The stadium is a living creature with sixty thousand mouths and it's screaming at a frequency my teeth can feel.
I'm standing at the tunnel entrance in the red dress that fits like it was sewn directly onto my skeleton, heels so thin they should be classified as a structural hazard, and the security guard beside me keeps glancing sideways like he's worried I might bolt.
Smart man. I'm totally considering it.
The crowd is hostile. Boos roll down from the upper decks in waves — Jared's name turned into a chant that isn't flattering, signs waving in the stands that I can't read from here but can guess at.
His reputation walked into this stadium before he did. And the sixty thousand people who paid to watch him play are making sure he knows it.
Then the whistle blows and he becomes someone else entirely.
The snap is clean, he drops back, plants, and the ball leaves his hand in a spiral so tight it looks computer-generated — threading between two defenders into the receiver's hands like it was guided there by wire.
The crowd goes quiet. Not friendly-quiet, but the grudging silence of people watching someone do something they can't deny.
He fakes left, cuts right, slips through three defenders like they're standing in cement, and suddenly he's in open field, the ball tucked against his ribs, legs eating up the turf.
Touchdown.
The stadium detonates despite itself and the boos curdle into something confused and furious because you can't hate a man that hard and still be on your feet cheering, but here they are.
I can't look away. My fingers are pressed against the tunnel wall and my pulse is synced to the scoreboard clock and I hate myself for it.
Hate that my body still responds to him like a radio that can't change its frequency.
Hate that watching him move on a football field makes something in my chest expand against my ribs like it's trying to break free.
I’m watching Luke on the field too. He's in the trenches where the cameras never point — throwing blocks, absorbing hits, doing the unglamorous work that makes the highlights possible.
I see him spring the running back loose with a block that looks like it rearranged his entire skeletal structure and nobody in the stands even notices. The supernova and the gravity.
Jared burns so bright the whole world watches.
Luke holds everything in orbit and no one thinks to look down.
Final whistle and the scoreboard confirms what the last ten minutes already proved — they won. Jared is drenched in sweat, grinning through the blood from a cut on his lip, teammates swarming him. A journalist materializes with a microphone and Jared takes it, and the stadium falls to a murmur.
He looks straight into the camera, chest still heaving.
"You all know me as someone who doesn't take relationships seriously." His voice carries through the speakers and I watch it land on seventy thousand faces. "But today I admit — there's a woman who played me at my own game."
Near the tunnel, movement catches my eye. Anna steps forward, one hand touching her hair, her smile already in position — radiant, expectant, the expression of a woman who has been waiting for exactly this sentence.
She straightens her shoulders, lifts her chin and gets ready to shine.
But then Jared says my name and I feel Claire's hand presses between my shoulder blades — "Go, go, go" — and my legs start moving before my brain authorizes them.
I step onto the field and the floodlights hit me like a physical force, white and blinding. I shield my eyes with one hand and the cameras find me — I can feel them like heat, tracking from the ground up.
Red heels on green turf. The shimmer of silk against my thighs. My other hand touching the fabric at my hip, a nervous gesture I can't control.
The walk toward him takes a thousand years as the crowd noise fades to something distant and underwater, a roar that has nothing to do with me anymore.
Suddenly my heel catches on the turf — the thin spike sinks and my ankle turns and I pitch forward, arms reaching for nothing — and his hands are on my waist. Catching me. Steadying me.
The way he did in the locker room on my first day, except this time he doesn't let go.
My palms press flat against his chest, feeling his heart is slamming under my fingers, fast and hard, still running on game-speed adrenaline. Our faces are inches apart and his eyes are so green this close that my brain short-circuits for one treacherous second.
The stadium, the cameras, the screaming — all of it falls away and there's just the heat of his hands through the fabric of my dress and his breath against my face and something electric and terrifying pulsing in the quarter-inch of air between us.
Then he steadies me and drops to one knee.
The velvet box appears from somewhere — his pocket, a trainer, God himself for all I know — and the diamond inside catches the stadium lights like a cold star. His face tilts up to mine and for one fraction of a second, underneath the performance, I see something real. Something almost afraid.
"Mia, love of my life, will you marry me?"
Sixty thousand people hold their breath, I can hear it. That absence of sound, the vacuum, the entire stadium suspended on a single word.
My chest is so tight my lungs are barely functioning, but I plaster on the most convincing smile my face can manufacture, finally saying it. "Yes."
He stands, pulling me close, his arms lock around my waist and his mouth finds mine and the stadium explodes.
That wasn’t the plan.
I stiffen, every muscle seizing for one half-second, and then I force myself to play along, my lips moving against his, hand on the back of his neck where the cameras can see it, giving them the fairy tale they came for.
His mouth is warm and tastes like salt and the mouthguard he spat out thirty seconds ago. Underneath it is something I don't have a name for yet.
When we break apart, my lips stay close to his when I whisper against his mouth, "I hate you."
His hand tightens on my waist as he gives me the happiest wide smile. "Me too."
The cameras catch only the smile when over his shoulder my eyes find Luke.
He's standing at the thirty-yard line, helmet in his hand, the celebration flowing around him like water around a stone. But he's staring only at us.
His face is open in a way I've never seen it — no steady warmth, no patient half-smile. Just the raw, unguarded shock of a man watching something he didn't think would actually happen.
Our eyes meet across fifty yards of turf and the noise of the world and for half a second his expression holds mine like a hand I'm letting go of.
My smile is still plastered on for the cameras but my lungs have stopped working properly because Luke Matthews is standing on a football field looking at me the way I used to look at Jared from the bleachers — like the distance between them and the person they want is made of something heavier than air. And I did that. I put that look on his face. The guilt of it settles into my ribs like a weight I'll be carrying home.
Then he looks away. Puts his helmet back on. Walks toward the tunnel.
Near the sideline, Anna hasn't moved.
Her hand is still touching her hair from when she thought the microphone was for her. Her smile is gone and in its place something white and rigid and very, very still. The expression of a woman recalculating every assumption she's ever made about her place in the world.
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