Page 164 of Gamebreaker

"After our first fight, I pulled up your Instagram."

"I know. You mentioned..."

"I went back to the beginning."

I stared at her.

"All of it," she said. "Every post. The coming out ones, and the ones from before that, when you were still figuring it out and posting sunsets with captions that were trying a little too hard to sound like you had it together. And then the ones after, when you stopped trying to sound like anyone and you were just you." Her jaw moved. "I did that in my kitchen. For an hour. After a fight I'd started. After I'd decided you were shallow."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't.

"There was a post from about a year and a half ago," she said. "A mug of coffee on your counter. Early morning light. The caption was first morning in a very long time that felt like mine. That was all it said." Her eyes changed. "I put my phone down and went to bed. And I told myself it didn't mean anything. That I was only looking because I felt guilty. I kept telling myself that for weeks. Even while I was checking your stories to see if you'd gotten the oat milk foam again. Even when I caught myself looking forward to fighting with you. Even when I was texting you basketball rules at eleven at night, because..." Her voice dropped very low. "Because I wanted to know what you thought about everything. Because I wanted to know what went on in your head. Because talking to you was the best part of my day, and I didn't have a single other person in my life I could say that about."

She pressed her lips together.

"The night at the bar," she said. "When you told me you wanted to make another terrible decision with me. I knew. I knew exactly what I was feeling and what it meant and what it would cost me to be honest about it." Her eyes stayed on mine. "And I felt it anyway. I couldn't stop it. I tried. It didn't work."

The room had gone very still.

"I loved you before I knew what to do with it," she said. "I loved you when it was inconvenient and terrifying, and I had no idea what came next. I loved you through one perfect night, and I loved you through watching you walk out in the morning, knowing it wasn't enough. I loved you through three weeks of playing the best basketball of my life and not feeling a single second of it." She breathed out slowly. "I posted tonight because I had to. The hiding had already cost me more than coming out ever could. But I also posted because of that last line. Because even if you'd decided you were done with me, I needed it to exist somewhere. That you were worth twelve years of fear. That you were worth more than that."

She held my gaze.

"And you are, Harper," she said. "You are worth more than that. You have been since the beginning, since you looked up from your phone in that tunnel and told me exactly what you thought of me without blinking. You are the most..." She stopped, then started again differently. "Do you know what I kept thinking about, these last three weeks? Going home alone after games, lying in a bed that didn't smell like you anymore? I'd think about the way you argue. The way you go after a point you believe in like you're personally offended the universe hasn't agreed with you yet. I kept thinking about how you talk with your hands when you're passionate, and then you notice you're doing it, and you don't stop. You just own it. I thought about how you laughed the first time I said anything that genuinely surprised you. I couldn't stop thinking about these ordinary details, and I'd think, this is what I'm afraid of losing. Not the night. Not the feeling. You. Specifically. The whole, actual, unreduced version of you."

I realized my face was wet again.

I hadn't noticed when that happened.

"You went back to the beginning of my Instagram," I said.

"Yes."

"You read every caption."

"Yes."

"Cameron." My voice came out in pieces. "That is genuinely the most romantic and slightly unhinged act anyone has ever committed on my behalf."

Her expression cracked open. It wasn't quite a smile. It was the feeling underneath a smile, the relief that lives below everything else.

"Harper."

"Yes, Cam. I know."

I looked at her across the three feet of string-lit space between the couch and the armchair, and I thought about the coffee mug photo. I thought about her alone in her kitchen at some late hour, scrolling back through two years of my life, finding that caption, putting her phone down. I thought about how long she'd been carrying this. How many of the same moments I'd been collecting, she'd been collecting too, both of us silent, both of us completely sure we were the only one.

I thought about her in that kitchen under one light while I sat in my car at the bottom of her driveway, both of us aching for each other through a single pane of dark glass.

"I've been in love with you for longer than I've ever let myself admit," I said. "You were the first person who saw past the performance without my permission. And then you liked what was underneath it. And I didn't know what to do with that, because nobody had ever liked what was underneath it before. Not my mother. Not Henry. Not anybody." My voice gave out. "Just you."

She crossed the three feet between us.

I didn't move. She knelt in front of the armchair so we were eye to eye, her hands resting on the arms on either side of me, and she looked at me the way she'd looked at me at halftime. Except now there was no distance and no crowd and no wall left between us and whatever came next.

"Harper," she said quietly.

"Cam," I whispered.