Chapter 33 #2
First play, I came off a high screen, split the hedge, took one long step into the lane, and finished through contact with my left.
And-one.
The crowd noise hit like surf.
I backed up on defense with my chest already buzzing.
Not nerves.
Charge.
The next few minutes blurred into one clean instinct after another.
A steal on the wing.
A kick-out three.
A chasedown block that sent our bench halfway onto the court.
A transition finish where I hung in the air just long enough to hear the defender cuss before the ball dropped through.
By the second media timeout, Kane slapped the back of my head on the way to the bench.
“Emotionally moisturized!” he yelled over the noise.
I almost laughed in Coach’s face.
Coach, to his credit, didn’t ask.
He just looked at the stat sheet, looked at me, and said, “Keep your foot on their throat.”
I grabbed my water bottle.
“Happy to.”
But even in the middle of all that noise, all that adrenaline, some part of me stayed aware of the quieter truth underneath it:
Stella would’ve loved this.
Not the spotlight.
Not the attention.
The violence of the focus.
The way I was playing like I’d finally stopped apologizing for being good at something that mattered.
Maybe that was part of it too.
Loving her didn’t make me softer.
It made me stop lying.
At halftime I had eighteen.
By the time the second half tipped, I felt even better.
The game slowed.
Then obeyed.
I hit a pull-up from the elbow so clean it barely touched net.
Buried a corner three with a hand in my face.
Dove on the floor for a loose ball and came up grinning when I flipped it backward to Jalen for a dunk.
The bench lost its mind.
The road crowd started booing me every time I touched it.
Late in the fourth, tie game, under two minutes, Coach called a set for me at the top.
Clear side.
One defender.
Everything breathing hard.
I dribbled left.
Crossed back.
Saw him shift too high.
Rose.
The jumper felt perfect the second it left my hand.
Net.
Nothing else.
The sound that came out of our section was animal.
On the next possession I forced a bad pass, Kane got the steal, and we ended it at the line.
When the buzzer sounded, the whole arena turned into noise and flashing cameras and teammates pounding into my shoulders.
Somebody grabbed my jersey and yelled, “Thirty-two!”
Kane got both hands on my head and shouted, “This is what romance novels do to a man!”
I shoved him off, laughing now because I couldn’t help it.
Maybe he was right again.
Maybe that was the joke.
I’d spent so much time trying to wall off the parts of me that wanted too hard, loved too hard, felt too much.
And the second I stopped treating that as a flaw?
I became harder to beat.
In the handshake line, I caught a glimpse of myself on the arena jumbotron.
Sweat-soaked.
Breathing hard.
Eyes bright.
Alive.
Not just functioning.
Not just performing.
Alive.
And I knew exactly who had struck the match.
The locker room after a win smells like wet cotton, heat, and relief.
Guys were loud.
Music was worse.
Somebody threw a towel at my head and missed by a mile.
I sat at my locker, elbows on my knees, still coming down from the game, and finally checked my phone.
No new text from Stella yet.
Which was fine.
Probably she was showering.
With teammates.
Or studying.
Or asleep.
Or maybe she was lying on her bed replaying the same impossible almost from the gym and making my life harder from two hundred miles away without even trying.
Kane dropped down beside me, still buzzing.
“You know what’s sick?”
“You saying literally anything?”
He ignored that.
“You played better tonight because of her.”
I dried my face with the edge of a towel and looked at him.
He wasn’t smirking now.
Not really.
Just… noticing.
“Yeah,” I said after a second.
His eyebrows lifted.
That was the thing about honesty.
Once you let it in, it gets harder to shove back out.
He leaned against the locker behind us and nodded once.
“Huh.”
I looked down at my phone again.
At Stella’s name in the thread.
At Hurry back.
At the whole wildfire path we’d lit between us in less than forty-eight hours.
“Thought she’d mess me up,” I said quietly.
Kane followed my gaze.
“And?”
I smiled before I could stop it.
“She makes me better.”
He let that sit.
Then he grinned.
“I’m happy for you and her. And I have my own girl, now.”
“TR?”
“Huh?”
“Track girl.”
“Yeah, what can I say after T&T— the #TR hashtag blew up.”
I laughed and shoved him away.
But after he got up, after the noise swelled again and Coach started talking and guys started stripping tape off wrists and ankles, I sat there with that truth warm and settled in my chest.
Stella wasn’t a distraction.
She was the firestarter.
The spark.
The thing that hit steel and made it remember it could throw sparks too. Her love—if I was brave enough to call it that—didn’t take me off course.
It turned the whole damn road electric.
I unlocked my phone and typed before I could second-guess it.
Won.
Thirty-two.
You started it.
I looked at the message, smiled once, and added:
You’re not a distraction, Stells.
You’re gasoline.
Then I sent it.
I’m still half dressed when Jade calls.
Not texts.
Calls.
Which means two things immediately: one, she watched the game, and two, she’s about to be insufferable.
I’m sitting on the edge of the locker room bench in gray sweats with a towel around my neck, shoulder still warm from the postgame shower, when Leo’s name flashes underneath hers on FaceTime.
I answer and get both of them at once.
Leo is stretched out against what looks like a leather headboard, clean white tee, expensive hair doing that effortless-rich-boy thing I’ve always wanted to punch on principle.
Jade is folded into his side in some tiny black tank, barefaced, eyes sharp, looking exactly like the kind of girl who asks one question and somehow ends up with your entire soul on the table.
“Thirty-two?” Jade says by way of hello. “Who do you think you are?”
I smirk despite myself.
“Historically? Me.”
Leo laughs.
“There he is.”
His voice does something weird to my chest every time now. Familiar. Old life. Brotherhood I didn’t realize I’d miss until I was no longer living inside it.
Jade leans closer to the phone.
“We watched online. The stream was horrible. Your defense looked rude.”
“It was rude.”
“I know.” She points at the screen. “You looked happy, though. Which is disturbing.”
“You look good,” Leo agrees.
I shrug one shoulder.
“Road win.”
“No, can’t be just that,” Leo’s mouth curves.
“You look like you fit there.”
For a second I don’t say anything—Harvard had a certain kind of polish. Stanford has less ceremony and more sun and somehow feels less like wearing somebody else’s suit.
“I do.”
Leo nods like he already knew the answer.
“Yeah. I can tell.”
A beat passes.
Then he adds, quieter, “Miss having you here, though.”
I look down at the towel in my hands and huff a breath through my nose.
“Yeah,” I respond, “miss you too.”
Jade tilts her head between us.
“God, you two are exhausting.”
Leo grins. “You’re jealous.”
“Obviously.”
Then, because she is incapable of not cutting straight to the artery, she narrows her eyes at me and says, “Okay. What’s going on with you and Stella?”
There it is.
I lean back against the headboard. “Subtle.”
“I’m only asking because you look like a man who either found religion or got the girl.”
I glance away. Which is answer enough.
Jade makes a low, scandalized noise. “Oh my God.”
Leo laughs. “No way.”
I scrub a hand over my jaw. “It’s not done.”
That only makes Jade scoot closer to the screen.
“Spill the tea.”
“Jade.”
“Tristan.”
She’s grinning now, but it’s not mean. Just delighted in the specific way people get when they’ve watched two idiots orbit each other for years and are finally seeing movement.
Leo folds one arm behind his head.
“Start talking.”
So, I do.
Not every detail.
Not the ones I want to keep private because some things still feel too close to the bone.
But enough.
I tell them about Isa.
About ending it.
About how wrong it got the second I let convenience stand where honesty should’ve been.
About Stella in the coffee shop, at the gym, in my head, in every room before I was ready.
About the library.
Jade’s eyes sharpen there.
“What happened in the library?”
I exhale once and stare past the phone for half a second, replaying it.
“She saw Isa with me,” I say. “Didn’t make a scene. Didn’t cry. Didn’t beg. She just…” I shake my head. “She put Isa in her place in that terrifyingly calm Stella way. Told her, without really saying the words, that she wasn’t built to play backup in anybody’s story.”
Jade goes still.
Then she leans back slowly and says, “Wow.”
Leo glances at her.
“What?”
Her mouth twists a little.
“That sounds familiar.”
I look at her.
She gives me a dry, knowing smile.
“Not the exact details,” she says. “But the energy? Yeah. A little bit.”
There’s something in her face when she says it—not pride exactly, not shame either. Recognition. The kind that comes from becoming someone sharp because softness kept getting punished.
I nod once.
“Yeah,” I say. “That tracks.”
She laughs quietly and tucks one leg under herself.
“I think Stella and I would either hit it off immediately or set something expensive on fire.”
“You and Stella would absolutely hit it off,” I say.
Leo snorts. “We’re cooked, Vale.”
“They’d terrify everyone within a three-mile radius.”
“Correct,” Jade says.
Then her attention snaps back to me.
“So where are you now?”
I let my head fall back against the wall. “Still at the game. Locker room. We are leaving in ten, heading to the airport. She told me she wanted me back. I finally stopped acting like that was some kind of threat.” I look at the screen again. “I saw her before we left. In the gym. Early.”
Jade’s eyes widen.
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“Nothing?”
I laugh once.
“No. Not nothing.”