39. Chapter 39 — Ty
Ruiz nods once and keeps walking.
Wren disappears back into the crowd. The cameras drift to the next story. The celebration keeps going all around us.
Just Ava and me. Confetti still falling. Nowhere either of us has to be.
***
She pulls back enough to look at me.
Confetti in her hair. Stadium lights on her face. That composed expression completely gone — something open and bright where it used to be, the version she keeps behind everything else.
We said it last night. Private. Just us, in the dark, the city glittering outside.
Now she's going to say it here.
I can see her deciding to.
"I'm in love with you," she says. Out loud. On a Super Bowl field. On Valentine's Day. With a camera three feet away and her father twenty feet behind her.
Not because I need to hear it again.
Because she wants the world to have it.
My face does the thing. The full open thing. No dimmer. Nothing held back.
"I know," I say. "I've known since the gala."
She stares at me. "You did not."
"The drink." I look at her. "Nobody throws a drink at someone they don't feel something about."
"That is the most—"
I kiss her.
In front of the cameras. In front of everyone. In front of the whole world and every person in this franchise and Coach Ruiz who just nodded and kept walking.
***
When I pull back, Wren is beside us.
Phone in hand. Expression serene. The specific calm of a woman who has already handled everything.
"Statement's ready when you are." A beat. "Also there are approximately forty cameras pointed at you right now."
"I know," I say.
"Do you want to say anything?"
I look at Ava. She looks at me. I open my mouth.
"Don't," she says.
I grin. "I wasn't going to say anything stupid."
"You were absolutely going to say something stupid."
"Something true."
"Same thing," she says. "Not right now."
Wren looks between us. Closes her phone. "I'll handle it."
She walks away. I watch her go.
"She's very good at her job," I say.
"Yes." Ava looks up at me. "That's why we like her."
***
The team finds us eventually.
Prentiss first — of course it's Prentiss — wrapping both arms around me from behind and nearly taking us both down. Marcus is behind him. Moving with that deliberate economy he brings to everything.
He doesn't say anything. He grips my shoulder once. Looks at Ava. Nods.
That's the whole thing, from Marcus.
Dante is three steps back. He catches my eye across the noise. Does the thing with his chin — one small upward tilt.
I nod back. The conversation in a parking lot at six in the morning. The answer that would be the same in ten years. I understand it now in a way I didn't then.
Jax finds me last. Stands beside me for a moment. Doesn't say anything.
"Valentine's Day," I finally say.
He looks at me. "Wren is going to think I planned this."
"Did it work out for you?"
He almost says something. Doesn't. Looks out at the field instead — the confetti, the cameras, the whole franchise in motion.
"Yeah," he says. "It did."
***
Later.
The hotel. The quiet after the noise. The specific silence of a room when the city outside is still celebrating and in here there's nothing left to manage.
No clock. No alarm to set. No system. No careful distance.
Just the specific relief of two people who carried something enormous, finally, completely, setting it down.
***
She's still in her game-day clothes when we get back to the room. Across the field Sara Reed has a press credential and the expression of a journalist who just watched a story confirm itself.
She opens her notebook. Writes one line. Closes it.
Looks at Dante.
He tilts his head. Leave it.
She puts the notebook away.
fix that.
She fixes mine. We're not careful about it. We're not quiet about it either — the city outside is loud enough that nobody's listening anyway.
This is different from every other time. No clock running. No alarm already set in the back of my head. No part of either of us still calculating the exit.
Just this. Just her. The full weight of three months of wanting something I couldn't say out loud, finally out loud.
We lie in the dark with the LA noise bleeding through the glass. I feel like I could sleep for a week.
I don't sleep.
***
She tells me what her father said to her privately.
Not at dinner. Not in his office. Quietly, privately, when it was just the two of them.
Be happy, Ava. That's the whole thing.
I'm quiet for a moment.
"That's what he said to me about Indiana too," I say. "Not in those words. But that was the thing."
She looks at me.
"He asked about my dad," I say. "And then he said — one sentence, the way he says everything — 'The ones who love you badly still love you. That counts for something.'"
She closes her eyes.
"That's very him," she says.
"Yeah."
I look at the ceiling. The city outside is still going — noise carrying through the glass, the particular sound of LA on a night when something happened that everyone wants to be near.
In here it's quiet.
Just the two of us. The thing we built. The whole rest of it ahead.
I turn my head. She's already looking at me.
"Hi," I say.
She laughs. The real one — sharp and bright, entirely hers.
"You already said that."
"I know." I look at her. "I'll probably keep saying it."
She rolls her eyes. Doesn't move away.
Outside, the city keeps going. In here, the confetti has settled somewhere we'll find for weeks — in jacket pockets, in luggage, in the pages of things.
Small evidence of a night that was real.
I think about a bedroom in Indiana. A Saturday afternoon. A kid watching film and dreaming about exactly this, not knowing yet what this would actually look like.
It looked like her.
It looked like this.