Chapter Fourteen
Ava
He comes through my door smelling like fresh air and Thai food, and I hate how immediately my whole body relaxes.
This is the problem with Reece Steele. Not the media.
Not my father. Not Lena Hart, her burner numbers, and her loaded Instagram comments.
The problem is the specific way I stop bracing for something the second he walks into a room I’m already in.
I’ve spent twenty-six years keeping myself tightly wound and functional, and he unspools me in under ten seconds without appearing to try.
He sets the bag on my kitchen counter, then starts pulling out the containers, navigating my kitchen with the ease of someone who has been here enough times to know which drawer holds the forks and which cabinet holds the plates I actually use rather than the ones I bought at a market three years ago and display as art.
“Sit,” he says.
“It’s my kitchen.”
“And you’ve been standing since I walked in.” He doesn’t look up from the containers. “Sit down, Ava.”
I sit at the kitchen counter because I’m choosing to, not because he told me to. There’s a distinction, and I maintain it privately.
He sets a container in front of me. Pad see ew from the place two blocks over that gets the noodles right.
Then a second container, something for himself, something with enough protein to fuel whatever his training schedule demands tomorrow.
Then, the chopsticks are lined up parallel, and a napkin is folded once, because Reece has this contradictory quality of doing small things neatly.
“You remembered the no-garlic rule,” I say.
“Seven a.m. client.” He settles onto the stool across from me. “I pay attention.”
He does. This is the part I’m still adjusting to, the fact that he listens the first time, files the information, and produces it later without fanfare, as though keeping track of me is not an effort but an instinct.
The oat milk latte with one sugar. The Pad See Ew.
The way he texts me after late games, before he texts anyone else, not because I asked him to, but because it occurred to him that I might want to know.
It’s terrifying, but it is what it is.
I pick up the chopsticks and eat, and for a few minutes we don’t say anything.
Outside, the city hums its usual nighttime frequency.
The string lights above my bookshelf cast the apartment in warm amber.
Reece eats with the focused efficiency of an athlete whose body requires consistent fuel, but his eyes keep coming back to me across the counter the way they do when he’s thinking about something he hasn’t said yet.
“Tell me what he said,” I say. “All of it.”
He tells me.
Not in a rush, not softening anything, not editing for my comfort.
He walks me through the office, the framing, the career speech, and the clean-headlines request. He tells me my father used the phrase ‘the owner’ when he meant me, which lands somewhere tender in my chest because I know exactly why Dad would do that.
He would keep the professional distance of it, his attempt to separate his concern for his pitcher from his concern for his daughter, the two things pulling in opposite directions.
He tells me he said nothing useful and left.
I put my chopsticks down. “He’s going to come back harder when nothing changes.”
“Probably.”
“And you’re not going to change anything.”
“No,” he says it simply, without bravado. Not a performance. “But I need you to tell me something honest.”
“I’m always honest.”
“You’re honest about the risks. You’re excellent at cataloging every possible disaster in advance.” He rests his forearms on the counter. “Tell me what you actually want. Not the responsible version. The real one.”
‘The real one.’ He keeps asking for this, the version I don’t hand out freely, and I’ve learned to keep behind everything else because wanting things openly is how you get ambushed when they go away.
I look at him across my kitchen counter with his takeout container, his parallel chopsticks, the slight tension at the corner of his jaw that means he knows this answer could go either way, and he’s bracing for it without showing me he’s bracing.
“I don’t want to blow up your career,” I say.
“Not as a hypothetical. Not as a worst-case scenario exercise. As an actual thing that I would not be able to live with.” I hold his gaze.
“You have something real, Reece. The kind of talent people spend their entire lives chasing. And I know you say the contract doesn’t scare you, the media doesn’t scare you, and my father doesn’t scare you. ”
“None of them do.”
“Then you’re either braver than me or less informed, and I don’t think you’re less informed.
” I wrap my hands around my water glass.
“What I want is to keep seeing you. What I also want is for the seeing not to end your career, my relationship with my father, or whatever we’ve been building for the past several weeks.
And the problem with wanting all of those things simultaneously is they’re not all compatible. ”
“Some of them are.”
“Enough of them?”
He’s quiet for a moment, turning the problem over the way he turns everything over, methodically, without visible agitation. “You know what I’ve been doing this season that I haven’t done in three years?”
“Throwing harder.”
“Caring.” He says it matter-of-factly. “About outcomes. About what happens after the win, instead of just whether I get the win. I’ve been running on autopilot since my second full season, going through the mechanics without needing any of it to mean something.
” His eyes stay on mine. “You happened, Ava. Whatever that’s worth in the risk calculation. ”
It’s worth a considerable amount. I don’t say this. I look at my food instead.
“Eat,” he says, which is the kindest possible way to give me a moment to reassemble myself without acknowledging I need one.
I eat.
Then we clear the containers.
He washes the chopsticks without being asked, which is such a specific domestic gesture that it short-circuits something in my brain, and I stand behind him at the sink trying to remember what I was worried about three minutes ago.
He turns off the faucet and spins around, and I am approximately four inches away from him, which is not entirely accidental on my part.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“Feeling better?”
“The Pad See Ew helped.”
“I’ll pass your compliments to the restaurant.”
“Your compliments. You picked it.”
“Because you like it, and I wrote it down.”
“You wrote it?” I stop. “You wrote down my food order?”
“Notes app,” he says this without a trace of embarrassment, which is one of his more disarming qualities, the complete absence of self-consciousness about the ways he pays attention to me. “You like it, you’re important to me, and I wasn’t sure if I’d remember.”
I stare at him for a long moment.
“Reece.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re making it very difficult to be sensible about this.”
His mouth curves. “Good.”
He reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, that small, unhurried gesture I’ve cataloged carefully, the one he does without thinking, the one that suggests touching me is as natural to him as breathing, and he’s stopped questioning it entirely.
“I’m not asking you to stop being sensible,” he says. “I’m asking you to be sensible and still choose this. Both things at once.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It’s the simplest thing I’ve felt in years. The outside of it is complicated. The actual thing? Simple.”
I close the remaining distance.
He kisses me the way he does everything when he’s decided, with total commitment, one hand sliding into my hair and the other finding my waist and pulling me in until there’s no gap left between us.
I fist my hands in his shirt and kiss him back.
The day’s accumulated weight dissolves the way it always does when we do this.
The blogs, the burner screenshots, and my father’s careful professional distance fall away until there’s nothing left but his warmth and the specific, devastating certainty that this man has worked his way past every defense I built.
“Bedroom,” I say against his mouth.
“You sure?”
“I’ve been sure since you walked in with my favorite food order.”
He laughs, that rough-edged, genuine laugh, and I walk backward down the hallway pulling him with me.
My room is warm, the string lights on, the city a low hum outside the window. He pulls the door closed behind us and looks at me the way he looked at me the first time, as if I’m something he can’t quite believe he gets to stand near.
“You’re still doing the thing,” I say.
“What thing?”
“Looking at me like I’m an event.”
“You are an event.” He reaches for the hem of my shirt. “Can I?”
I lift my arms in answer.
He takes it off slowly, sets it aside, and runs his hands from my shoulders down my arms with a kind of reverence that makes my throat tight. His eyes move over me, and he shakes his head slightly, a small private thing, as though he’s resolving an internal argument.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.” He presses his mouth to my shoulder, the curve of my neck, the place below my ear that he has learned with infuriating precision. “Nothing except you.”
I pull his shirt over his head and run my palms across his chest, the lean muscle, the surgery scar I kissed before, the ribs where my ink is settling into his skin. I spread my hand flat over the design and feel him breathe.
“How’s it healing?” I ask, purely professional.
“Ava.”
“I’m serious. The—”
“Healing perfectly.” He tips my chin up. “Ask me again in the morning.”
Then he kisses me again, deeper, walking me back toward the bed, and I stop asking.
The back of my knees find the mattress, and I pull him down with me. The full, warm weight of him settles over me like something I’ve been waiting for without knowing I was waiting.