Chapter 9 #2
They is usually two people, max. Maybe three if someone’s bored. Tonight it’s a small cluster that somehow feels bigger than it is.
Cameras are pointed in my general direction. A boom mic hovers just overhead. A reporter I recognize from earlier in the season—same suit, same voice—locks eyes with me and smiles like he’s pleased we’re meeting again.
“How did you feel about your role down the stretch tonight?” he asks.
Not about being ready. Not about getting the opportunity. Your role.
I answer automatically. Talk about trusting the system. Staying locked in. Doing what Coach asks.
He nods. “You mentioned last week that you’ve been focusing on defensive reads. Was that something you felt paid off tonight?”
I pause for half a beat. Last week? He remembers what I said last week.
“Yeah,” I say, careful now. “I think so. I’m trying to be more disciplined, especially late in the game.”
Another reporter jumps in before the first can respond. “Do you feel like teams are starting to game-plan for you?”
The question lands sideways in my chest.
Game-plan.
For me.
I keep my face neutral. “I think teams game-plan for everyone in the rotation,” I say. “My job is just to be ready.”
“Coach seemed to trust you in that final stretch,” someone else adds. “How does that feel, earning that kind of confidence?”
I almost say surreal. I almost say terrifying. Instead, I say, “It means a lot. I’m grateful.”
Grateful is safe. Grateful doesn’t give them anything sharp to hold on to.
When they finally let me go, my jaw aches like I’ve been clenching it without realizing.
Back in the locker room, Marco raises his eyebrows. “Look at you,” he says. “Getting follow-ups.”
“Don’t start,” I mutter, shoving my stuff into my bag.
He grins. “Too late. They remember your name now. That’s how it begins.”
“Please don’t say that like it’s a horror movie.”
He laughs. “It is.”
The next few games blur together—airports, buses, hotels, arenas that all look the same if you squint.
Someone yells across the room. Someone laughs too loud. A speaker thumps bass like it’s trying to rattle the tiles loose.
“They know now,” I mutter under my breath, mostly to myself, recalling Rafe’s words from the other day.
Marco hears me anyway. “Don’t say it like you’re mad,” he calls from two lockers down. “This is what you wanted.”
I flip him off without looking. Because he’s right. And I hate that he’s right. The thing is—my rise still makes sense to my brain. It’s incremental. It has steps. It has patterns. It’s the League in a nutshell: earn an inch, hold it, earn another.
Rafe’s rise doesn’t do steps. It doesn’t creep. It fucking sprints.
Steel Saints goes from doing well to what the hell is happening in about five minutes flat. One week they’re thrilled to sell out a few venues, the next they’re adding dates so fast it makes my head spin trying to keep track. It’s like someone cracked open a dam and the whole thing just… rushes.
I keep getting alerts—new show announced, second show added, third show added. Cities stack up on his calendar like bad Tetris. Nothing fits. Everything gets shoved in anyway.
Rafe sends me screenshots sometimes, half proud, half panicked.
Rafe: Look at this routing!
Rafe: Who decided this? The fuck?
Rafe: I’m going to die in Ohio.
Me: You’re not allowed to die in Ohio.
Rafe: Also, Eli made us do “celebration shots,” and now I’m vibrating.
Rafe: If I send you a voice note and it’s nonsense, no it isn’t
He reacts with a string of laughing emojis, then disappears for six hours because he’s probably being pulled into another interview, another photoshoot, another meet-and-greet in some fluorescent hallway.
I watch it happen through my phone like everyone else—like I’m a fan with better access.
Clips sent at stupid hours that I open under my hotel sheets with my brightness turned all the way down so I don’t wake up angry.
Short shaky videos from the side of the stage.
Backstage selfies where his face is flushed and sweaty and lit wrong, like he’s taken them mid-run because he can’t stop moving long enough to breathe.
Voice notes that are half laughter, half disbelief.
“Babe,” he says, voice coming in crackly over the noise, “I swear to God—they were screaming the words back at us. Not just one song. Every fucking song on the damn album.”
I hear the clink of glass before I hear his laugh again.
Someone in the background whoops. Someone else shouts his name like they’re calling him toward the fun.
He sounds like the night is swallowing him whole, and he’s letting it.
Then he turns the phone so I can hear it.
The crowd. It hits me so hard I have to sit up.
Thousands of voices, loud and raw, singing something that used to be just Rafe in our apartment with a guitar on his knee. That used to be him messing up lyrics and laughing at himself and looking at me like I was the only person worth performing for.
Now it’s—this. Big enough to swallow him whole.
My chest aches in a way I don’t have a word for. Pride, obviously. Pride so sharp it makes my throat sting. But also something else. Something meaner. Something like… mine, even though I know that’s not fair.
The last note in the recording warps as he moves, and then I hear his laugh again. Bright. Breathless. High on it. When the voice note ends, I stare at the screen longer than I should. Like I can reach through and pull him back.
Hours later—when my night is finally quiet and his is just winding down—I get the softer messages. The ones that aren’t adrenaline. The ones that feel like him exhaling.
Tonight’s no different.
Rafe: I miss you.
I stare at that for a second before answering, thumbs hovering like the words might bite. I miss him so badly sometimes it feels physical. Like a bruise. Like pressure in my ribs. But if I say it like that, he’ll hear the crack in it.
So I keep it simple.
Me: Miss you too.
It isn’t dramatic. It’s just true.
We get very good at missing each other.
Not in a romantic, tragic way either. More like… a skill. Something we work at because we don’t have another choice.
Our schedules slide past one another like they’re actively avoiding contact. When they line up, it’s never for long, and we both know it before we even see each other. That’s the worst part.
The anticipation comes with an expiration date attached.
A night here. A morning there. A meal eaten too fast. A shower shared because it saves time.
Sex that’s half laughter and half desperation because one of us has to leave in three hours and neither of us wants to be the one who says it out loud first.
We don’t talk about how ridiculous it is. We just do it.
The apartment helps. Kind of.
When Rafe’s home, the place feels alive in the way it always does when he’s in it. His shoes kicked off in stupid places. Music bleeding through his headphones. His unfinished coffee abandoned on the counter because he forgot it existed the second he got distracted.
He leaves little traces everywhere like breadcrumbs.
When he’s not home, the apartment feels paused—like it’s holding its breath.
I don’t move his stuff. Not because I’m sentimental, but because it feels like tempting fate. Like if I put his hoodie away or shift his guitar case even an inch, the universe will decide he doesn’t have to come back.
Which is insane. I know that.
Still.
But it’s the nights that are brutal. Not because they’re lonely in a poetic way—lonely in real life is mostly just annoying.
It’s the hotel beds that are either rock hard or so soft they swallow your spine. It’s pillows that never sit right under your neck. It’s air-conditioning that smells like cleaning chemicals and failure. It’s the fact that I’m always too wired to sleep, even when I’m exhausted.
I fall asleep with my phone in my hand more nights than I don’t. Wake up to messages time-stamped hours earlier and feel that split second of panic—like I missed something important. Like I missed him.
Sometimes we actually talk. Real talking. Long calls where neither of us wants to be the first to hang up, so we circle around nothing, voices quieter and softer until we’re basically breathing into the line.
Other times it’s quick check-ins layered over exhaustion.
“Did you eat?”
“You sound wrecked.”
“Text me when you land.”
“Are you safe?”
“I love you.”
That one never drops. If anything, it hits harder now. Not because we’re fragile, but because we’re not. Because we keep doing this anyway—keep choosing each other even when it would be easier to stop trying so hard.
And some nights, after we hang up, I lie there staring at the ceiling and think: This is what people mean when they say love is work. Not candles and anniversaries and slow dancing. Work.
The thing that finally knocks the wind out of me isn’t big. It’s stupid. It’s one of those tiny, petty little cuts you don’t even feel until you look down and realize you’ve been bleeding.
I’m in a hotel room—Phoenix, I think. Or maybe I just played Phoenix. Everything in here is beige enough that it barely matters. Beige walls. Beige carpet. Beige curtains trying to pretend they’re not curtains. The kind of room you could swap with ten other rooms and no one would know.
The air conditioner rattles like it’s struggling for purpose. The numbers on the clock glow red and accusatory.
2:17 a.m.
I should be asleep. I need to be asleep. We fly in the morning. My legs are still heavy from the game. My shoulder aches where someone got me on a drive and smiled about it after like it was friendly.
But my body won’t let go.
Every time I close my eyes, I see the court. The crowd. The line. That moment right before the ball leaves my hand when everything goes silent in my head and I can hear my own heartbeat like it’s mic’d.
I roll over, punch the pillow into something vaguely workable, and stare at the ceiling.
Nothing.