Chapter 26
Full Circle
Jax finally wore Nina down in April, after a full semester of increasingly elaborate, increasingly unsuccessful attempts, and the team took the whole thing as validating proof that their captain-in-waiting was, in fact, capable of genuine romantic patience when properly motivated.
"I blame you two directly," Nina told Tessa and Beck, sitting across from them at the diner where Jax had finally, successfully, asked her out properly.
"You made it look so easy. Bad boy turns into golden retriever, everyone swoons, happily ever after.
I had unreasonable expectations walking into this. "
"Jax was never really a bad boy," Beck said, grinning. "He just talks a big game. Softest guy on the team, honestly. Cried at a dog commercial in October."
"I did not cry."
"You cried, Jax. I have a video."
Tessa watched the two of them bicker, easy and warm, and thought about how strange the whole year looked in retrospect — a boy with an airtight reputation who'd broken every single rule of it for her, a best friend who'd crossed states to keep a promise and then found her own version of this, unexpected and specific, in a goalie who couldn't stop grinning around her.
None of it had gone the way any of them expected walking into September.
"Can I tell you something?" Beck said quietly, once Nina and Jax had wandered off toward the jukebox, still bickering happily.
"I used to think love was supposed to announce itself.
Fireworks, big moments, undeniable proof.
I spent two years waiting for that feeling and never finding it, which is honestly probably why I never let anything get serious.
I thought if it wasn't loud, it wasn't real. "
"And now?"
"Now I think the loud stuff is just the marketing.
The real thing is quieter. It's a Tuesday.
It's you falling asleep on my shoulder during a movie you insisted you weren't tired for.
It's learning your coffee order without being told.
It's realizing, somewhere around February, that I hadn't thought about leaving in months, and it hadn't even occurred to me to notice the absence of the thought until right then.
" He took her hand across the table. "I spent two years building a reputation around never staying.
I don't think I've fully said thank you for teaching me the other thing was actually possible. "
"You don't have to thank me for that. I got the same lesson in reverse. I spent a year convinced nobody could actually choose me without an angle. You taught me the opposite is possible too."
They sat there a long while, hands linked across a sticky diner table, watching their best friends argue happily by the jukebox, and Tessa thought that this — the ordinary, unglamorous, entirely unremarkable comfort of a booth at a diner on a Tuesday — was worth more than every grand gesture either of them could have staged.
The gestures had gotten them here. This was what they'd actually been building toward the whole time.
? ? ?
By the end of freshman year, Tessa had become enough of a fixture in Beck's friend group that Jax started, half-jokingly but with increasing frequency, referring to her as the seventh member of the team, a title that stuck faster than anyone expected.
"You've been to more team dinners than half the actual bench," he told her one Sunday, sliding a plate of pasta across the table with the easy familiarity of someone who'd stopped thinking of her as a guest months ago. "At this point you should get a jersey, honestly, it's overdue."
"I would wear that jersey with tremendous, genuine pride, for the record."
"I'm serious. We're doing it. Team vote, I already have Coach's blessing, don't ask how."
They did, in fact, do it — Beck showed up not long after with a custom jersey, her name stitched across the back above his own number in the same block lettering as the official team gear, the whole team gathered in the living room to watch her open it like it was Christmas morning, phones out to record the reaction.
She cried, again, for what felt like the fifteenth time that semester, and Jax declared, with great ceremony, standing on the coffee table despite three separate requests to get down, that she was officially inducted, whatever that meant in practical terms, and the whole apartment dissolved into its usual chaos of shouting and stolen garlic bread and someone starting an impromptu chant of her name.
She thought, watching it all unfold around her, pasta sauce on her chin, about how strange and wonderful it was that this loud, ridiculous, deeply loyal group of boys had simply absorbed her without ever once making her audition for the space, without a single test she had to pass first. Nobody here had ever done the math on what she was worth to them, had never once calculated the cost-benefit of keeping her around.
Nobody here had ever made her feel like she needed to earn her seat at the table twice, or apologize for taking up the space she already occupied.
"You okay?" Beck asked, catching her staring off into the noise of it, his hand finding hers under the table on instinct.
"I'm perfect," she said, and pulled the jersey on right there over her sweater, ignoring Jax's whoop of approval from across the room, the fabric still stiff and new against her skin.
"I just keep thinking about how much I almost missed, if I'd kept my head down the way I promised myself I would freshman year, back in that first dorm room, making that list in the car.
If I'd let the fear win completely, the way it almost did more than once. "
"You didn't, though. Not in the end."
"No," she said, smiling at him, at the chaos of the room behind him, at the whole loud, chosen life she'd built almost by accident out of the wreckage of everything she'd lost. "I really didn't, in the end. I got so close, more times than I've probably told you, but I really didn't."