Chapter Twenty-Five
Alexei
The apartment is quiet.
After three hours of stadium noise and press conferences and teammates spraying champagne on each other like we’re in a frat movie, the silence hits me like a wall when the elevator doors open.
My ears are still ringing. My shoulder’s sore from where I took a hit in the third quarter that I haven’t told anyone about yet.
I’m carrying my gym bag in one hand and a bottle of champagne someone shoved at me on the way out in the other.
Ryleigh walks in ahead of me, kicking off her boots at the door the way she always does—one lands upright, one tips sideways.
She’s still in my jersey. Still has confetti in her hair.
I can see a few gold flecks caught in the honey strands near her temple, and she hasn’t noticed them yet, and I’m not going to tell her.
She pads barefoot into the kitchen and fills a glass of water from the tap, drinking it in one long pull. The ring catches the light from the city through the windows—this brief flash, there and gone—and I set my bag down and just stand there.
Watching her.
My fiancée. Barefoot in my kitchen at midnight, drinking water like it’s any other night, except she’s wearing my name on her back and my ring on her finger and two hours ago fifty thousand people watched me ask her to be mine.
She catches me staring. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.” She sets the glass down and leans against the counter, arms crossed, a small smile pulling at her lips.
“Can’t help it.”
“Try.”
“Don’t want to.”
She shakes her head, but she’s smiling wider now, and the kitchen is dim and quiet and it’s just us, and I still can’t believe this is my life.
I cross the room and set the champagne on the counter beside her. She looks at the bottle, then at me.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on some kind of strict athlete diet?”
“I just won a championship. I think I get one night off.”
“Fair point.” She reaches for two glasses from the cabinet—she knows where everything is, doesn’t have to think about it, her hand going straight to the right shelf—and sets them on the counter. I pop the cork, pour, and hand her one.
We stand there, hip to hip, leaning against the counter in the low light. The city glows through the windows. It’s quiet enough to hear the hum of the building.
“Your mom called me eleven times during the fourth quarter,” Ryleigh says, taking a sip.
“Only eleven? She’s showing restraint.”
“The twelfth time was a FaceTime. Ella was asleep on her lap, and your mom was crying and trying to whisper-yell at me in Russian. I understood maybe three words.”
“Let me guess. Alexei, baby, and something that sounded like a curse.”
“That’s exactly right.”
I grin. “She’s going to be impossible now. She’s been asking me when I was going to propose since the second time she met you.”
“The second time?”
“My mother has a sixth sense about these things. She told me after dinner. Said she could see it in the way I looked at you.”
Ryleigh traces the rim of her glass. “What way?”
“The way I’m looking at you right now.”
Her cheeks flush, and she takes another sip of champagne. “Smooth.”
“I try.”
We’re quiet for a minute. The good kind—where the silence isn’t empty; it’s just full of things neither of us needs to say out loud. I can hear a siren somewhere far below, and the fridge humming, and Ryleigh breathing.
“Ella rolled over by herself today,” she says. “Both directions. Your mom sent me a video during the second quarter, and I almost missed a play because I was watching it.”
“Both directions?”
“Belly to back and back to belly. Full rotational capability. Your mother narrates the whole thing like a nature documentary.”
I laugh—a real one, loose and easy—and it feels good. Everything feels good tonight. My body hurts, and I’m exhausted, and I should probably ice my shoulder, and none of it matters because Ryleigh said yes.
“My dad used to say something,” I tell her, leaning against the counter. “He didn’t talk much—he was always working, always tired—but sometimes at night he’d sit on the porch with a beer, and if you sat with him long enough, he’d say things.”
She turns to look at me.
“He said the way you know it’s real is you can’t picture going back. Not that you don’t want to—that you can’t. Like your brain won’t even construct the image anymore.”
The apartment is so quiet I can hear the heat come on.
“I can’t picture this apartment without your shoes by the door,” I say. “Or the kitchen without you humming in it. I can’t picture it without the crib, or the mornings without you stealing my T-shirts, or any of it. I can’t go back. My brain won’t do it.”
Her eyes are bright. She blinks, and a tear slides down her cheek, and she wipes it with the back of her hand.
“I’m scared,” she says.
“Of what?”
“Of deserving this.” Her voice is barely above a whisper.
“The girl who was standing outside that bar two months ago . . . she didn’t have any of this.
She didn’t have a family. She didn’t have a home.
She was just surviving. And now I’m here, and you’re here, and Ella’s here, and I have a ring on my finger and sisters who text me every day, and sometimes I wake up at 3 a.m. and check that it’s all still real. ”
I cross the room and take her face in my hands. “It’s real.”
“I know. I know it is. It’s just . . . a lot.”
I lean down and press my forehead against hers. “I know.”
She laughs, wet and quiet, and tips her face up to kiss me. Soft at first. Salt from her tears on her lips and champagne on her tongue and her fingers curling into the front of my shirt.
Then not so soft.
Her hand slides up my chest, around my neck, into my hair, and the kiss deepens into something slower and more deliberate. I pull her closer, my hands finding her waist, and she makes a sound against my mouth—this quiet, need-filled thing—that lights me up from the inside.
“I believe,” she murmurs against my lips, “that we have a championship to celebrate.”
“Is that so?”
“Mm-hm.” She pulls back just enough to look at me, and her eyes are dark and her cheeks are flushed and she’s biting her bottom lip in a way that makes my pulse spike. “Take me to bed.”
I grin. “Bossy.”
“Learned from the best.”
I lift her, and she wraps her legs around my waist, laughing, and I carry her down the hall to our room—the way I did the first time, the way I plan to do for the rest of my life—and the apartment is quiet and the city glows and somewhere across town our daughter is sleeping at her grandmother’s house.
Our daughter. Our home. Our life.
Not bad for a guy who was supposed to keep walking.