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I found Seattle's point guard first, and hugged her, because she'd played me hard and clean all night and deserved it. Then, I didn't decide anything. I don't think it was that deliberate. I think my body just knew where to go, the way it had always known where to go on a court. By pure instinct, by information moving faster than thought.

By the certainty that there was one right direction and I'd already found it.

I crossed to the sideline.

Harper saw me coming. I watched her face change. Every bit of composure she'd been holding for the cameras fell away into a joy so huge and so open it stopped my heart. Her lips parted. Her eyes went wide and wet.

She didn't wait for me.

She came out of her seat and met me at the edge of the court, and I took her face in my hands, and I kissed her in front of twenty-three thousand people.

It wasn't careful. It wasn't tentative. It wasn't the measured, provisional gesture of someone with one eye on the exit. I kissed her the way I played on my best nights. Completely committed. I held nothing back, every last ounce of me aimed at exactly this.

She kissed me back with both fists in the front of my jersey, up on her toes, laughing into my mouth and crying at the same time.

Above us, the crowd made a sound I had never heard an arena make. It wasn't a roar. It was fuller than that. It moved through the building like weather, like the whole structure had taken a breath.

I was aware, distantly, that the video board had found us. That cameras were moving. That twenty-three thousand people were watching.

I was much more aware of Harper.

The exhale against my lips when we finally broke apart. Her hands releasing my jersey and smoothing the fabric flat again, that absentminded way she had of touching me that I'd noticed the first time she did it and never stopped noticing. Her dark eyes opened and found mine.

"Babe," she whispered.

I smiled down at her affectionately, my heart clenching. "Baby."

"You threw ball good," she said.

The laugh came out of me so hard and so loud I heard it cut through the arena. "What?"

"That's what I thought the first night. Sitting right over there, on my phone, not watching you." Her eyes were streaming. "Yay, sports. Go team. Throw ball good. That was my whole review. I was so wrong about you, Cam. I was wrong about everything. Except that." She laughed through it. "You do throw ball very, very good."

"Harper."

"The jumbotron is definitely on us right now."

"I know."

"The whole arena is looking at us."

"I know that too."

"You kissed me in front of everyone." Her voice broke completely. "You did that. On purpose. In front of everyone."

"I did."

"I need you to know," she said, very clearly, "that some part of me started loving you the second you walked out of that tunnel and told me I was wasting a seat. I loved you on the days I hated you. I loved you on the days I left. I loved you in my car outside your house with one light on, and I loved you when I went on that date with the wrong person, and I loved you on my bathroom floor." She grabbed my jersey again. "And I'm going to love you on Tuesdays, and on bad days, and on the days you lose, and the days you can't sleep, and the days you're so scared you can't breathe. I'm going to love you out loud, Cameron Russo, for the rest of my life, and I'm going to be so annoying about it."

I couldn't speak. I put my forehead against hers, there in front of everyone, and closed my eyes, and breathed her in.

"For the rest of our lives," she said again, quieter, like she was hearing it for the first time herself.

"Yeah," I said. "The rest of our lives."

"You're sure?"

"I'm the one who kissed you on the jumbotron, Harper."