“What’s on your mind tonight?” she asked.
“Too much,” I breathed out.
Rayah knocked her shoulder into mine. “You wanna talk about it? I’ve been told I’m a pretty good listener—not just a pretty face.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” I admitted.
“You and Eva …” Her voice was so low, the ocean almost swallowed it. “That distance can’t be easy.”
I let out a sharp breath. “You’d know. Tash is in China, right?”
Rayah looked over her shoulder at me, one brow arched, the moon catching in her eyes. Slowly, she smiled. Not the sly grin she wore when she was testing me. This smile was different. Softer. Wistful.
“Yeah,” she said. “Guangdong. It’s a twelve-hour time difference with spotty Wi-Fi. Some days it feels like we’re on different planets.”
“So how do you make it work?” I asked.
Rayah let out a laugh, not mocking, but surprised. “Because it’s Tash,” she said, like that explained everything. “We’ve been at this since freshman year. Dorms, team buses, sneaking out after curfew ...” She shook her head as if grinning at the memory. “When the pros started calling,” she continued, “everyone thought it would break us. Different teams, different cities, different countries. But it didn’t. If anything, it only made us stronger. It made us choose each other, over and over.”
Could it really be that easy? To keep choosing each other, over and over, through every season, every setback, every time?
“She’s worth the distance,” Rayah said simply. “That’s all it is. If you love someone enough, the miles don’t scare you. You just figure it out.”
I kicked at the sand, my sneakers sinking into the softer part of the shore. “And you never get tempted?”
Rayah snorted. “Please. I’m surrounded by hot, athletic, queer womenall the time.Everyone’s a temptation.” She tipped her head toward me, teasing. “You know that better than anyone.”
I snorted at the description, but she grinned and went on.
“But here’s the thing: when you’ve been with someone that long, when you know who you’d still want next to you after the injuries, after the trades, after the bullshit contracts—all the restis just noise. It’s not even temptation anymore. It’s background static.”
I didn’t say anything right away. I thought of Eva, and the perfectly quiet moments when it was only the two of us—no outside pressures, no disappointed family, no brand endorsements, no lurking ex-girlfriends.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “You just have to quiet the noise.”
Rayah bumped her shoulder into mine, an easy, friendly gesture. “Exactly. Don’t let anybody make you think distance changes what’s real.”
Rayah’s words were encouraging and much needed. But the ache in my chest whispered that noise wasn’t always so easy to silence.
Chapter
Thirty
The first photo hit my feed before I’d even started on my second cup of coffee.
I was still in shorts from my morning run, the end of my ponytail damp from the Miami morning. I leaned against the kitchen counter, scrolling through my phone and half-listening to Jazz gripe about how Cuban coffee was too sweet, even when it’s not actually sweet. She dug through my pantry like she lived there and not the apartment next door, but my attention snagged on a familiar face framed by gold and black.
Eva.
She was wearing a black gown with a plunging neckline, her dark hair swept up in a twist that showed off the perfect line of her neck. She wasn’t looking at the camera, but the lighting caught her like it had been planned for her skin alone.
My stomach churned uncomfortably. Kate Gillespie stood just to her right in a champagne-colored dress, angled close enough that her bare arm brushed Eva’s.
It was the kind of photo that made you feel like you’d interrupted something private. Except it wasn’t private at all. There were at least three hundred comments under the image, half from sports accounts reposting it with captions likePowerduoand half from people speculating if I’d been cropped out of the image.
I had known Eva was going to another fancy event. She’d texted me a picture of her in her dress beforehand with a short text about missing me. But I hadn’t known Kate would be her Plus-One again.
I should have stopped—I should have turned off my phone and taken a shower, orhell, even gone for another run—but I kept scrolling until my algorithm betrayed me again. I stopped on a second photo.
