Chapter 3 #3
“I’m not asking for a promise,” I say, gentler than I meant to. “Just… if you want something that isn’t a gym or a court or a dinner where people talk about donations. It’s loud. It’s messy. It’s real.” I grin, deflecting before I sound like a brochure. “And the beer is cheap.”
He huffs. “I don’t—”
“Drink,” I finish for him. “Right. Rumor mill says you’re allergic to fun.”
His cheeks color again. “I do drink occasionally. I just can’t get wasted during the season.”
“I get it.” I shrug. “I won’t tell your coach you were within ten feet of a bar.”
He looks at me for a second, like he’s trying to figure out if I’m dangerous or just an idiot.
Then he does something I’m not ready for: He relaxes half an inch.
It reads in the drop of his shoulders, the unpinching at the corners of his eyes.
He tucks the flyer into the pocket of his warm-up jacket like it’s a fragile thing he doesn’t want to crumple.
“Okay,” he says. “Maybe.”
Maybe is a symphony when you expect a no.
Someone calls his name from down the tunnel—staff voice, clipped, official. Ollie glances over his shoulder, and I watch the captain refit himself across his face; it’s like watching someone pull on armor. He nods toward the voice, then back to me.
“I have to….” He gestures vaguely toward press and obligations and a life that isn’t mine.
“Go,” I say. “Break the chain.”
His head tilts. “What?”
Shit. I didn’t mean to say that out loud. The song title slipped. I cover fast. “Break the… press? Whatever. Go do your captain thing.”
His mouth almost curves. It’s dangerous. “Good night, Rafe.”
It’s the first time he’s said my name ever, and the fact that he knows it at all…. My heart does stupid in my chest. “Night, Ollie.”
He steps back, turns, and is gone into the bright mouth of the tunnel, swallowed by the machine that prints the posters I saw in the student union. I stand there, head light, arm still extended like a moron for a heartbeat after he leaves. Then I shove my hand into my pocket and turn to Drew.
He’s staring at me with his whole stupid face lit up. “You are not normal.”
“Never claimed to be,” I say. My voice is rough. I clear my throat. “He took the flyer.”
“I saw.” He wiggles his eyebrows like he’s in a cartoon. “Tomorrow’s going to be interesting.”
“Or nothing,” I say, because I’m not an idiot. “He’s got a life with handlers and obligations and a coach who probably sleeps with one eye open.”
Drew claps my shoulder. “Maybe. But he walked over. In a building full of people, he walked over to you.”
That’s the part I can’t shake. He didn’t have to. He could’ve ducked into the press, into the locker room, into a sea of teammates and boosters and escape hatches. He came anyway. Said hi. Took a risk the size of a sentence.
We climb back into the night. The air is cool and clean and loud with students yelling victory into the sky.
Drew talks about dumplings. I talk about absolutely nothing because my brain is a projector stuck on a loop: the three he hit from space, the towel twisting once, the flyer slipping into his pocket like a promise, the way he said my name.
Outside the arena, the campus is a parade of joy.
Strangers slap palms with strangers. Someone bangs a drum.
Someone else tries to crowd-surf for reasons that defy gravity and security protocols.
I should be irritated by the chaos. I’m not.
It feels like home, just louder and in a different language.
“Food,” Drew insists. “You need to carb-load your emotions.”
“You’re an idiot,” I say, but I let him steer me toward a truck that sells noodles out of a window. We eat standing on the curb, steam fogging in the air like breath. I burn my tongue and don’t care.
“You think he’ll come?” Drew asks around a mouthful.
“I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t. The reasonable part of me says no. The part that writes songs says maybe is a word you can live on for a night.
We split, because he’s meeting a friend and I need to walk the buzz out of my legs before I try to sleep.
I cut across the quad, where the palm trees are black cutouts against a sky that refuses to go fully dark.
Finals ghosts drift in clumps, chanting, “We’re so fucked,” like a prayer.
Somewhere a trumpet tries valiantly to find a key.
The band room windows glow. My fingers itch for a pen.
Back in the apartment, Miles is on the couch with a guitar across his knees, coaxing a melody. He glances up, clocking my face like a seismograph reading a quake.
“How was it?” he asks.
“Loud,” I say. “Good loud.”
He nods once, like that answers everything he needs to know. “You write?”
“Soon,” I say, already digging for the notebook in my bag. “Very soon.”
I close my bedroom door, fall into the chair by the tiny desk that came with the place, and flip to a blank page. The pen hovers, then drops, and the lines spill out fast, too fast for my hand, clean in a way that tells me I’ll be able to read them tomorrow.
You looked up and I forgot the score,
A thousand voices, I only heard yours.
Armor fitted in a hallway light,
Towel twist, leader’s jaw, steady fight.
If you come where the lights are cheap,
Where the sound guy swears and the floorboards creak,
I’ll give you three songs and a place to breathe,
No jerseys, no speeches—just stay and be.
I stop, hand cramped, chest hot. I stare at the words until they blur, then sit back and let the adrenaline drain out of me in a long, shaky breath.
Maybe he’ll show. Maybe he won’t. Either way, I’ve got a chorus that tastes like the kind of trouble you only get once in a long while. The kind you chase because you know what it feels like to miss it.
I thumb my phone awake, open the email with the ticket confirmation from earlier for a different kind of stage—his—and smile like a thief.
Tomorrow’s ours.
And if he walks through that door and into that noise? I’ll have something to sing about that isn’t just a guess.