Page 133 of Gamebreaker

I was reaching for the deadbolt when I saw it, half hidden under the edge of the entry table, right where my keys had hit the floor last night.

A hair tie. Black, a little stretched out, with a single dark curly strand still wound around it.

I'd pulled it out of her hair against this door. I remembered doing it. Her ponytail coming loose in my hand, her curls falling around her shoulders, the way she'd gasped like I'd undressed her, before I'd so much as touched the jersey.

I crouched down and picked it up, and I didn't stand back up.

I knelt there on my own floor in the dark, holding the elastic band like it was the most fragile gift anyone had ever handed me, and I finally fell apart.

Not quietly. Not with any control at all. The sound came up out of me from some place I hadn't known I had, ugly and enormous, and it echoed off all that glass and all those high ceilings and all that clean, expensive emptiness, and there was no one there to hear it. That was the point of this house. I'd chosen it so that no one would ever hear me.

I'd cried when we won the second championship, and then years later, I'd cried for a beautiful woman I'd carelessly insulted at a charity gala. I hadn't cried since.

I cried now until my ribs ached, on my knees in the entryway, with my forehead against the door she'd walked out of.

Later, I lay on my back in the clean sheets and stared at the ceiling the way I had at dawn. The city was dark now. My body ached. I had trained to exhaustion, and felt numb, then cried and felt all of it.

Harper's perfume was still there, faint, underneath the laundered cotton. I'd changed these sheets this morning. I'd washed the old ones on hot. It shouldn't still be there.

It was still there. Maybe it was in my head. Maybe it was in the house now, in the walls, the way she was.

The hair tie was on my right wrist.

I'd slid it on without thinking, and now it sat just above my tattoo. The coordinates of the house I grew up in, inked into my skin when I was twenty-three and homesick in a new city, so I'd always know where I came from. Providence. My mother's kitchen. The boxes for the deli. Sunday dinners loud enough to rattle the windows. The only place I'd ever been completely myself.

I turned my wrist in the dark and looked at them together. The way home had always been written on me. And the place it had moved to last night, without asking my permission.

I just need you to be it in daylight too.

Ten words. Simple. Clear. Devastatingly fair. Not a demand. Not an ultimatum dressed up in anger. Just the honest expression of a need she'd earned the right to have. A woman who'd already paid the highest possible price for living honestly, who'd lost her family for the courage to be herself, and who'd still stood in my doorway and told me that I mattered.

What would it look like to be brave enough to meet her there?

What would it feel like to post a photo that was real? To walk into a room with Harper beside me without running the PR math? To answer a question at a press conference without the practiced escape I'd spent a decade perfecting?

I didn't know. I couldn't see it clearly yet. But I could feel the shape of it somewhere ahead of me, the way you feel a teammate cutting backdoor before you see her. Lighter than this. A life where I didn't have to keep two versions of myself alive at once.

My eyes grew heavy.

And then it came to me the way the truest shots always had. Not forced, not planned. Off the dribble, in rhythm, the release already happening before I knew I'd decided to take it.

I love her.

Not might. Not could. Not someday, if the timing is right, if the sponsors approve, if the world is ready.

I love her.

I love the way she talks with her hands, like her words are too big to fit in her mouth. I love that she's never been quiet for one day in her life. I love that she calls me Captain Miserable and that it somehow actually means I see you. I love that she picked basketball as a safeword and laughed at herself for it. I love that she trusted me with her whole body after the world had given her every reason not to trust anyone at all. I love the dimple she only shows when she forgets to perform for the world. I love that she stood in my doorway, breaking apart, and still told me to eat real meals.

I love her the way I loved the game when I was eight years old, before it was a job, before it was a brand. When it was just a ball and a driveway and my father rebounding for me in the dark, and the pure, uncomplicated joy of finding out what my awkward, lanky body could do. The kind of love you don't choose. The kind that chooses you, and changes the shape of your whole life around it.

I had spent twelve years being seen by millions and known by almost no one.

She'd known me in one night.

And I'd sent her home in another woman's jersey.

I love her.