Chapter 82: He Comes

Elias POV

He breaks away from the lap while the stadium is still full.

I see it happening before I fully register what it means. The rest of the team are still running, still receiving the noise of the crowd, and Noah simply steps out of the line and walks toward the east stand with the directness of someone who has decided where they are going and is not particularly interested in anything that might get in the way.

Ivy grabs my arm. "He's coming this way."

"I see that."

"He left the lap."

"I see that too."

"Elias," she says.

"Ivy."

"He left the lap for you."

I do not say anything. I am already moving toward the steps.

We meet at the bottom of the east stand, in the concourse where the stadium noise is still enormous overhead and people are streaming past in all directions and none of it is the thing that is happening between us right now.

He looks like he always does after a match, kit damp, hair compressed from where the captain's armband was, the specific loose-limbed quality of someone who has spent ninety minutes at full output and is now in the aftermath of it.

He looks like the best version of himself.

"You won," I say.

"We won," he says.

I start to say I was in the stands but he is already saying it back to me, the thing I told him I always say, and we end up saying it at the same time and then both stopping, and he laughs, the full real kind, and it is the best sound I have heard in months.

He pulls me in. Both arms, properly, and I hold back properly, and we stand there in the middle of the concourse in front of whoever is watching and whoever has their phone out and whatever the campus has to say about it next week.

In front of all of it.

From somewhere behind me I hear Marcus. He is audible from remarkable distances even in the middle of a regional championship celebration. He is saying something with the specific frequency of a person who has achieved a thing he intended to achieve and is not being subtle about it.

"I TOLD HIM," Marcus is saying, to someone, to everyone, to the stadium at large. "THREE MONTHS AGO. I TOLD HIM TO SORT HIMSELF OUT."

I do not pull away to look. I can feel Noah smiling against my shoulder.

"He is going to be impossible," Noah says.

"He was already impossible," I say.

"More impossible," Noah says. "For at least a month."

"I can live with that," I say.

Ivy finds us a few minutes later. She has tears on her face that she is not acknowledging and her scarf is wrapped around her neck exactly as Marcus instructed.

"I am very happy," she says, with the specific precision of someone making a formal statement. "I am also a little overwhelmed. I am going to find Saoirse."

"Go," I say.

"Congratulations," she says to Noah.

"Thank you for coming," he says.

"I would not have missed it," she says. She looks at me once, the small significant look, and then she goes.

The celebration is still going around us. Players and their families and the crowd mixing in the way it does after a result like this, the boundaries between the pitch and the stands dissolving into one shared thing.

Drayden finds Noah and shakes his hand. There is not much in it, just a handshake and a nod, but it is clean and real and Drayden looks at me briefly and nods once, which I take as what it is.

Tyler claps Noah on the shoulder and says, "Same time next year."

"Same time next year," Noah says.

Marcus reappears, having apparently completed his broadcast to the stadium, and says to me: "I hope you noticed I set up both goals."

"Noah told me you set up one," I say.

"Noah is being conservative with the accounting," Marcus says. "You understand this."

"I'm choosing to believe you set up one and a half," I say.

Marcus considers this. "I will accept one and a half," he says. He points at Noah. "He scores the goals. I create the conditions. This is the arrangement."

"Noted and recorded," I say.

Marcus beams. He moves on to the next person, already beginning the next chapter of the story he is going to tell about this day for the rest of his life.

Noah looks at me. "One and a half," he says.

"He deserves one and a half," I say.

"He does," Noah admits. "He really does."

The afternoon goes on around us. Eventually, after the photographs and the presentations and Marcus's extended celebration speech that nobody asked for and everyone enjoyed, we walk back across campus together, Noah still in his kit, me in my red skirt and the scarf worn correctly as instructed, in the November cold.

There is nothing that needs saying that has not been said.

Noah has his jacket on over the kit now, the one he grabbed from his bag in the changing room before they came out. He smells like grass and cold air and the particular quality of someone who has spent ninety minutes inside something they love.

"What do you want to do tonight?" he says.

"Nothing specific," I say. "Just this."

"Walking in the cold."

"Walking in the cold," I confirm. "After the regional championship. In November. Together."

He considers this. "That's a good thing to want."

"Yes," I say. "It is."

We walk back through the campus and the evening closes in around us and neither of us needs to say anything else.

That is the whole of it.

That is everything.

We walk in the quiet and it is the good kind.

The campus is quiet around us. The November cold is the good kind, the kind that makes you aware of being warm next to someone. We walk until we reach his building and we stop on the steps and he looks at me and I look at him and there is nothing that needs saying because we have said it all and the rest is just this, the two of us, here.