Page 139

Still not over it.

My heart had never been so completely and utterly broken.

18

This Complicates Things

Cam

Twenty-six points.

Thirteen assists.

Plus-twenty-two in thirty-four minutes of playoff basketball, in Game 1 of a semifinal, the kind of line our analysts would probably call the best individual performance in the franchise this postseason.

I sat at my locker in the empty locker room, still in my uniform, and felt numb to all of it.

The arena had gone quiet, like arenas do after a crowd empties out, that hollow, echoing stillness of a theater after the audience leaves. Somewhere above me, twenty-three thousand people were filing out into the night, carrying the win home with them, and I was sitting here with my elbows on my knees, staring at the floor, trying to remember how to breathe.

Her hair tie was on the shelf of my locker, where I'd put it before warm-ups so I could see it. Black, a little stretched out. I'd worn it on my wrist every day for a week. I reached up, took it down, and slid it back on, over the coordinates of the house I grew up in.

She'd been here tonight.

Leather jacket. Dark jeans. Hair down, curls loose around her face. I'd only ever seen her hair like that in private, in the early morning, when she'd stopped performing and just existed. She'd looked beautiful, and it bypassed every defense I had, the way she always did.

She hadn't worn a jersey. Not Trish's. Not anyone's.

No name on her at all.

I didn't know why that was the detail that kept cutting me open. Maybe because a week ago, I'd wanted to strip Trish's name off her back and put mine there instead, and tonight, she'd come with nobody's. Like she'd finally understood what I'd been too much of a coward to say out loud. She wasn't anyone's. Least of all mine.

She'd looked like she hadn't slept in a week.

I knew what that looked like. I'd been seeing it in my own mirror every morning.

The three seconds at halftime had nearly destroyed me.

I'd been walking toward the bench, already running adjustments in my head, already calculating what we needed to fix defensively in the third quarter, and then I'd looked up, and she was there, and every calculation dissolved. I stopped walking. I just stood at the edge of the court like I'd forgotten what my legs were for, looking at Harper DuBose sitting courtside in my world and wanting her there so badly it registered as physical pain.

She'd looked back.

Three seconds of complete honesty, none of it hidden, none of it managed. Two people admitting across fifteen feet of hardwood that they were both suffering and neither of them knew how to stop.

Then I'd looked away. Because I had to. Because my team needed me, and twenty-three thousand people were watching, and I couldn't afford to stand at the edge of the court falling apart in front of all of them.

I'd nearly missed a free throw after halftime. I shoot ninety-three percent from the line. I hadn't missed one under pressure in three seasons.

And after the final buzzer, on my way off the floor, I'd seen her one more time.

She was in the corridor past the tunnel with Mia, half turned away, already leaving. I was twenty feet behind her, at the mouth of the tunnel, with a security guard at my shoulder and a camera crew from the broadcast still filming the team walking off. And she'd stopped. She'd turned around and looked back toward the tunnel, just once, like she knew.

I'd stepped behind the guard.

I'd stood there, six foot three, the captain of this team, and hid behind a man in a yellow jacket so the woman I loved wouldn't see me, because if she saw me I would have walked to her, and if I walked to her, the cameras would have seen.

She'd turned around and left.

My phone buzzed on the bench beside me.