Page 46 of Take Two

“It’s efficient.”

“It’s ridiculous and efficient.”

His laugh follows me as we leave the kitchen, warm and unhurried, trailing through the hallway behind us, and it takes me a moment to register something I haven’t felt in quite a while. I haven’t thought about filming. I haven’t thought about the press schedule, about the careful architecture of my public image, or about the clock quietly ticking down on the time I have left in this city. Not once since I stepped through that front door.

I’m simply here. Present in a way I don’t recognize immediately because I’m so rarely in it. And the realization, when it settles, feels far more significant and far more dangerous than whatever mystical connection exists between a professional athlete and his bulk-purchased hard candy.

Jamie leads me into what is easily the largest room in the house.

The living room manages the rare trick of feeling both grand and genuinely comfortable at the same time. The original woodwork frames the room along every edge, rich and dark against lighter walls, anchoring the space with a sense of permanence that no renovation could replicate from scratch. An oversized sectional dominates the center of the room, clearly chosen for the singular purpose of being deeply, irresponsibly comfortable. A stone fireplace anchors one wall, the chimney breast rising all the way to the ceiling. Above the mantel, a television large enough to leave no doubt about the profession of the man who lives here, dominates the space. Built-in bookshelves bracket the fireplace on either side, filled with books stacked both upright and flat, with more framed photographs tucked between them, because of course there are.

At this point, none of it surprises me. The entire house speaks the same language, every room another verse of the same story. A place someone genuinely comes home to rather than retreats from.

I find, with some quiet surprise, that I wouldn’t mind doing the same.

“Go ahead.” Jamie gestures toward the couch with an easy openness. “Make yourself comfortable.”

I lower myself onto the nearest corner of the sectional and immediately, without warning or ceremony, sink.

My eyebrows rise toward the ceiling as something close to a sound of involuntary pleasure escapes me before I can stop it. Every tension I’ve been carrying since this morning, since last week, possibly since longer than that, dissolves on contact.

“This thing is dangerous,” I say, in something very close to a moan.

A laugh escapes him, genuine and bright. “That’s exactly what my mother said.”

“I believe her completely.”

Jamie drops onto the opposite end and reaches forward to collect the remote resting on the coffee table. SportsCenter appears on the screen a beat later, before he mutes it and tosses the remote aside.

Highlights flash across the screen in silence. Neither of us pays them much attention.

I try. For perhaps three seconds. Then my gaze wanders again, drawn back toward the bookshelves, the photographs, the quiet accumulation of all these small, chosen things. So many memories, all of them easy and warm and uncomplicated, and I become aware of something low and persistent in my chest that takes me a moment to name.

Envy.

By the time I’ve pulled my focus back from somewhere near the far bookshelf, I find I’ve pulled it straight into Jamie’s waiting gaze.

“What?” he asks, his voice quiet enough that it doesn’t disturb the stillness of the room.

I try to arrange my expression into something that doesn’t require explanation, but the smile I manage is too careful and I know the moment it lands that he’s already clocked the shift in me. He watches with the kind of unhurried patience that makes deflection feel more effort than it’s worth.

I look at the photographs on the shelf. Then around the room. Then I gesture with one hand, an open, loose motion that takes in all of it, the walls, the light, the bookshelves, the whole worn and breathing warmth of the place.

The words arrive before I’ve fully decided to say them.

“I don’t think any version of you that existed in my head lived here.”

For a moment, Jamie says nothing. He shifts slightly in his seat, lets his gaze travel slowly around the room as though seeing it briefly through a borrowed lens, then brings it back to me. “Is that a bad thing?”

“No.” The answer comes immediately, without hesitation. “It’s really not.”

The corner of his mouth lifts. “Then why do you look like you’re having an existential crisis on my couch?”

A laugh escapes me, and this one, at least, is real. “Because I think I’ve spent the last two weeks steadily realizing how wrong I was about you.”

That gets his attention. He shifts again, turning toward me, brow lifted pensively. “Wrong how?”

I lean back against the cushions and let my gaze move through the room one more time. Every direction I look, I find another piece of him, a photograph, a particular book spine, a small, remembered object placed without ceremony on a shelf. Evidence of a life that has nothing to do with arenas or cameras or carefully constructed public narratives.