Chapter Twenty
Reece
The stadium empties in waves.
You can hear it from the locker room, the crowd dissolving in layers, the upper deck first, then the middle tiers, then the diehards who stay until the ushers look pointed.
The noise doesn’t disappear. It transforms. Fifty-two thousand voices compress down to a few hundred, then a few dozen, then the particular echo of a nearly empty building settling back into itself after hours of punishment.
I sit at my locker for a long time without moving.
Nine innings, nine strikeouts, one earned run.
The numbers will look clean in tomorrow’s box score, efficient, controlled, and dominant.
The kind of line that gets a pitcher written about in predictable, flattering terms. Career high in strikeouts at this stage of the season.
Command percentage above ninety. First-pitch strike rate is the best of any start this year.
None of those numbers is why I’m still sitting here.
Noise lingers in the concrete corridors long after the last fan leaves.
Cleats echo against tile in the hallway outside.
Equipment managers roll carts past my locker with the organized efficiency of people who have done this a thousand times and will do it a thousand more.
Somewhere down the room, Martinez is telling a story I can hear in fragments, something about the third inning that keeps the guys around him laughing.
We won.
I won something else tonight, too, and it’s sitting in my chest like a stone that hasn’t decided whether it’s heavy or warm.
Coach Bishop finds me before I reach the showers.
He comes around the corner with the measured gait of a man who always knows exactly where he’s going, stops in front of my locker, and crosses his arms. He’s still in his game kit.
He always is, long after everyone else has changed, a habit I’ve watched for three seasons and never asked about.
I’ve always assumed it’s a ritual. Tonight, I wonder if it’s armor.
He looks at me the way he looks at every situation he’s making calculations about. Patient. Thorough. Nothing rushed.
“Media tomorrow,” he says.
“I know.”
“They’re going to ask about the rumors.” He doesn’t specify which rumors. We both know which rumors.
“They can ask.”
He studies me for a long moment. Looking for deflection, for the practiced pivot I’ve been using in press situations since my first season, the slight reframe that answers a question without actually answering it. I’m good at it. I’ve been doing it for years.
He won’t find it tonight.
“You sure about this?” he asks.
There are about forty different things packed into those four words.
He’s asking whether I understand what going public means for my contract, my relationship with management, and my position in this organization.
He’s asking whether I’ve thought through the media circus that follows.
He’s probably asking whether I understand what it means for his daughter to have her name attached to mine in every sports column and gossip vertical from here to the East Coast.
He’s also asking, underneath all of that, whether this is real.
I meet his gaze. “Yeah.”
He holds it for three full seconds. Then he nods once. Not enthusiastically. Not warmly. The nod of a man who has processed a situation and arrived at a decision.
“Then do it clean,” he says. “No drama. No performance. Just the truth.” He walks away before I can respond.
Which is fine, because what I want to say is that clean is all I have left, and I’m done performing anything for anybody, and the truth is the only language I’ve spoken since I walked back into Ink District Studio.
He probably knows all of that already.
He’s a smarter man than I gave him credit for at the beginning of all this.
The shower runs hot, which is the only temperature I can tolerate after nine innings.
Steam rolls down the tiled walls and fills the stall until I can’t see the grout lines.
I stand under the spray and let it work through my shoulders, my back, and the particular knot between my shoulder blades that forms on high-pitch-count nights and takes days to release fully.
My pulse doesn’t slow down the way it normally does after a win.
Normally, the shower is where the adrenaline drains. The hot water gives it somewhere to go, pulls it out through my skin, and by the time I’m dry, I’m back to baseline, tired and satisfied, nothing elevated.
Tonight, baseline isn’t accessible. My heart is doing something steady and elevated that has nothing to do with pitch count, adrenaline, or the divisional title we just secured.
Ava was in the stands tonight, third row of the club section, aisle seat. Her cap was pulled low. No sunglasses despite the stadium lights. No checking whether anyone nearby is watching.
She didn’t flinch when the cameras swept the family section during the seventh-inning stretch. I wasn’t watching. I was in the dugout, I couldn’t have been watching, but Mack was tracking it from the plate, and he told me later with a grin so wide it looked architectural.
“Ava looked directly into the lens,” he said, shaking his head like he’d witnessed a miracle of physics. “Not defiantly. Not nervously. She looked at it the same way she probably looks at a client who asks if the needle’s going to hurt. Calmly, like the question wasn’t even interesting.”
I dress fast and skip the team dinner despite three separate invitations, all of which I decline without specific explanation, and the small talk at the exit. Someone calls my name from across the parking lot, a familiar voice, probably Rodriguez, and I wave without turning around.
Keys in hand. Phone buzzing with messages I don’t open.
The drive across the city takes twenty minutes because of traffic, it normally takes less than ten and feels like both an hour and no time at all.
The championship win is on every radio station I scan past, highlights, commentary, someone with a very enthusiastic voice saying my name in a sentence containing the words ‘statistically unprecedented.’ I turn it off after thirty seconds and drive in silence with the windows cracked, the night air carrying the last of the stadium noise out of my lungs.
No hesitation.
No second-guessing.
Not a single moment of wondering whether this is the right call.
I’ve done enough wondering for one season.
Her building rises ahead, familiar now in the way that places become familiar when you’ve been paying attention to them.
I know the parking configuration. I know the entry code she gave me three weeks ago with a look that said she’d thought it over before offering it.
I know the sound the stairwell door makes, which step creaks, and the particular quality of the light in the hallway outside her apartment at this time of night.
I park at an angle and don’t fix it.
I take the stairs two at a time.
I knock once.
The door opens, and she’s standing there barefoot on the hardwood, hair loose over her shoulders, wearing my old practice shirt that hits her mid-thigh.
It’s the gray one I left on her chair three weeks ago and stopped expecting back sometime around week two.
There’s a smudge of something dark on her left forearm that might be ink from sketching or might be charcoal, and she doesn’t appear to have noticed it.
Her face is clean, stripped of the careful neutrality she carries in public.
Her smile hits first.
Bright, open, the real one, the one that reaches her eyes, and I’ve been cataloging since the first time she let her guard completely down in the front seat of her car outside the studio. The one she reserves for moments that are entirely, uncomplicatedly hers.
“You came,” she says.
“As if I wouldn’t.”
She steps back, and I walk in. The door shuts behind me with a soft, certain sound.
The apartment smells like citrus and something warm from the oven, and the speaker on her kitchen counter is playing something low and unhurried, something without words.
Her sketchbook is open on the coffee table, pencil beside it, the page half filled with something I can’t read from here.
She was working while she waited. Of course, she was.
Ava, in a state of pure stillness, is a thing that doesn’t exist.
She starts to say something. Probably about the game. Probably about the ninth inning, the strikeout count, or something she saw from the third row that she’s been waiting to tell me.
I don’t let her finish.
My hands find her waist. Lift. Turn. Her back hits the counter, and something feral wakes up inside me.
Not anger.
Not dominance for the sake of it.
Claim.
Her hands fist in my shirt, and I feel the tremor in her fingers. She isn’t startled or unsure, she’s ready, and the knowledge of it strips away every last restraint I’ve been holding onto since the moment I walked back through that studio door.
I kiss her hard. My teeth catch her lip, pulling, needing the mark of her in my mouth. She answers with equal hunger, biting back, dragging her nails down my chest with a sting that shoots straight to my spine and lower.
Weeks of restraint burn off in seconds.
Every careful touch in a darkened restaurant. Every controlled kiss on a tailgate under city lights. Every measured distance in public spaces. Every calculated gap between us where I wanted none.
Gone.
All of it, gone.
“You’re mine,” I tell her, voice rough, stripped down to something I don’t recognize as the polished version of myself.
She doesn’t hesitate.
“I know.”
Two words.
Unhesitating.
Certain.
They hit deeper than any crowd noise I’ve ever stood in the middle of.