The night before Game Four, Rae couldn't sleep, and neither, it turned out, could Beckett — the two of them lying awake in the dark long after either of them had any reasonable excuse for still being conscious, the specific electric tension of a potential series-clinching game keeping sleep stubbornly out of reach.
"You're doing the thing again," Beckett said into the darkness, echoing her own accusation from weeks earlier. "The rigid-spine thing."
"I can't help it. If we win tomorrow, we're conference champions. I've never been part of anything like that in my whole life."
"Neither have I, actually. Not at this level." He shifted closer in the dark, his arm coming around her, warm and grounding. "I keep thinking about how far we've come since September. Since that first morning at prac
