FAZER LOGINNOAH'S POVI don't do things without a reason. Everything I do has a calculation behind it example who I talk to, what I say, where I stand during press interviews, which interviews I take and which ones I shut down without explanation. Coach calls it emotional discipline. Jax calls it being a control freak. I call it survival, which is a word nobody on this team knows I use for it because I've never said it out loud.The point is I'm controlled.Which is the only reason I'm still trying to figure out why I was on the other side of that court one second and on my knees in front of Elena Voss the next, with no memory of the distance in between.I don't have a calculation for that. I've been trying to build one for the last three hours and it's not working.It started before the ball even hit her. That's the part I keep coming back to. I heard the play go wrong and I was already moving before I'd located where the ball was going. Some part of me had already run the math without telling
ELENA'S POVOkay so in my defense, I was exactly where I was supposed to be.I need that on record before anything else because knowing Noah he has already constructed a version of this story where I wandered into the middle of a live drill waving my camera around like I had a death wish, and I refuse to let that narrative exist unchallenged.I was behind the tape so part of my body was past that orange line. I was doing my job, minding my business, being a completely responsible member of the media team and the ball found me anyway, because that is the kind of week I am having.It was the second morning at the arena. Everyone running harder than the play required, making choices that were more spectacular than necessary, performing the version of themselves that looked best from the upper rows where the clipboards were.Good material, actually Ethan had this way of moving on the court and I'd gotten three frames I was genuinely proud of. Dr. Reyes was going to have nothing to complai
NOAH'S POV I've played basketball in front of thirty thousand people. I've played with a stress fracture in my left hand that I didn't tell the coaching staff about until after we won. I've played the night my mother called with news about my stepfather that made me sit in the locker room for twenty minutes before I could make my legs work. I've played through injuries and bad press and the specific psychological warfare of rival crowds who'd done their research and knew exactly which words to throw at you from the stands. I have never not once in four years of college ball played like I played the first half of that game and the only variable was her. It started at warmups. She was in the press section with her camera out and I'd gotten used to the camera over the last three weeks. Except tonight she was different. It didn't matter. It wasn't relevant. I ran layup lines and did not look at the press section. Okay scratch that, I looked at the press section. She had her camera up
ELENA'S POV"You're in the way, Voss."That was the first thing he said to me the morning after I fell asleep on his shoulder for an hour and forty minutes on a bus. Not good morning or even the standard issue cold stare I'd learned to translate as his version of an acknowledgment. I was standing at the hotel breakfast station and there was an entire empty counter to his left.The hotel was nice, the kind of place designed to be completely forgettable. I'd gotten my room key last night, gone upstairs, and spent twenty minutes sitting on the edge of the bed staring at nothing while my brain replayed the bus ride in excruciating detail.The specific horror of waking up and realizing what I'd done.He'd given me an out just enough that I could pretend it was accidental, that I'd just drifted in the wrong direction and the bus had done the rest. I'd taken that out with both hands because the alternative was acknowledging it, and acknowledging it meant having a conversation I wasn't equipp
NOAH'S POVThere are exactly four things I control on away game days. My warmup. My playlist. My seat on the bus. My headspace.That's it. That's the whole list. Everything else, the refs, the crowd, the weather, and whether Jax decides to be a functioning human being or a walking chaos, I let go. Coach spent three months in my sophomore year drilling that into me and I'd built my entire game-day routine around it.Four things. That's all and Elena Voss was currently dismantling all four of them when we hadn't even left the parking lot.It started with the seating arrangement. There wasn't one, there never was, the team just filed in and claimed territory like every road trip was a mild turf war but there was an understanding. I sat in row three. Window seat on the left side. I had since freshman year and everyone knew it.What everyone apparently hadn't accounted for was Dr. Reyes adding a media note to the travel managers that said Elena was required to document the full away game e
ELENA'S POV There are exactly three things I regret about dating Lucas Kane. One: I did it at all. Two: I did it for six months, which is approximately five months and three weeks longer than I should have. Three: I did it while telling myself it was moving on, which it wasn't, which I knew the entire time, which is the part I don't like to examine too closely in the daylight.We ended badly. Just a quiet, mutual acknowledgment that I was somewhere else entirely every time he reached for my hand, and he was tired of pretending not to notice. He'd looked at me across a coffee shop table eight months ago and said "you're not really here, are you?" and I'd opened my mouth to argue and found I had nothing. That was the last time I saw him until tonight.I had a deadline, and a document open on my screen with a title, and exactly one sentence I didn't hate. The cursor had been blinking at me for forty minutes."More grit, Voss." Dr. Reyes had said it this morning. I'd spent the rest of th







