronica's mouth moves not quite a smile the particular arrangement of her face that is what veronica looks like when she is happy but is not going to perform it for the room.

kate has been cataloguing this expression for two years and it still does things to her. "come back to the hotel with me," veronica says kate doesn't answer she takes veronica's hand her fingers fitting into the spaces between veronica's with the ease of something practiced, something that has always known where it belongs and they walk out of the tunnel and into the los angeles night, which receives them without ceremony, which is exactly what kate needs it to do.

the city is warm in the way los angeles is warm at night in june, which is not the warm of summer elsewhere but something thicker and more specific, threaded through with jasmine from somebody's yard and the lingering heat of pavement that has been absorbing sun all day.

kate has been living here for a year and she still finds it slightly unreal sometimes, the way the city refuses to cool down, the way the nights feel like a continuation of the day rather than a break from it.

they walk three blocks without saying much this is comfortable one of the things kate has learned about veronica, one of the things she has come to love, is that she does not fill silence for the sake of filling it.

she is content to just exist next to you and let the silence have its own texture kate used to be a talker, used to feel silence as a problem to be solved, and two years of veronica have slowly taught her that sometimes the quiet is the conversation.

veronica swings their joined hands once, lightly. "your third quarter was something," she says. "you were watching."

"i'm always watching." kate processes this for a moment. "even when you're running your own offense."

"especially then. peripheral vision." veronica says it with the flat matter-of-factness that kate has learned means she's being completely serious. "you came off that drag screen in the third and i almost called timeout just to watch you shoot it."

"you almost called a timeout," kate says, "to watch me shoot a jumper."

"i didn't. i exercised restraint." a pause. "it was a very good jumper." kate laughs it comes out bigger than she means it to, spilling out of her in the warm night air, and she feels veronica's grip tighten slightly on her hand in response, and she thinks this. this is what i've been counting down to. not just the physical fact of her but this, exactly this the specific ease of it, the way laughter sounds different when she's the one who caused it.

they walk another half-block in the good silence.

"i missed you," kate says she has been saying this to herself for four months in various forms and none of them have been adequate and this one isn't either but it's what she has.

veronica is quiet for a moment. "i know," she says. and then, softer "me too." she does not elaborate kate has learned to receive this at full weight rather than waiting for more.

veronica means what she says and says only what she means, and me too from veronica contains multitudes, contains four months of facetimes that weren't enough, contains a lamp still burning in a golden state apartment, contains all the counting.

the hotel comes into view half a block ahead.

kate does not walk faster she has been waiting seventeen days and she can wait another thirty seconds.

there is a specific silence that belongs to veronica, different from the silence of an empty room or the silence after a hard loss or the silence of the tunnel with the game still on everyone's skin.

kate knows it the way she knows veronica's game from the inside, from having spent enough time inside it that she has learned its particular texture veronica goes silent when she wants to pay attention it is a focused silence, a receiving silence, the silence of someone who has decided you are the most important thing currently happening and is giving you all of themselves in response.

she is very silent now at the hotel three blocks from the arena kate doesn't remember the walk in any detail she can reconstruct she remembers warmth, and veronica's hand, and the smell of the city and the way the streetlights made everything amber-colored and slightly unreal.

she remembers the lobby, cool and quiet after the street, and the elevator, and the door of the elevator closing behind them, and then veronica's hands on her face and veronica's mouth on hers and the specific quality of that kiss, which was not a first-kiss kiss and not a hello kiss but something that had been building for four months and had therefore accumulated significant pressure.

kate pressed back into the elevator wall and let it land. she thought, from some distance right. this. i had forgotten the specific geometry of this and i should not be allowed to forget it again.

she had not forgotten that it was the thing she had been carrying the memory of this in her body the entire time, but memory and the thing itself are not the same, and the gap between them is exactly the size of four months and three weeks.

the room is dark except for the city light coming through the curtains in long amber rectangles across the floor the city outside is doing what cities do indifferent and gorgeous and completely unaware of them and kate is not thinking about it at all.

she is thinking about veronica's hands, which know her the way her own hands know a basketball with the confidence of long practice, with the particular certainty of something that has been done enough times to become fluent.

she is thinking about the sound of veronica saying her name, which is different from how anyone else says it, which has always had a different weight in veronica's mouth, more considered, like she means it specifically every time.

kate has wanted this so specifically and for so long that when it finally happens it feels almost too much to stay inside of the wanting has been living in her like a weather system for months, low pressure building and building, and now it breaks and she is in the middle of it and it is enormous and good and she says veronica's name once into the dark, not as a question, just as a fact, just as a form of saying i know where i am. i know who i'm with. this is real.

veronica answers it with her hands with her mouth. with the specific patience and intention of someone who has also been counting down, who has also been carrying the weight of the waiting and is now finally, finally allowed to set it down.

later when the city went purple outside the curtains, that particular transition between deep night and the first gray idea of morning.

kate is on her back and veronica is beside her, tracing something on her shoulder with one fingertip a shape that might be letters, might be nothing, might be a word veronica is writing against kate's skin because she doesn't feel like saying it out loud yet.

kate lies very still so she doesn't disturb it she breathes she looks at the ceiling, which is the color of right now, the color of this specific moment she has been trying to get back to since phoenix.

she catalogs veronica the weight of her warmth, still, even now the specific temperature of her that kate has been cold without for four months.

the sound of her breathing, which kate has memorized and which is different in person than through a phone speaker, fuller, realer, the kind of sound that can only exist when someone is actually next to you in the dark.

the way she traces the shape on kate's shoulder with the deliberateness of someone who is not ready to stop touching her yet and is not going to pretend otherwise.

kate turns her head veronica is looking at the ceiling, or at the window, or at something kate can't see. the city light catches the clean line of her profile the quality of attention she carries even in stillness, the particular expression of her face when she is somewhere that feels safe enough to let everything down.

kate has seen this face in early mornings and late nights and the aftermath of hard games and the private spaces between all the public ones, and it is still the thing that undoes her the most, every time, without exception. "how many days until the next game?" veronica asks her voice is low, slower than usual, worn down to its most honest register, meaning how long do we have right now. and she also means i'm already calculating. she means tell me so i can start.

kate has already done the math she did it on her phone two nights ago at midnight and now she carries the number in the same place she carries all the other numbers. "forty-one," she says.

veronica is quiet for a moment. the city breathes outside the window. somewhere below them a car passes, music briefly audible through the glass, and then gone. "forty-one," veronica says, like she is placing the number somewhere inside herself, making room for it, rearranging things to accommodate the weight of another wait. "okay." kate watches her.

"okay," veronica says again softer as she resumes the tracing on kate's shoulder the maybe-word kate watches veronica's profile and feels the tenderness of it settle over her like something physical the specific particular tenderness of loving someone across distance, of knowing that in a few hours they will be back to counting, back to phone calls and texts and the insufficient medium of screens, and choosing to love them anyway, completely, without holding anything back against the leaving.

she doesn't say i'll count with you but she doesn't say forty-one is survivable. we've done worse.

she doesn't say i love you in a way that has made every city i've lived in feel temporary except the ones where you are and all of it is true and none of it needs to be said right now, in this room, with the city going purple outside and veronica's fingertip still moving against her shoulder.

she came off a ball screen in the second quarter and you picked her up at half-court, dropping into your stance, and she looked at you and really looked at you and smiled. 

not a trash-talk smile, not cocky just like she'd finally found something worth her attention your chest did something you didn't have language for. 

you told yourself it was adrenaline you stayed disciplined you stayed in your stance she scored anyway it didn't feel like it was about the points.

by the fourth quarter the galen center was loud in the way that only hostile venues get loud — not the organized cheering of your home crowd but something rawer, a sound that wanted something from you. 

usc was up six you had the ball at the top of the key and juju was on you, close enough that you could hear her breathing, and she said  quiet, not for anyone else you keep going left.

you went left she was there you threw it out before she could strip it and you heard her exhale, something almost like a laugh, and you set your jaw and ran back on defense because that was all you could do.

stanford lost by four you'd cut it to two with forty seconds left and then a turnover happened that wasn't your fault but lived in your body like it was. 

you were still in the tunnel, the locker room not yet reached, when you heard footsteps behind you and turned and juju was there, still in her warmups, her team thirty feet back at the court entrance as she looked at you for a second then she said “good game.”

not patronizing, not smug and you knew she meant it the way you only mean something when you've earned the right to say it.

you said “yeah” and walked away and spent forty-five minutes in the shower that night trying to figure out why it felt like losing even when you'd been the one she'd said it to.

she got your number from maya, who you would be having a very serious conversation with as soon as you figured out what to say the text came three days after the game you were in the stanford film room, watching your own footage with the lights off, and your phone lit up with a number you didn't have saved and a message that said

UNKNOWN: you had 22 and 7 assists. that turnover wasn't on you

UNKNOWN:  this is juju by the way

you stared at your phone for an embarrassingly long time. the film paused on your own face, mid-possession, eyes reading the defense. 

you looked tired in the freeze frame, you looked like someone who had not stopped thinking about the game even once in three days. you typed and deleted four things but you settled on. 

YOU: how did you get this number

JUJU: i have my ways

JUJU: also you're not going to say thank you?

YOU: thank you

YOU: why are you texting me?

JUJU: because i wanted to

JUJU: you play like you have something to prove. i like that

you saved her contact whereas you told yourself it was so you'd know not to block her you texted back at eleven-thirty that night and neither of you mentioned what team you played for.

it became a thing without either of you deciding it would be late nights mostly after practice, after film, after the particular exhaustion of being a division one athlete whose body was always slightly more depleted than she was willing to admit. 

she'd text something a clip she was studying, a question about read-and-react sets, something funny that happened at practice and you'd text back, and then somehow two hours had passed and you were lying in the dark in your stanford dorm room talking to juju watkins about whether zone defense was intellectually cowardly and you were laughing, actually laughing, at something she said.

you didn't talk about this to anyone not even maya, who had started giving you a very specific look whenever your phone went off after ten pm you ran into her at a tournament in february neutral site, a showcase event, and your teams weren't matched up but you were warming up on adjacent courts and you looked over and there she was, three lanes down, and she saw you at the same moment. 

she grinned when you looked away but first you made six three-pointers in warmups, which was two more than usual, and tried very hard to feel normal about that.

she texted you that night: six threes in warmups show-off.

you wrote back: you were watching.

she took four minutes to respond: obviously.

the thing you were refusing to name got louder after that the transfer decision had been building for a while you'd been honest with yourself about it before you were honest with anyone else stanford was extraordinary and you were grateful and it also wasn't quite right, the system, the fit, something you couldn't articulate clearly but felt every day in practice. 

you started making calls in march you told your parents first you told your coach with the kind of conversation that was professional and respectful and hurt anyway you told juju before you told most of your teammates. 

you didn't plan to, she'd texted you something about your upcoming schedule and you'd typed i'm transferring and then stared at it and then sent it before you could make a better decision.

YOU: i'm transferring

JUJU: what

JUJU: where

YOU: ucla

JUJU: ...

JUJU: you're going to be in my conference

YOU: yeah

JUJU: okay

JUJU: i mean you're still going to lose

YOU: keep telling yourself that

JUJU: ...i'm glad you're staying in la

you read that last message six times you put your phone face down you picked it up and read it 

again you didn't respond for twenty minutes and then you said; me too and that was the closest either of you came to saying it for a very long time.

ucla was good, it was the right call you knew it the first week of practice, the system clicking into something that felt like it was built around the way you saw the game, and your teammates were sharp and funny and welcoming in the way only a team that already knows what it wants can be los angeles was also the same city as usc, which you had known intellectually and which now lived in your body as a constant low-frequency awareness you couldn't fully explain to yourself.

you saw juju at a preseason event in october — a women's basketball media day at the staples center that both programs attended, separate tables, separate interview schedules, the whole thing very officially organized and entirely insufficient at keeping you on opposite sides of the room. 

she found you by the water station during a break between sessions she was in usc gear, hair back, exactly as composed as she always was, and she said you cut your hair and you said i did and she said it looks good and you said thank you and neither of you said anything for just a half-second too long.

she said: “how's the system?”

you said: “really good actually.”

she said: “good and she looked like she meant it and that was somehow worse than anything she could have said to be difficult.”

you texted each other after you kept texting each other after every time you were in the same room, like proximity recharged something that distance had been slowly depleting you had a conversation at two in the morning in late october about zone rotations that somehow became a conversation about what you wanted after college, what the league looked like from where you were standing, what you were afraid of, what you wouldn't say to anyone on your own team because it would cost something to say it. 

she told you things you got the sense she didn't tell many people. you told her things you'd barely told yourself you stopped pretending you didn't know what it was you just didn't do anything about it, because she was juju watkins and she was usc and you were ucla and the season was starting and the thing you had whatever it was felt too careful to risk on the wrong moment.

the film room incident happened on a tuesday it was a shared facility, one of the auxiliary buildings used by multiple programs, small, always slightly cold, the kind of room that felt designed to disappear you from the world for a few hours. you had a key card. you'd been using it late at night since october, after the main film sessions, just to sit alone with footage and think without anyone watching you think.

you came in at ten-thirty on a tuesday in november and juju was already there she was sitting in the second row, laptop open, headphones around her neck, footage paused on a half-court possession she looked up when the door opened and her expression did something complicated  surprise, and then something else that settled into careful neutrality before you could read it fully.

you said: “i didn't know you used this room.”

she said: “i didn't know you did either.”

you stood in the doorway for a second and she didn't tell you to leave and you didn't leave. you walked to the third row and sat down and pulled up your own footage and you sat in the dark together for a while in a silence that wasn't uncomfortable, which maybe should have told you something after a while she said, not looking away from her screen: your pull-up has gotten cleaner.

you looked at her as she was watching your footage she'd pulled it up on her own laptop sometime in the last hour without saying anything, and she was watching you play with her chin in her hand and her expression was the same one she got when she was genuinely studying something.

you said: “you're watching my tape.”

she said: “i watch everyone's tape.”

you said: “juju.”

she finally looked at you in the dark of the film room, with the blue light of the screen catching the side of her face, she looked — not careful, for once she looked like something she'd been holding was getting heavy.

she said: “yeah i'm watching your tape.”

neither of you said anything else. you turned back to your screen you stayed until almost midnight and when you left you both walked out at the same time and stood in the parking lot in the november air and she said same time thursday? like it was the most natural thing in the world.

you said yeah.

you came back thursday and the thursday after that. and the one after that.

the game was in december and usc won by three and you had a good game twenty-four points, six assists, played forty minutes and felt every one of them and it didn't matter because you lost and losing to juju's team was its own particular category of awful.

you were in the tunnel when she found you, you'd seen her scanning the court after the final whistle and you'd left before she could cross it because you did not have the capacity right now for whatever carefully composed thing she would say to you.

you needed to be somewhere without her face in it for approximately forty-five minutes and then you would be fine but she was fast and you'd stopped moving and now she was in the tunnel with you and she said your name and you turned around.

she looked like she'd been trying to get to you for several minutes and the relief of having done it was doing something to her composure whereas she was still in her uniform there was a fold of court chalk on her knee.

she said hey. you okay? and something about the gentleness of it cracked something open that you'd been managing very carefully and 

you said: “don't do that.”

she said: “do what?”

you said: “be nice to me right now i just lost to you i don't need you to be.”  and you stopped because you didn't know how to finish the sentence without it becoming something else, something shifted in juju's expression. 

not frustration — something rawer than that, something that had been living under the composure for a long time and was done being contained she said: “i'm not being nice to you because i feel sorry for you.”

you said: “then why—”

“because i like you,” she said, and her voice came out louder than she intended, sharp in the empty tunnel, and she looked almost startled by herself for a half second before her jaw set and she kept going. 

“because i have liked you since that first game and you know that, you have to know that, and you just — you keep acting like you don't feel it too and i don't understand it. i don't understand how you can be in that film room with me every week and text me at two in the morning and look at me the way you look at me and not”— she stopped.

her hands came up and she pressed her knuckles to her mouth for a moment like she was physically holding the rest of it in the tunnel was completely silent then she said, quieter “i'm not doing the nice thing because i beat you. i'm doing it because i care about you and i'm tired of pretending i don't and i just need to know if you”— she exhaled, sharp, and looked at the ceiling for one second “just tell me you don't feel the same and i'll leave you alone i mean it. i'll walk away and it'll be fine i just—”

“juju.”

she looked at you.

“i've been making you crazy on purpose,” you said a beat something moved through her face — confusion, then understanding, then something that wasn't quite fury but was adjacent to it you said “the going-left thing. first game i knew you were going to be there i wanted to see what you'd do. and the film room, and the texts — i know exactly what it is and yet i’ve known for a long time.”

she stared at you the sharpness in her face was still there but it was changing shape, becoming something else. so you do feel it.

you said “yeah” and she said “i cannot believe you,” and then she crossed the two feet between you and kissed you.

it wasn't soft it was the kiss of someone who had been holding something a long time and had finally decided the holding was no longer worth it her hand coming up to your jaw, her mouth certain, and you made a small helpless sound and kissed her back and the forty-five minutes you'd needed dissolved into nothing.

she pulled back just far enough to breathe her forehead dropped against yours. her hand was still on your face and her thumb traced the line of your cheekbone and you felt the careful thing you'd been protecting come loose entirely.

she said, very quietly “you are so annoying.” but you said “you like it.” she kissed you again instead of answering, which was an answer when she pulled away she looked at you for a moment and then said “come on.” but you said “where.” she said "film room” and when you raised an eyebrow she said “obviously not to watch film,” like you were being incredibly slow, and took your hand and you laughed and let her pull you forward into the rest of the night.

the film room was cold and dark and she sat down in the wide chair at the back row and pulled you into her lap before you'd finished closing the door behind you you settled against her and she looked up at you for a moment with her hands resting on your hips, like she was letting herself actually see you now that there was nothing in the way then she reached up and tucked a piece of hair behind your ear and said “hi.” and you said “hi.”

she kissed you soft the first time — nothing like the tunnel, which had been all release and urgency. this was slower. intentional her hands moved to your face and she kissed your mouth and then the corner of it, the line of your jaw, the curve just below your ear, and you felt something loosen in your chest that you hadn't known was still held tight.

she said, against your cheek “i've been thinking about this since october.” and you said “just october?”

she said “okay fine, february,” and you laughed and she kissed the laugh off of you then she shifted and drew back and looked at you with something settled and certain in her expression, and she said “can i—” and you said yes before she'd finished asking, because you already knew and the answer had been yes for a long time.

she was methodical about it in the way she was methodical about everything that mattered she found the hem of your warmup jacket and pulled it off your shoulders and set it aside and then she pressed her lips to your collarbone, the base of your throat, the soft skin just below your shoulder — unhurried, like she had a plan and intended to execute every part of it. 

you had your hands in her hair and your head tipped back and she kissed every inch of you she could reach with the patience of someone who had been waiting and was no longer in any rush now that the waiting was over your shoulder the inside of your wrist when she lifted your arm the space behind your ear that made your breath catch she catalogued your reactions the way she catalogued everything, filed them away, came back to them.

she said, low, against your skin “you okay?” you said “yeah yes don't stop” she didn't stop later you were tangled together in the dark, her chin resting on your head, her fingers tracing absent patterns on your shoulder, and she said “you're still going to lose in february.” and you said “i'm already prepared.” she lifted her head to look at you “that's my line.” you said “i know. i've been studying you for a year.”

she looked at you for a moment and then she smiled the real one, the one she didn't deploy on the court, the one that made her look entirely like herself you thought about the first time you'd seen it, in that tunnel after the galen center game, and how far you'd traveled to arrive at this version of it: her arms around you in the dark, los angeles cold outside, nowhere else either of you needed to be.

she kissed your temple. you settled back against her “i like you,” she said simply like it was easy now that she'd said it once you said “i know i like you too.”

she finds parking two blocks down from veronica's building and sits in the car for thirty seconds longer than necessary this is the building she used to come to after home games after wins, after losses, after the nights when chase center was so loud it rang in her ears all the way down the 101 she'd end up here, on veronica’s couch, shedding the game the way you shed a coat it was easy then. everything was easier when she belonged to the city the same way the city seemed to belong to her.

that was three weeks ago, technically three weeks since nakase called her into the office and said the words that kate has been refusing to fully feel since because there will be time to feel them later, after she's proved something, after she's made the sparks' standard 12-game activation look like an obvious decision rather than a consolation prize it was brutal, she told the reporters, because it was, and then she breathed through it in front of cameras and went to los angeles and started over.

now she's back in san francisco on a tuesday night, going to dinner, just dinner, and veronica opens the door before kate can knock of course she does veronica leans in the doorway in sweats and a northwestern t-shirt, no socks, and looks at kate the way she always looks at kate like she's reading something, like kate is a text that interests her her hair is down she looks like herself in the specific way that means she's not performing anything for anyone, and kate has always found that the most dangerous version of her. "you look good," veronica says.

"i'm always going to look good," kate says, "that's not news," and veronica laughs low and real and steps back to let her in the apartment smells the same as she doesn't know why that lands so hard, like something she forgot she'd been missing. 

the wood and warmth of it, the particular arrangement of veronica's life on every surface — the northwestern sweatshirt always on the same chair, the whiteboard by the kitchen still tracking something kate doesn't look at too closely she used to know what was on that board she used to know everything about this apartment by heart she still does that's the thing nothing's changed only kate's jersey.

"hungry?" veronica asks from the kitchen, already moving. "starving," kate says, and sits down at the counter, and tells herself dinner just a dinner.

VERONICA’S POV:

they eat at the counter and migrate to the couch the way they always used to, veronica at one end and kate at the other, and there is maybe eighteen inches of space between them that veronica is acutely aware of.

kate is talking about the sparks she's careful about it the particular diplomacy of someone processing something complicated in real time while projecting steadiness veronica has been watching kate do this for two years and she's good at it, genuinely good, but veronica knows what the seams look like. coach roberts. the development contract for twelve games kate says these things lightly, like they're facts she's already made peace with, and veronica catalogs each one and says nothing about what she hears underneath them.

"and the locker room is good," kate says. "like, genuinely. i wasn't expecting that, i think i expected to feel like a guest, but it doesn't feel like that." a pause. "yet."

"it won't," veronica says. "that's not how you work."

kate looks at her. "you can't know that from two games."

"i know you." veronica keeps her voice even she's been doing this all evening  tracking herself, monitoring the distance, aware of every inch of the space between them. it is exhausting in a specific way that only kate has ever made her work this hard. "you walk into a room and something organizes around you. it's not a thing you decide to do. it's just how you exist."

kate looks away first, good, veronica thinks. except winning doesn't feel like anything right now because they are not playing or they are always playing with kate it has always been both they talk about the season  golden state's 5-2 record, the fever game last thursday, what it felt like to go to the line up four with eighteen seconds left and hold it. 

kate asks good questions, the kind that mean she's actually watched the film, and veronica answers them and watches kate's face the whole time: the tilt of her head when something interests her, the small frown when she's filing something away to think about later. 

kate martin pays attention to things the way the film does exhaustively, indifferent to context, missing nothing she used to turn that attention on veronica and veronica would feel it like a hand on her arm.

she can feel it now they are carefully not talking about tomorrow by ten o'clock there are twelve inches between them but veronica has not moved, kate's socks are off, her feet tucked up under her, the way she always sits when she's stopped performing relaxed and actually become it. 

the low light of the apartment does something to the angles of her face that veronica is cataloguing and trying to stop cataloguing. "i missed this," kate says, into a comfortable silence. "you know specifically sitting here." she doesn't say “you.” but it is almost loud veronica looks at her kate looks back nine inches, maybe neither of them moving.

she is aware of the list of reasons she compiled it herself after may patient, methodical, the way she approaches everything that matters tomorrow's game is on the list the development contract is on the list the fact that golden state let kate go and kate bled for this team and kate cried in front of cameras three weeks ago, which veronica watched on her phone in the locker room with something she could not name sitting very heavily in her chest — that's on the list too the list is thorough.

she reaches across the nine inches and tucks kate's hair back from her face just that her thumb along kate's temple whereas kate goes very still. "yeah," veronica says softly. "me too."

KATE POV:

the thing about veronica burton is that she is always the one who decides kate has known this since they were in college, since the first time they stood on opposite sides of something and veronica just waited patiently and precisely until she saw exactly what she wanted and moved for it. 

it used to make kate crazy it still makes kate crazy it is also, she has come to understand, one of the most attractive things about her, which is not useful information to be confirming right now with veronica's thumb at her hairline and the game tomorrow and the fact that kate's name is not on golden state's roster anymore, that the building two blocks down has her memory in it but not her jersey.

she doesn't move away she should move away she knows this the way you know a weather forecast for a city you're already standing in veronica's hand has stilled, warm and just there, and kate is mapping the weight of it with the same precision she uses on film the angle, the pressure, the specific deliberateness of it this was not an accident with veronica nothing is an accident.

"we should probably talk about what this is," kate says. "probably," veronica agrees. she doesn't move her hand. "we said—" kate starts. "i know what we said."

"the thing in may—"

"kate." veronica says her name like a period like a door swinging closed and open at the same time. "i know." kate closes the nine inches herself; she doesn't know who she's surprising, not veronica, who doesn't get surprised, not herself, who has been driving toward this since she parked the car. 

she closes it and presses her forehead to veronica's and just breathes, and for a moment they are only those foreheads together, breathing, veronica's hand still light in her hair. "we have a game tomorrow," kate says very close to her mouth. "i know," veronica says very close to hers.

"i'm going to make the active roster." kate says it like a fact, like she's saying it to herself as much as to veronica. "i'm going to play tomorrow."

"i know you are." veronica pulls back just far enough to look at her whereas her eyes are steady and warm and full of something kate has never successfully translated. "and golden state is still going to win."

"yeah?" kate says. "yeah," veronica says, and then she kisses her, and kate thinks we'll see about that, and stops thinking about basketball entirely.

VERONICA’S POV:

this is the part where the list of reasons should reassert itself; veronica is aware of the list she is kissing kate martin on her couch at ten-fifteen the night before they play each other for the first time, kate in a sparks uniform she was handed three weeks after golden state handed her nothing, and the list is not doing anything useful at all.

kate kisses the way she plays — controlled, deliberate, and then suddenly not there is always a moment where the control gives and something more urgent takes over, and veronica has been waiting for that moment since kate walked through the door, maybe longer, maybe since she watched kate cry on camera and felt the particular helplessness of being the wrong person to call. 

veronica's hands find the hem of kate's shirt as kate makes a sound against her mouth that veronica catalogs immediately and permanently kate swings a leg over and straddles her lap with the ease of someone who has done exactly this before—that one time in may that they stepped back from and did not discuss and veronica grips her hips and looks up at her. "hi," kate says. three centimeters away. "hi," veronica says. "we're doing this."

"we're doing this." kate tilts her head. that ghost of a smile. "was this always going to happen when you texted me?"

veronica considers diplomacy. "yes," she says instead kate laughs surprised, real, the one that scrunches her nose, the one veronica has been keeping in her private archive since approximately their second week as teammates and then veronica's hands are at the hem of kate's shirt and kate reaches for hers in return and for a moment they are just looking at each other. 

the low light of the apartment, the familiar weight of everything they are to each other sitting between them, not being a problem, just being true this is the building that was kate's too, veronica thinks kate sat in this apartment after every home game for a season, and golden state cut her one day before the next season started and called her a family member while they did it, and now kate is here in a development deal with the sparks, back in san francisco for the first time, and she came here tonight instead of anywhere else that means something veronica has been sitting with what it means all evening. "bedroom," she says.

kate climbs off her lap and extends a hand like she lives here like she still knows where everything is, which she does veronica takes her hand and follows her down the hall and does not look at the list at all.

ALTERNATING:

kate has a freckle under her left shoulder blade veronica knows this she has always known this, since the first time, and she presses her mouth to it now in the dark and feels kate's breath stutter  that small involuntary thing, the one that cannot be performed and she thinks this is what i have been not thinking about for three weeks.

they move slowly; this is not a decision; it happens the way weather happens, the urgency of the couch giving way to something quieter when the door closes, like the bedroom is a different register. 

veronica's hands move over kate's back with a patience that surprises even her kate turns over and pulls her down and they fit together the way they always have easy and specific, the particular geometry of two people whose bodies remember each other without having to relearn anything. "i forgot how good you are at this," kate says, into the dark.

"you didn't forget," veronica says, kate's laugh is soft. "no," she agrees. "i didn't." veronica traces her collarbone, her sternum slowly unhurried whereas kate's hands are gentle in her hair not pulling yet, just holding, the way you hold something you've put down and picked back up and are relieved to find unchanged. 

veronica works her way down kate's body like she's reading something she already knows by heart and is reading more carefully now kate makes quiet sounds above her, not performing anything, just present — that particular quality of attention kate has, the full weight of it, the way she makes you feel like the only thing in the room.

veronica looks up at her kate looks back down. neither of them says anything this is the part that aches, veronica thinks not badly not like damage like the ache of something that fits pressing against a space she has been very careful not to examine directly.

kate got waived and veronica watched it on her phone and felt it somewhere it had no business landing, and now kate is here, looking at her like that, and the list of reasons is somewhere in the other room being completely useless.

she presses her mouth lower and kate's head falls back and kate's hand tightens in her hair she closes her eyes and lets herself have all of it just tonight by the time kate pulls her back up they are both breathing harder than two professional athletes should be at rest, which veronica finds obscurely funny, and kate must see it because kate smiles that slow private one, the one that takes a moment to arrive and cups veronica's face in both hands. "stay here," kate says softly which means with me, don't go somewhere else in your head right now. "i'm here," veronica says kate kisses her like she believes it.

KATE POV:

the thing shifts around midnight kate couldn't name the exact moment it's a pressure thing, a momentum thing the way a game turns on a single possession that's barely distinguishable from the forty before it one moment they're slow and careful, and then veronica does something deliberate at the curve of kate's shoulder, something with her mouth that is very clearly intentional, and kate's whole body rewires.

she rolls them over veronica looks up at her with something adjacent to surprise she's rarely surprised, kate has always hated and loved that about her and her hair is everywhere and her eyes are dark and she is the reigning most improved player in the wnba and kate's former teammate and the reason san francisco still feels like a city kate belongs to even though kate's name is not on the arena anymore she is also, kate thinks, absolutely not going to win this. "hi," kate says again.

"you're going to be insufferable about this," veronica says, reading her face with that awful accuracy. "tomorrow," kate says. "i'll be insufferable tomorrow." she pins veronica's wrists above her head, lightly, and watches her exhale. "right now i'm being something else."

veronica's chin tips up definitely there she is the version of veronica that kate first understood as a challenge before she understood it as something she wanted to be on the right side of. "oh yeah? what's that?"

"better than you," kate says simply, and lowers her head, and veronica makes a sound that kate is going to replay for the rest of the week it is competitive in the specific way that nothing except basketball has ever been competitive between them. not mean, not cruel — both of them knowing the other's moves before they're made, finding counter-moves, finding the space inside the counter-moves. 

kate knows veronica's tells veronica knows hers they weaponize this cheerfully, thoroughly, without mercy, and kate takes her apart the way she takes apart a zone defense: patiently, completely, finding every gap veronica's hands pull at her hair. 

her whole body working against kate's grip like she's testing whether it'll hold it holds her voice goes rough in the specific way kate has been keeping in some private archive for two years now, retrieving occasionally, trying not to retrieve too often. "kate," veronica says a warning and a plea at the same time, the way only she has ever managed.

"i know," kate says, against her skin. "kate—"

"i've got you," kate says. "i've got you." and then she does fully, completely feels veronica come apart under her with a shudder that kate feels in her own chest she holds her through it loosens her grip and just holds, her face pressed to veronica's neck, her own heart going fast for reasons that have nothing to do with exertion.

veronica's hands softened in her hair and started moving, slowly the way you touch someone to say something you don't have words for yet kate closes her eyes and lets herself be held you win some, she thinks and then veronica rolls her over, deliberate and unhurried, and kate thinks fine, then. and means it in every possible sense.

VERONICA’S POV:

kate falls asleep before veronica does she always has it's one of the small private facts veronica keeps in the category of things that are mine and tries not to examine too closely kate martin, who is awake and sharp and relentlessly present at every other moment, falls asleep fast and easy the way children do like she decides to and then just does it like nothing follows her there. 

veronica used to watch her from the other side of the bed when they were there, and then it wasn't, and then it was may, and now it's this, and veronica is doing the math she is very good at math as it is not helping her.

the numbers kate was waived one day before the season kate said it wasn't easy at all in a press conference while visibly trying not to cry, and veronica watched it on her phone in the locker room at chase center  in ballhalla in the building that had been kate's home too, where kate's jersey number used to hang in the tunnel with everyone else's, and felt something she did not have the right word for. 

nakase said kate was family and then let her go, and kate went to los angeles and signed a development deal worth a weekly stipend and a pro-rated minimum salary and veronica knows what that means, what kate traded down to, to keep playing.

tomorrow golden state plays los angeles at chase center kate will walk back into that building in a sparks uniform veronica will be on the other side of the court kate shifts in the dark, resettles. some instinct pulling her closer even unconscious. 

her arm ends up across veronica's ribs veronica looks down at it and she thinks about moving it she leaves it where it is the continued math they dated, last year, the way two people date when both of them are building careers inside an organization they love and neither of them wants to be the reason the other one loses focus. 

they ended it mutually and correctly and with the specific grief of choosing the right hard thing, and they stayed close because there was never a world where they didn't stay close and then may happened an offseason weekend, something that was always waiting, that had been waiting through the whole relationship and the ending of it and they stepped back over the line and did not discuss it directly and veronica spent three months being more careful and then golden state cut kate and veronica stopped being careful and texted her.

she cannot figure out what she wants the answer to be she has been trying to figure this out for months and she cannot get there the bay is quiet outside that low particular frequency of san francisco at one in the morning, the hum of the bridge, the specific texture of the city veronica has come to know over a season and a half. 

this is home now kate used to be part of what made it home, and then she wasn't, and now she's here for one night with her arm across veronica's ribs and her name on the away team's roster and everything between them unresolved and vivid and completely, irreducibly real.

veronica turns her head in the dark, kate's face is unguarded, not closed, just resting, the sharp attention turned all the way off she looks young, she looks like herself, the version of herself that only shows up when she's stopped working at anything.

tomorrow veronica will be on one side of halfcourt and kate will be on the other the game will be the game it always is this is something veronica has always respected about both of them, that they do not let what they are to each other make them soft on the floor kate will play hard and precise and veronica will do the same and one of them will win and neither of them will let the other get away with anything.

"and rule number three is—"

the classroom door opened and paige's entire brain stopped working. you stood in the doorway holding your daughter's hand avery though paige didn't know her name yet the little girl was practically hiding behind your leg while peeking around you every few seconds.

you looked tired, not the kind of tired that came from one bad night's sleep, the kind that lived beneath your eyes, the kind that came from carrying too much responsibility for too long a coffee cup rested in your hand.

a backpack hung from your shoulder, your phone was tucked beneath your arm and despite looking exhausted, every time you glanced down at your daughter, your face softened immediately like nothing else in the world mattered more than her.

paige started completely forgetting where she completely forgot what she was doing and completely forgot she was supposed to be teaching. "ms. bueckers?"

she blinked when one of the kids was staring at her. "huh?"

"what's rule number three?" she looked at him then at you then back at him. "don't eat glue." the classroom erupted laughter bounced off every wall because rule number three definitely wasn't don't eat glue and paige knew that but apparently her brain had chosen that exact moment to abandon her your laugh join the children.

quiet warm and beautiful and paige immediately knew she was in trouble serious trouble because she didn't even know your name yet and somehow she already wanted to hear that laugh again. "actually," she quickly corrected, trying to save herself, "rule number three is keep your hands to yourself."

more laughter one kid proudly announced he had never eaten glue before another admitted he had and paige's classroom immediately descended into complete chaos which was probably for the best because it gave her something else to focus on besides you.

except it didn't really work because every few seconds she found herself looking toward the doorway again and every single time she did, you were looking at your daughter with that same soft smile.

eventually introductions ended and parents began leaving children slowly drifting toward activity stations but avery remained firmly attached to your side. "mommy." you immediately looked down. "yeah, bug?"

"what if nobody likes me?" paige felt her heart break a little. you immediately crouched down in front of her right there on the classroom floor giving her your full attention. "avery." the little girl looked at you. "you're funny." small nod. "you're smart." another nod. "you're kind." a bigger nod. "people like kind people."

avery considered that carefully. "what if they don't?" you smiled. "then they're weird." avery burst into laughter and paige nearly melted because she couldn't stop watching and couldn't stop noticing the little things.

the way you brushed hair out of avery's face the way you listened carefully whenever she spoke the way your entire world seemed to revolve around her. "you're gonna have a great day."

"promise?"

"cross my heart."

"double promise?" you laughed. "double promise."

avery wrapped her arms around your neck and you hugged her immediately, holding her tightly and for some reason that image stayed with paige because there was so much love there.

so much devotion so much warmth it was impossible not to notice eventually you kissed the top of avery's head. "go make some friends, bug."

avery nodded then reluctantly let go and wandered toward the other children and suddenly it was just you and paige for a moment neither of you spoke then you smiled. "hi."

"hi." smooth very smooth you laughed and paige wanted to disappear. "i'm y/n."

"paige."

"nice to meet you."

"you too."

your eyes met and for some reason neither of you looked away immediately. something lingered there, something small, something impossible to explain but both of you felt it. "avery already likes you." paige laughed. "she's known me for ten minutes."

"that's all she needs." their eyes met again and paige felt something strange settle in her chest something she immediately chose to ignore. "thank you for taking care of her."

the words were simple but they carried weight because being a single parent meant trusting someone with your entire world and paige understood that her smile softened. "i will."

something changed in your expression just for a second then you nodded. "have a good day, ms. bueckers."

"you too." and then you left paige watched you walk away and immediately walked face-first into a bookshelf hard three students laughed.

one asked if she needed a doctor. the school year only got worse after that because every morning you dropped avery off and every afternoon you picked her up which meant paige saw you every single day at first the conversations were short small simple. "good morning."

"morning."

"how's avery doing?"

"she's excited."

"that's good."

but eventually they became longer and longer and longer until somehow you found yourselves talking almost every day sometimes about avery sometimes about school sometimes about basketball because eventually paige learned you played in the wnba which shocked exactly nobody except paige because apparently everyone else already knew.

"wait." you looked up. "what?"

"you're telling me you're a professional basketball player?" you laughed. "a little late figuring that out."

"nobody told me."

"i've picked avery up in team gear."

"i thought you really liked basketball." you laughed so hard you nearly dropped your coffee and paige spent the rest of the day thinking about that laugh which was becoming a problem, a very noticeable problem especially according to the other teachers. "she's here."

paige looked up from grading papers. "who?" the teacher across from her stared. "the parent."

"what parent?"

"the one you're in love with." paige nearly inhaled her coffee. "i'm not in love with anybody."

"you fixed your hair when she walked into the parking lot."

"that's normal."

"you checked your reflection in a spoon."

"twice."

"leave me alone." the teacher laughed. "you've got a crush."

"i do not."

"you absolutely do." the classroom door opened and suddenly there you were holding a forgotten lunchbox paige immediately sat up straighter the teacher burst out laughing. "oh my god."

"leave."

"look at you."

"leave."

"lover girl."

"get out." you looked between them completely confused. "should i come back?"

"no."

"yes." the teacher pointed dramatically. "she likes—"

paige threw a marker at her; the teacher barely dodged it and immediately ran away laughing leaving paige to suffer alone. you were trying so hard not to laugh and somehow that worse months passed than winter arrived snow covered the sidewalks and somehow you became part of paige's routine.

the best part of it every morning she looked for your car and every afternoon she found excuses to stay outside longer during pickup, every conversation mattered and every smile lingered.

every laugh stayed with her and the more she learned about you, the worse it got because she saw how hard you worked, how exhausted you always were and how much you sacrificed for avery.

one afternoon after pickup, paige happened to glance outside and saw you sitting alone in your car you hadn't driven away avery was in the backseat.

already asleep and you were just sitting there hands on the steering wheel eyes closed silent like you were trying to gather enough energy to make it through the rest of the day.

something about it broke her heart because everyone saw the athlete, the professional, the successful woman but paige saw the tired mother trying her best and from that moment on, her crush stopped feeling like a crush.

because now she genuinely cared which terrified her and then came the day everything fell apart or rather the day avery decided to ruin everyone's life. "mommy?"

"yes, bug?"

"i think ms. bueckers likes you."

the hallway went silent completely silent whereas paige froze you froze even the other parents froze avery looked delighted. "avery."

"what?"

"you can't say things like that."

"why?"

"because—"

"she does." paige nearly passed away right there immediately. "avery."

"she smiles every time she sees you." you covered your face. "oh my god."

"and she talks different."

"avery."

"and she always—"

"avery."

"what?"

"i was using my inside voice." the little girl wasn't wrong which somehow made everything worse paige wanted the floor to swallow her whole, you were trying so hard not to laugh and failing badly then avery grinned completely unbothered. "i'm still right." and ran off toward the playground.

leaving complete destruction behind her you stared after her then at paige then back after her before laughing full-on laughing the kind that made your shoulders shake and paige couldn't even be embarrassed anymore because she was too busy staring at your smile. "i am so sorry."

"it's okay."

"she has absolutely no filter."

"i've noticed." another laugh escaped you then your eyes met hers and suddenly everything became quiet in the hallway, the parents, the children all of it had faded until it felt like it was only the two of you standing there looking at each other. "for what it's worth..." you said softly. "yeah?"

your smile returned smaller this time gentler warmer. "avery usually has pretty good instincts." and just like that, paige bueckers forgot how to breathe again.

for a second she genuinely thought she might have imagined it, maybe she'd heard wrong, maybe her brain had filled in the blanks because it desperately wanted your words to mean something they didn't but the way you were looking at her told her otherwise.

because you weren't laughing anymore you weren't teasing you weren't trying to rescue either of you from the awkwardness you were just looking at her and paige had never hated eye contact more in her life or loved it which was confusing very confusing. "oh."

brilliant absolutely brilliant response you smiled and somehow that made it worse because now there was amusement dancing behind your eyes. "oh?"

paige wanted to disappear immediately, preferably forever. "i had something better in my head." you laughed the sound instantly loosening the knot that had formed in her chest. "i believe you."

"i did."

"mhm."

"i did."

"sure."

paige groaned, you laughed again and for the first time neither of you looked away afterward neither of you rushed to fill the silence neither of you pretended that something hadn't shifted because it had.

the air felt different maybe even lighter but somehow heavier too like both of you were standing at the edge of something neither had been brave enough to acknowledge before then a voice interrupted. "mommy!"

both of you looked down avery came sprinting across the playground completely unaware she'd just altered the course of two lives or maybe completely aware it was honestly hard to tell with her.

she wrapped herself around your waist. "can i have mac and cheese tonight?" you blinked. "hello to you too."

"hi."

"how was recess?"

"good."

"what happened?"

"i played tag."

"that's nice."

"can i have mac and cheese?" paige laughed and you sighed dramatically. "we'll discuss it."

"that's not a yes."

"it's not a no." avery narrowed her eyes. "that's suspicious." you stared paige stared the five-year-old crossed her arms you looked at paige. "she's been watching too much television."

"clearly." avery gasped. "i heard that."

"that was the goal." another dramatic gasp and somehow the moment broke not in a bad way just enough for both of you to breathe again eventually pickup ended, children left teachers headed home and life continued.

except now it didn't feel exactly the same because every conversation afterward carried that moment with it. every smile lingered a little longer, every goodbye felt a little more reluctant and a week later it finally happened, the thing that had apparently been inevitable for everyone except paige.

it was a friday afternoon avery had already climbed into your car and paige was standing beside the driver's door after a conversation that had somehow lasted twenty minutes again. "you should probably go." you looked up. "probably." neither of you moved, paige laughed softly. "avery's waiting."

"she can wait another minute." inside the car, avery immediately rolled the window down. "I CAN HEAR YOU." you closed your eyes. "please stop listening."

"i'm literally right here."

"avery."

"i support this relationship." paige nearly choked you and buried your face in your hands. "avery."

"what?"

"you can't just say things."

"why not?"

"because you're five."

"and?"

honestly fair question, paige was trying so hard not to laugh you pointed toward the passenger seat. "seatbelt."

"that's not an answer."

"seatbelt." avery huffed dramatically before obeying then she pointed at paige. "ask her."

you froze paige froze avery looked pleased with herself then she rolled the window back up like she'd just dropped a grenade and walked away.

silence complete silence you stared at the windshield paige stared at the parking lot neither of you speaking until finally you laughed quietly disbelievingly.

"i swear she's trying to ruin my life."

"i don't know." paige smiled. "i think she's trying to help mine." your head immediately turned toward her and there it was again that feeling that shift that terrifying, wonderful thing sitting between both of you.

paige swallowed, then decided she was done being afraid because she was twenty-something years old because she taught kindergarten because she dealt with chaos every day and because somehow asking out a professional basketball player was still the most terrifying thing she'd ever done. "can i ask you something?"

your expression softened. "yeah." paige took a breath then another then immediately forgot both of them. "would you maybe..."

god she hated this. "would you maybe want to get dinner sometime?" your eyes widened slightly and suddenly paige's heart dropped maybe she'd read everything wrong.

"i've been waiting for you to ask me that." paige blinked once and twice. "what?" you laughed the biggest smile she'd ever seen spreading across your face. "i've been waiting for you to ask."

"seriously?"

"paige." you leaned against the car. "i practically told you i liked you."

"i know but—"

"avery literally told you."

"that's fair."

"multiple times."

"also fair." you shook your head laughing and paige couldn't stop staring because now she knew she didn't have to wonder and didn't have to overthink every smile in every conversation.

every lingering glance you liked her you actually liked her and somehow that felt impossible. "so is that a yes?" paige asked you smiled warmly, beautiful and completely unfair. "it's definitely a yes." and for the first time since meeting you, paige felt like maybe her heart wasn't about to explode until avery rolled the window down again. 

"I TOLD BOTH OF YOU." and just like that, both of you dissolved into laughter right there in the school parking lot.

paige spent the entire week regretting asking you out not because you had said no quite literally the opposite you had said yes immediately enthusiastically which somehow made everything worse because now it was real and paige had spent the last six days overthinking every possible detail.

what if she talked too much?

what if she didn't talk enough?

what if she spilled something on herself?

what if she accidentally called you "avery's mom" instead of y/n?

what if—

"you need help." paige looked up and the teacher sitting across from her was watching with concern. "what?" "you've been staring at the same paper for ten minutes." paige looked down and she hadn't written a single thing. "oh."

"the date is tonight, isn't it?"

"maybe." the teacher groaned. "you're impossible."

"i'm fine."

"you changed outfits four times yesterday." paige froze. "how do you know that?"

"you posted all four on your private story."

"with a poll."

"paige." "leave me alone." the teacher laughed so hard she nearly fell out of her chair meanwhile, across town, you weren't doing much better. "mommy."

you looked up and avery was sitting cross-legged on your bed while watching you stare into your closet. "yeah?"

"you're nervous."

"i'm not nervous."

"you're holding two shirts and staring at the wall." you looked down, she had a point. "okay."

"you're nervous."

"maybe." avery nodded knowingly. "because you like her." you immediately pointed at her. "you are not allowed to be this observant."

"i get it from you." you sighed dramatically avery grinned. "you're gonna kiss." you almost choked. "avery."

"what?"

"please stop."

"i'm just saying."

you threw a pillow at her she caught it laughed and immediately threw it back. "you're blushing."

"i hate this family."

"it's just me."

"i know."

"love you too." and despite everything, you smiled because you really did later that evening, after convincing yourself not to cancel seventeen different times, you finally arrived.

paige was already there standing outside the restaurant, hands shoved into her jacket pockets looking nervous, really nervous which immediately made you feel better because if paige bueckers was nervous too, maybe you weren't alone she spotted you crossing the parking lot and instantly smiled.

that smile, the one that had somehow become your favorite thing, the one that made her eyes light up the one that always felt genuine and suddenly your nerves disappeared just a little. "hi."

"hi." both of you laughed immediately because somehow after months of talking every single day, this suddenly felt harder, different, better. "you look nice." the words slipped out before paige could stop them as your smile widened. "you too."

she immediately looked away which only made you laugh. "you're adorable when you're nervous." paige groaned. "oh no."

"what?"

"don't tell me you noticed."

"i noticed three seconds after i got here."

"great." you bumped your shoulder against hers lightly playfully. "Relax." and somehow that worked because it was you inside, dinner started awkwardly then less awkwardly then somehow three hours disappeared and conversation flowed effortlessly.

from basketball to teaching to childhood stories to embarrassing moments to favorite movies to everything in between, at one point paige laughed so hard she nearly spilled her drink. "i cannot believe you got a technical foul for arguing with a mascot." you pointed immediately. "first of all, i was right."

"it was a mascot."

"he started it." paige stared. "i need more details."

"he was talking trash."

"a mascot."

"yes."

"in costume."

"yes."

"and you argued back."

"i stand by my choices." paige laughed so hard her face hurt and god she couldn't remember the last time she'd enjoyed someone's company this much. every second felt easy, natural like they'd been doing this forever, eventually dinner ended neither of you wanted it to which became obvious when both of you kept finding reasons not to leave.

one more story, one more joke, one more conversation until eventually you found yourselves walking through the quiet parking lot.

neither quite ready to say goodbye but as the night air was cool and comfortable and for the first time all evening, neither of you were talking, just walking beside each other enjoying it.

paige glanced over you were smiling to yourself. "what?" you looked up. "hmm?"

"you're smiling."

"i had fun." something warm spread through paige's chest. "yeah?"

"yeah."

you looked at her really looked at her and suddenly the world felt quieter smaller like everything else had faded into the background. "i’ve wanted to do this for a while." paige stopped walking. "really?"

you nodded. "i just wasn't sure if you liked me." paige actually laughed out loud. "are you serious?"

"what?"

"i was so obvious."

"paige." you pointed at her. "you literally spent three months avoiding eye contact every time i complimented you."

"because i liked you."

"exactly."

"that doesn't make sense."

"it makes perfect sense." both of you laughed then neither of you spoke because now you were standing beside your car and the night was ending and neither of you wanted it. 

to your eyes met held lingered and for a moment neither moved then paige stepped a little closer not much just enough giving you every opportunity to pull away you didn't if anything, you stepped closer too and suddenly there was almost no space left between you her voice came out softer. "can i kiss you?"

your heart immediately betrayed you because it practically launched into your throat and yet somehow you still smiled. "please."

paige laughed softly, the happiest sound you'd ever heard, then she kissed you gently and carefully like she was afraid you'd disappear if she moved too fast and somehow that made it even better because there was nothing rushed about it.

nothing uncertain, just warmth and relief and months of feelings finally having somewhere to go when you pulled apart, neither of you moved very far foreheads almost touching both smiling like complete idiots. "wow."

"wow," paige agreed, you laughed, she laughed and for the first time since meeting her, you realized something avery was going to be absolutely unbearable about this the realization hit both of you at the exact same moment. "oh no."

"oh no."