Chapter Twenty-One #2
The thing about watching Reece pitch when you know him, when you know the way he breathes before a difficult batter, the way his shoulders drop when he’s found his rhythm, and the specific stillness that comes over him right before the ball leaves his hand, it becomes impossible to see it as anything other than what it is.
Art.
Not in the way people say something is art as a compliment.
In the way I mean it when I say the work of a person who has given themselves over to something completely, who has surrendered the parts of themselves that needed surrendering while keeping the parts worth keeping, and has created something out of that whole process that did not exist before them and will not exist without them.
I watch him take the mound in the seventh, the game tied, and the noise of fifty-two thousand people rises to something physical.
He doesn’t look toward section 214.
He doesn’t need to.
We both know I’m here.
The first batter sees three pitches and hits none of them.
The second takes two and then watches the third clip the corner with the resigned expression of someone who already knew the outcome before they stepped to the plate.
The third batter works the count to three and two, and the stadium breathes like one organism, held, waiting, and then Reece throws a curveball that breaks so late and so precisely it looks less like physics and more like intention made visible, and the umpire’s arm goes up, and the place comes apart.
The Wildcats take the lead in the eighth on a two-run double by Martinez.
They hold it in the ninth.
When the final out is recorded, the crowd becomes something enormous and uncontained, and I’m on my feet with everyone else because I have been on my feet since the seventh inning and, at some point, stopped pretending otherwise.
I watch Reece come off the mound and see his teammates meet him, the hands on his back, the brief and genuine celebration of men who trust each other with something real. I watch him look toward the dugout, and then I watch him look toward section 214.
He finds me immediately.
He’s too far away to read his expression clearly, but I’ve learned his face well enough by now to know certainty when I see it.
He breaks from the post-game gathering on the field and starts toward the first base line, toward the stands, and the crowd notices. Of course, the crowd notices Reece Steele walking purposefully anywhere post-game while cameras roll is the kind of thing fifty-two thousand people pay attention to.
He reaches the railing and starts climbing.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I don’t check it.
Because I’m already moving.
Not waiting. Not calculating the exposure, mapping the fallout, or listening for the sound of every shoe I’ve been waiting to drop since the night he kissed me outside my studio on a dark street. I kissed him back and called it a mistake.
I run down the stairs.
We meet in the middle, him climbing from the field side, me coming down from the seats, and the exact moment we reach each other, the stadium figures out what it’s watching, and the roar that goes up is the kind that starts in your chest before you hear it.
“Hi,” he says, slightly breathless, and the smile on his face is the real one, the one without performance.
“Hi, yourself,” I say.
He cups my face in both hands.
I reach up, grip the front of his jersey, and neither of us hesitates.
He kisses me in the middle of Wildcat Stadium, in front of fifty-two thousand people, and by morning, however many cameras are currently making this the lead story on every sports broadcast. The crowd goes absolutely feral, and I don’t hear any of it.
He makes a quiet and completely undone sound against my lips.
My own heartbeat pounds in my ears.
Reece’s hands cradle my face, steady and warm with the particular care of someone handling something precious.
I feel the solid certainty of him, the real weight of a person who has been here through every version of my fear and stayed anyway, and is still here, right now, mid-celebration, in front of the entire city, choosing this with the same deliberate intention he brings to everything that matters.
I press closer.
His arms slide around me.
And for the first time in longer than I can account for, I am not waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I’m not mapping the exit.
No standing half outside the moment, observing from a careful distance, prepared to detach the second it demands too much.
Fully here. Both feet grounded. No qualifiers.
When we finally break apart, we’re both breathing like we’ve done something strenuous, and the noise in the stadium has reached a pitch I’m not sure human ears were designed to process.
Reece is looking at me with those gold-flecked eyes and the most insufferably, beautifully certain expression I have ever seen on a person’s face.
“I told you,” he says.
“You tell me a lot of things.”
“I told you there was no other shoe.”
I look at him, this infuriating, patient, entirely too perceptive man, standing in the bleachers of his own stadium in full uniform with thousands of people watching, looking at me the way I’ve only ever seen people look at art they intend to keep.
“You were right,” I say.
His smile widens.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t say ‘I know.’ ”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“You were absolutely going to say that.”
He laughs, and it’s the rough-edged, warm-underneath one, the genuine one, and the crowd is still chanting something I can’t describe because all of my attention is accounted for.
He rests his forehead against mine. His thumb traces my jaw, unhurried, certain.
“This is not going to be simple,” I say.
“I know.”
“My father is going to have opinions.”
“He already does. He shared several of them at dinner.”
“The media is going to—”
“Ava.”
“Make it into something—”
“Ava.” He tilts my chin up. “We can handle all of it.”
“Together?”
“Together.”
I look at him, then glance out at the stadium around us, absurd, vast, and lit like the center of the known world, and I look at the life waiting on the other side of this moment, complicated, real, and entirely ours.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” I pull him back down. “Now stop talking.”
He does.
This time, the kiss is not urgent, desperate, or stolen between secrets. It isn’t the sharp, electric thing outside my studio or the careful, tentative thing in my apartment when we were both still pretending.
This one is mine.
This one is ours.
And somewhere in the stands, I’m fairly certain I hear my father’s groan above the roar of fifty-two thousand people, which is, honestly, exactly what he deserves.
I smile against Reece’s mouth.
He feels it and pulls back, eyes bright with laughter. “What?”
“My dad.”
A beat.
“I know,” he says. “I told him I was going to do something special at the end of the game.”
I stare at him. “You—”
“He needed to see it.” Reece’s grinning now, full and unguarded. “No more hiding. You said it yourself.”
For a second, I can only look at him. At this man who drove to my apartment at midnight in an inside-out shirt, who bought me Pad See Ew on a Tuesday, who let me press my art into his skin and trusted me with the parts of himself he keeps off-camera.
“I love you,” I say. The words arrive without calculation, without warning, without any of the maps I usually draw before entering territory this uncharted.
His whole face changes.
“Ava.”
“Don’t make it weird.”
“I’m not making it weird.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you’re about to be completely insufferable about something.”
“I love you too,” he says, simple and certain.
The way he throws a fastball, no hesitation, total commitment, all the way through.
“For what it’s worth, which I think is a lot, I’ve loved you since you rolled your eyes at the sound of fifty-two thousand people chanting my name and went back to fighting with your security gate. ”
“That was the first night.”
“I’m an efficient man.”
I laugh, and it comes out nothing like the careful, measured version I usually deploy in public, and I don’t care.
Below us, Martinez is doing something celebratory near home plate. Somewhere behind me, a camera shutter sounds. Tomorrow, there will be headlines, press conferences, and my father will have things to say over Sunday dinner for the foreseeable future.
And Reece is still holding my face in both hands in the middle of Wildcat Stadium, looking at me with the complete, undivided attention of a person who has decided, and I am looking back at him the same way.
No fear.
Not even a little.
“Come on,” he says. “I need to shower before the press conference.”
“I’ll wait,” I tell him.
He grins. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I take his hand. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And I mean it.
For the first time in years, I mean it with everything I have.
He squeezes my hand once, and we walk down the bleachers together, into the noise, the lights, and the rest of whatever comes next.
The other shoe never drops.
It turns out that some things are simply meant to hold.
THE END