I want to hold her hand in public.

I want to sneak behind the bar at Crusty Nut and replace the latte in her coffee mug with doctored lemongrass tea to get her back for slipping me flat Diet Coke instead of unsweet tea three days ago.

But mostly, I want to have the courage to ask her why this has to end when I get on a plane bound for Florida and spring training in mid-February.

Instead, I spend one January weekend in the tropics at Torres’s wedding, as planned, with most of the team but without Tillie Jean, since her parents are on their annual getaway and she’s running Crusty Nut solo, and get back to Shipwreck to a massive snowfall that requires extra planning so I don’t leave footprints between my house and her house, which means it’s three more nights before I can sneak in her window again.

Neither of us gets any sleep for the next two nights after that.

I’ve never laughed so much with a woman I’m sleeping with.

I’ve also never talked so much with a woman I’m sleeping with.

Not about real things.

And every night with Tillie Jean is one more night that makes me feel like maybe—just maybe—I can have more in this lifetime than I ever trusted myself with before.

At the end of January, I head back into Copper Valley for Fireballs Con, a Thursday through Saturday event that management puts on for the fans. Last year, they unveiled the mascot finalists during Fireballs Con.

This year, there aren’t any big surprises.

Just fun.

The kind of fun that comes without Tillie Jean again, since we’re still ducking Cooper’s suspicions and there’s no way that I can be in the same city as her without wanting her in my bed when she’d usually stay with her brother.

This fun?

It’s a normal kind of fun.

An old normal kind of fun.

A real normal kind of fun.

My teammates and I sit on panels answering fan questions and showing our egos when people ask if we’re going all the way this season.

We have a dance contest.

We karaoke with fans.

We play trivia.

And I’m weirdly back in my element and completely out of it all at the same time. My condo is exactly how I left it, but I’m not exactly how I left me.

So when I catch myself pacing and counting by fours while checking my phone for texts from TJ every three seconds Friday night, I head out.

Not to catch up with the single guys at a club, but instead, to drop by unannounced on a teammate in what could be a very bad decision.

The little house Luca’s renovating is in a solidly middle-class neighborhood, and the lights are still on when I pull up to his curb. I could’ve called, but I wasn’t sure I was planning on stopping until I got here.

Now that I am here, I pull out my phone and check it for messages from Tillie Jean again.

You know.

In case my top-of-the-line Bluetooth-enabled stereo system failed to notify me that I had a text from her.

But, there’s nothing under the contact labeled Jenny Smith.

It’s her code name in my phone.

I’m Bob the Backup Plumber in her phone.

And yeah, that was my idea.

I’m still in my SUV, debating if I want to text her and what I want to say—I know she’s having a girls’ night with Sloane and Georgia and Annika, so I really don’t expect her to text me back at all tonight—when movement in my peripheral vision makes me lift my head and look at Luca’s house.

Henri’s leaning out the front door, squinting at me, her hair tucked back under a bandana and her body wrapped up in sweatpants and a hoodie, which might be her normal work clothes, or it could be her pajamas.

Not much difference with Henri, and yeah, she’ll show up at parties dressed like that too.

Talk about owning who you are.

I roll down the passenger window and flip on my interior lights. “Hey, Henri.”

“Max? I thought that was you. What are you doing? Wanna come in? We’re watching this show that Tillie Jean’s friend Sloane told us about. Again. Not that I’m obsessed with it or anything, but I’m kinda obsessed with it. We can start over from the beginning. Luca won’t mind.”

“Luca will too mind,” Luca calls from inside.

“Hush. No, you won’t. The first scene will start, and you’ll get giddy with excitement at getting to experience it all over again, then you’ll tell Max all about how when you retire, you want to go coach a British football team too, since he’s a new audience for watching you watch Ted Lasso and hasn’t heard it a dozen times already.” She turns her smile back at me. “I have popcorn.”

“So long as you have popcorn,” I call back.

I roll the window back up, shut my car off, climb out, and head inside, glancing at the freshly painted walls and the new furniture and pristine wood floor. There’s a shelf showcasing all of the books Henri’s written as Nora Dawn, plants in the corner, and the massive TV on the wall by the stairs is paused on a scene of a dude with a mustache grinning a goofy grin.

Luca holds out a fist.

I bump. “Nice progress.”

“You should see the kitchen,” Henri says. “We have a working oven now.”

“I thought you had a working oven before the season was over.”

“Oh, right. We did. It’s the bathroom upstairs that wasn’t done yet. But now it is. And it’s gorgeous. And you can’t see it because I don’t remember what I left in there. Sit. I’ll go make popcorn. Dogzilla, scoot over. Make room for Max.”

Henri’s cat is in a soccer uniform—yes, for real, she puts her cat in clothes and costumes—and it doesn’t move an inch at her suggestion.

It does open one eye enough to glare at me and silently promise to eat my face off if I dare remove it from the easy chair it’s sleeping in.

“Here.” Luca reaches over and grabs the cat, setting the furball in his lap. “Her eyeball is worse than her bite. She’s too lazy to bite, and her only real objection to you sitting on the chair is that she already put the effort in to hopping up there.”

Three months ago, I would’ve called him whipped.

Tonight, I’m wondering why Tillie Jean doesn’t have a cat that she likes to dress up in costumes.

Or why she doesn’t have a dog. Or even a fish.

She’d be a great fish mom. That fish would have more fish castles than any fish to come before it.

Fuck.

I should be cranky about not getting laid tonight, and instead, I’m cranky that I’m not in a pet store helping Tillie Jean pick out a fish castle.

I drop into the chair and shove my fingers through my hair.

“You need me to send Henri out to pick up six different kinds of dessert from six different places?” Luca asks.

“I’d do it,” she calls from the kitchen, “except he’d probably rather you go do the running, sweetie. We all know I’m a better listener.”

“Good point. Ice cream? Cheesecake? Cookies? Baked chicken?”

“I have Luca’s Nonna’s ziti recipe, but we’re out of the right kinds of cheese,” Henri says. “Not that you want the ziti. It’s cursed ziti, but I don’t think it’s a bad curse. Also, if you want both of us, Max, we can DoorDash something in.”

This whole situation is so ridiculously domestic that I should be breaking out in hives.