Page 68 of Gave Proof Through the Night

We run the breakout drill until my lungs feel like they’ve been marinating in battery acid. But somewhere around the fourth rep, it clicks. Twiles hits me with a stretch pass I don't even have to look for, and I one-time it to Dash, and Dash buries it top shelf so clean that even Badaszek almost smiles.

“There,” he says. “That. Do that Sunday and we won’t have this conversation again.”

Tyson gathers us at center ice before we break for water, and for a guy who once told a reporter his favorite color is “clear,” he gives a genuinely solid speech. Something about how West doesn’t get to lose two in a row and call it a slump. If we lose two in a row, it will be the last time it happens.

“Game 4, we need to be on point,” he says. “Every shift. I’m not asking for perfect. I’m asking for accountable.”

We all bang our sticks on the ice.

At the water break, I make the mistake of checking my phone.

I don’t even do it smoothly. I fumble it out of my bag, and the second the screen lights up, my whole face does something involuntary and, according to my teammates, deeply embarrassing.

“There it is,” Bryce says, barely even looking up from his own phone. “The Zesty smile.”

“I don’t have a Zesty smile.”

“Uh-huh.” Colt leans over my shoulder, and I angle the phone away like that’ll help. “Is it a woman? It’s always a woman.”

“It’s nobody.”

“It is definitely a woman,” Kingston says.

Across the bench, Jake’s got his own dumb smile going, aimed at the stands instead of a phone, because Izzy’s up there next to the team staff in a jacket that’s a size too big to be anyone else’s. Neal elbows him. “You gonna keep pretending that’s just ‘PR stuff,’ man?”

“It’s complicated,” Jake says.

Bryce is still glued to his own phone, grinning at whatever’s on the screen. That, I’m fairly certain, is because of a woman.

I saw the newspaper stacked by the front doors on the way in, some enterprising photographer’s shot of him and Hadley outside the arena last night, her looking at him like he just solved world hunger, him grinning like the team didn’t just lose 6–3.

WHO IS BRYCE CHAMBERS'S MYSTERY WOMAN, the headline wanted to know, like it was a scandal and not just two people standing near each other with goofy expressions on their faces. Well, Bryce has a goofy face, anyway. He always has a goofy face, to be honest.

I’ve got no room to give any of them grief. Not with my own screen lit up like a shrine.

I still remember typing that first text, three nights ago, standing at the window in my suite an hour after she gave me her number and walked away. I’d changed her contact name to “Dangerous” because that seemed appropriate. And that phone of hers. Where do you get a flip phone these days?

Me: Can your phone even get texts?

Dangerous: rude. also yes. also this took me 45 seconds 2 type on a number pad so u better appreciate it

Me: I appreciate it deeply.

Dangerous: good

Me: Might be the most effort anyone’s put into texting me all year.

Dangerous: don’t get used to it Zesty

I’d grinned at that phone in the dark like a complete lunatic.

Thursday I told myself I wasn’t going to text her first. Thursday I texted her first anyway, and somewhere in there I stopped pretending I had any self-control left where she’s concerned.

Me: Still owe you that guitar lesson.

Dangerous: u say that like i forgot

Me: Did you forget?