risk it all
pairing: usc!juju!dating x usc!reader!dating
wc: 6.1k
request: y/n
anon asked: hi honey! i saw that your requests were open but you didn’t have your inbox out so i thought i’d just send you a chat. was wondering if i could request a paige or juju fic based on risk it all by kwn. i’m picturing a relationship that hasn’t been launched yet even though it’s been a while and it’s all star weekend. basically reader is a bit tipsy and is seen in the back of the studbudz stream singing the song to p or juju and dancing/ making eyes and fans freak. you’re amazing thank you!!
summary: you weren't supposed to be visible, you weren't supposed to be anything but a blurry shape at the edge of somebody else's livestream, mouthing along to a song you didn't think anyone was watching you sing and then the internet found the eleven seconds where you forgot to be careful.
🏷️: @333dee, @marleymarleymarleymarley, @sammiejane22, @ladyluvbugs, @c-grace56, @authentic-girl03
you have gotten good at the math of it six months of practice will do that you can walk into a room full of people and know, within about four seconds, exactly how far away juju is standing, exactly which door she came in through, exactly whether tonight is a night you get to stand near her or a night you have to orbit her from across the room like she's a planet you're not allowed to land on.
tonight you're orbiting all-star weekend, it does that to you, it turns every hallway into a red carpet and every open door into a camera you didn't consent to and you've been together really together, not situationship together, not maybe-something together since february quietly carefully.
the way you'd tend something you weren't sure would survive being looked at too hard it started as texting that went too late, then it was her jacket in your car and you not giving it back on purpose, then it was a night in march you don't talk about because talking about it makes it feel like it needs a name, and you weren't ready to name it yet still aren't, technically six months in and you still don't have a word for what you post, if you post anything, which you don't.
it isn't that you're ashamed you want to be extremely clear with yourself about that, standing here in a ballroom with a signature cocktail sweating in your hand, watching juju laugh at something one of her teammates said from fifteen feet away like she isn't also tracking exactly where you are in the room.
it isn't shame it's math it's the fact that the second this becomes a known thing, it becomes a discussed thing, and discussed things get dissected, and dissected things get ugly, and you have watched it happen to enough people you know to understand that "ugly" isn't a worst-case scenario, it's a baseline expectation some slice of the internet is always going to have opinions about who a girl like her should be seen with you'd rather not test how big that slice is.
so; the orbit of the careful four-second math, the not-touching in public that has become its own kind of intimacy, actually a whole vocabulary of look and don't look, stand near but not next to, laugh at the joke but don't laugh at her.
you're good at it, you've had practice what you have not had practice at is three vodka sodas on an empty stomach at a party that started at eight and somehow it is now almost midnight, and someone's phone is playing a song that goes straight into your sternum every single time, and juju is standing under a string of gold lights looking like this is just a regular tuesday for her, unfairly gorgeous, laughing with her head tipped back, and you are for the first time in six months of careful math not doing any math at all.
you're just looking at her, the studbudz stream is not supposed to be your problem it's set up in the corner of the after-party a ring light, two mics, a couch, a rotating cast of players stopping by to talk trash and do bits for the fans watching live and you clocked it hours ago the way you clock every camera in a room, which is to say; know where it's pointed, stay out of the frame, treat it like a landmine with a very generous blast radius.
you were staying out of the frame you want that on the record, later, when you're replaying this in your head at 3am you were staying out of the frame, for hours, doing the geometry perfectly, keeping the couch and the ring light and the two mics in your peripheral vision at all times like a very well-trained dog and then the song happens.
you don't even clock it as a decision that's the part that will keep you up it's not like you thought i am now going to do something it's more like the second vodka soda had worn a groove into your brain smooth enough that when the opening bars came through the speaker that low, slinky bassline, the kind of song that sounds like it was written specifically to be sung to someone across a room your body just went you swayed before you decided to sway.
your mouth was already shaping the first line before you clocked that your mouth was doing anything at all and juju was right there eight feet away, laughing at something, half turned toward you without fully turning, the way she does when she's performing not looking at you as hard as you're performing not looking at her.
you don't remember choosing to look at her instead of away you remember the moment after that the moment where you were already singing, already halfway through mouthing the first line, hips already moving on their own recognizance, and you had a single, sober, horrified thought; you are singing this out loud, to her face, in public and then the vodka soda and the string lights and the way she was looking back at you, like you'd hit a switch in her she didn't have full control over either, just steamrolled the horrified thought completely.
so you kept going you sang the part about wanting somebody enough to risk everything sane for them, and you swayed your hips like the floor was tilting toward her specifically, and you made eyes actual, unmistakable, movie-poster eyes across eight feet of ballroom, at juju watkins, at all-star weekend, while a livestream ran twenty feet to your left with a couch full of players doing bits that nobody at home was watching anymore, because something in the corner of the frame had gotten a lot more interesting.
you didn't know that last part yet you were still just singing juju's whole face changed you watched it happen in real time the careful, practiced, we don't do this in public stillness cracking down the middle, replaced by something dumbfounded and delighted and just slightly panicked, like she was watching you set fire to something she'd been protecting for six months and couldn't decide if she wanted to help you fan the flames.
she laughed a real laugh, surprised out of her, hand coming up to cover her mouth like that would undo it and mouthed something back at you that you'll never be able to prove in a court of law but that you are ninety percent sure was you're insane, and forty percent sure was also i love you, because juju's face does this thing when she's overwhelmed where every emotion just runs together into the same helpless grin.
you did a little spin you want it on the record that you did a little spin, unprompted, because the song asked for it and you had, apparently, stopped being a person who says no to things and behind you, twenty feet away, the studbudz camera which had been pointed at the couch the entire night, faithfully documenting a conversation about somebody's rookie season free throw percentage caught, in the soft-focus background of its frame, eleven full seconds of you.
you find out at 12:41am you're in the bathroom, the good kind of tipsy where the room is warm and pleasant instead of spinning, reapplying lip gloss you don't need because your hands want something to do, when your phone buzzes against the marble counter hard enough that you jump it's your group chat with six unread messages in the time it took you to walk from the ballroom to here.
azzi: WAIT azzi: WAIT WAIT WAIT azzi: are you singing to juju watkins on the studbudz stream right now azzi: i am SCREAMING azzi: send help i am on the floor azzi: ARE YOU OKAY BECAUSE THE INTERNET IS NOT
you stare at your phone for a full four seconds before the words rearrange themselves into something your brain can actually process.
studbudz stream.
you thought you were background you thought genuinely, sincerely thought, in whatever alcohol-softened corner of your brain was doing risk assessment that you were eight feet outside the frame, safely tucked into the part of the party that wasn't anybody's business you open twitter with fingers that don't feel like your own.
the clip has forty-one thousand views it is one minute and eight seconds old, according to the timestamp on the earliest repost, and it already has forty-one thousand views, and the caption on the top quote-tweet eleven thousand likes, still climbing while you watch, the number ticking up like a stock price just says; ok so who is she and why is juju watkins looking at her like THAT
you watch the clip, you make yourself watch the whole clip, all eleven seconds of it, hand pressed flat against your own sternum like you can hold your heart in place through sheer physical pressure it's you have to be honest with yourself it's bad not bad like ugly, bad like undeniable.
the camera isn't even fully on you; you're soft-focus, half-cropped by the edge of the frame, but the choreography of it does all the talking anyway. you, swaying, singing, unmistakably at someone and then the camera doesn't even have to cut to juju for the internet to know exactly who because for one full second, right at the end, right when you do the stupid unplanned spin, the frame catches her too catches her face doing the thing it did catches her not looking away.
eleven seconds that's all it took eleven seconds and six months of very careful math evaporate into forty-one thousand views and climbing your hands are shaking you set the phone down on the marble counter face-down like that will make it stop existing, and you look at yourself in the mirror flushed, gloss half-applied, eyes too wide and you think, with a clarity that cuts straight through the vodka; oh my god. what did i just do.
juju finds you four minutes later you haven't left the bathroom you've locked yourself in the single-occupancy one at the end of the hall, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with your phone in your lap, doing the thing where you refresh a number over and over even though watching it climb is actively making everything worse.
fifty-eight thousand views there's a soft knock. "hey it's me."
you almost don't want to open the door some small, cowardly part of you wants to just sit in this bathroom until all-star weekend is over and pretend this whole night happened to somebody else but it's juju, and you have never in six months not opened a door for juju, so you get up on legs that feel unreliable and let her in.
she looks okay, first; she looks like she ran here, a little, hair slightly less perfect than it was twenty minutes ago, and second; she looks like she's trying very hard to arrange her face into something calm for your benefit, and third; underneath the calm, she looks scared you know her scared face you have seen it exactly twice before; once during a game she thought she'd lost before the buzzer, once during a phone call from her mom that she wouldn't talk about after this is a version of that face.
she shuts the door behind her and locks it and for a second neither of you says anything. "okay," she says finally, low. "okay. so."
"i know." your voice comes out smaller than you want it to. "i know, i'm so sorry, i wasn't even thinking, i didn't realize the camera was—"
"hey. hey." she crosses the bathroom in two steps and takes your face in both hands, tilting it up so you have to look at her instead of at the floor. "i'm not mad at you."
"you should be. i just —" your voice cracks embarrassingly. "i just outed us to the entire internet because i had three vodka sodas and a song came on." something flickers across her face and here's the thing you'll turn over later, in the dark, trying to catalog it honestly instead of how you want to remember it, it isn't only fear.
there's a beat, half a second, where something in her just lights up like some part of her that's been holding its breath for six months finally got to exhale but then the fear catches up and swallows the light whole, and her thumb brushes your cheekbone, and she says, quiet: "i'm not mad. i promise i'm not mad. i just —" she exhales, long, through her nose. "i need like five minutes to figure out how scared i'm supposed to be right now. is that okay? can you give me that?"
you nod, because it's the only thing you can do, and you watch her pull out her own phone with hands that are not quite steady, and you watch her face do the thing your face has been doing for the last four minutes the scroll, the flinch, the swallow.
"okay," she says again, mostly to herself. "okay, it's — it's not as bad as it could be. people are mostly just —" she huffs something that's almost a laugh. "people are mostly just losing their minds in a good way. there's a whole thread doing a timeline of, like, old photos. someone found a picture from your friend's birthday in march where i'm apparently 'looking at you like a whole meal.'" a real laugh escapes her this time, short and disbelieving. "i don't even remember that photo being taken."
"judea."
"i'm not — i'm looking, okay, i'm being honest with you, i'm not gonna pretend it's all good, there's some stuff that's not —" she stops herself. "what stuff."
she hesitates as that hesitation tells you everything. "judea."
"there's some stuff," she says carefully, "that's not about you being a girl who sang to me. there's some stuff that's about the fact that i'm gay and public about it now, whether i chose that or not, tonight, in about an hour."
her jaw works. "and there's people who have opinions about that. there's always people who have opinions about that. i knew that going into this — i've known that since i was fifteen and figured out who i was — but knowing it in the abstract and watching the first ugly reply come in are two different things." your stomach drops somewhere below the tile floor. "i did this to you."
"no." her voice sharpens, just slightly, just enough to mean it. "no. don't do that. you didn't do anything to me you sang a song at a party because you love me and you'd had a couple drinks and your guard was down. that's not a crime. the ugliness isn't your fault, it's theirs. i need you to actually hear that and not just nod at me."
you nod you're not sure you actually hear it but you nod you don't go back to the party juju texts someone you don't ask who, you're too tired to ask who and ten minutes later a car is waiting at a service entrance you didn't know existed, and the two of you are in the back seat of it, not touching, because even now, even in the middle of the wreckage of six months of careful math, some old habit keeps your hands folded separately in your own lap.
it's juju who breaks it halfway through the ride, in the dark, with the city sliding by gold and blurred outside the window, her hand finds yours on the seat between you and laces through it, and you both just look straight ahead, holding hands like it's a secret, in a car, alone, when the entire internet already knows.
it feels stupid it feels like muscle memory that hasn't caught up to the new reality yet you don't let go anyway. "my phone's been going off," she says quietly, eyes on the window. "team group chat found out. coach knows. my mom texted." your stomach lurches. "what did she say?"
a pause. "she said, and i quote, 'well it's about time, i was wondering when you were going to stop being weird about her.'" juju huffs something that's almost a laugh, almost. "she's known about you since april. i just never told you that because i didn't want you freaking out about one more person knowing."
"your mom knew?"
"my mom notices everything. she saw one photo of us from a distance and just knew. she's been very patiently waiting for me to say something for four months."
you don't know whether to laugh or cry, so you do a strange, hiccupping combination of both, and juju's hand tightens around yours, and for a second just a second the fear recedes far enough that you can feel the other thing underneath it.
the thing that's actually funny the thing that's actually, in some upside-down way, a relief it doesn't last by the time the car pulls up to the hotel, you've checked your phone four more times, and the number has climbed to two hundred and something thousand, and there's a screenshot circulating of your face clear enough this time, someone did the work of stabilizing and zooming captioned with your first name, which someone dug up from god knows where, and the fear comes rushing back in all at once, cold and total.
the hotel room is dark except for the city coming in through the window, all that gold and glass climbing up into a sky that doesn't have any real stars in it, just satellites and planes and the specific insomnia-glow of a city that never actually goes to sleep.
you sit on the edge of the bed with your shoes still on juju, stand by the window for a long minute, arms crossed, phone face-down on the dresser like she's trying to physically distance herself from it, and neither of you talks for a while. "can i say something," you finally manage, "that's going to sound stupid."
"always."
"i keep thinking about the part where it was before i knew anyone saw. like, there's this eleven seconds in my head that's just you, and me, and a song, and it was the best eleven seconds of my whole life, actually, no exaggeration, i have never in six months felt as unguarded as i felt in that eleven seconds. and now that same eleven seconds is a thing two hundred thousand strangers have opinions about, and i don't know how to hold both of those at the same time. i don't know how the best moment of my year and the scariest moment of my year are the exact same eleven seconds."
juju turns from the window in the low light, her face is unreadable for a second, and then it isn't then it's just open, just tired, just twenty-something and scared and in love, all at once. "i know," she says. "i've been sitting here trying to figure out the same thing."
she crosses the room and sits next to you on the edge of the bed, close enough that your knees touch, and for a long moment neither of you says anything else outside, the city keeps doing its indifferent glittering thing, unaware that anything in your life just changed.
"can i tell you the honest, ugly version of what's in my head right now," she says. "not the reassuring version. the real one."
"please."
"okay." she picks at a loose thread on the comforter, not looking at you. "the honest version is: i'm scared about my family not my mom she's fine, she's been fine, she's ready. but my grandma's a different story, and i don't know how she's gonna take it, and i don't want to find out over a viral clip instead of me telling her myself, on my own time, in my own words. that's already been taken away from me and i'm still figuring out how to feel about that." your chest aches. "i'm sorry."
"i know you are. let me finish, though, because there's more, and some of it's not sad." she looks up at you now, and there's something steadier in her eyes. "the honest version is also: i've been performing carefully for five months and some tiny, exhausted part of me is relieved. i'm tired of doing the geometry. i'm tired of not being able to hold your hand at a party. i'm tired of being asked in every single interview if there's 'anyone special' and having to build a whole careful sentence around the fact that yes, obviously, there is, and i'm not allowed to say her name."
"judea—"
"and the honest version is also," she goes on, quieter now, "that i'm scared about my career. i'm scared about sponsors. i'm scared about the two percent of every comment section that's going to say something genuinely cruel, and how it's going to feel to read that while also trying to play basketball on national television. i'm scared about being the story instead of being a basketball player who happens to be gay, because i've watched that happen to other people and it swallows them whole for a whole season. that's the scary, ugly, real version. i'm not gonna pretend i don't feel all of that just to make you feel better." you sit with that for a second it's heavier than the reassurance you wanted, but it's honest, and honest is worth more right now than comfortable.
"and the other part," you say slowly. "the relieved part. tell me more about that part."
something in her face softens, just at the edges. "the relieved part is that i don't have to pretend anymore that the way i look at you across a room is nothing. i've been doing that for six months and it's genuinely exhausting, holding my own face still like that. the relieved part is that my mom already knows and she's happy for me. the relieved part is that somewhere in that clip, underneath the panic, there's a version of tonight where a girl sang a whole song at me in front of god and everybody because she loves me too much to keep doing the math. and i don't actually want to go back to a world where that never happened. i just wish it happened on our terms instead of the internet's."
you reach for her hand again this time neither of you hesitates you don't sleep much you lie in the dark with your head on her chest, her heartbeat steady and a little too fast under your ear, both of your phones face-down and buzzing periodically on the nightstand like something feral that hasn't quite been put down for the night.
around 2am you break and check yours anyway it's not all bad that's the thing you weren't braced for you were braced for a wall of ugliness, had steeled yourself for it, and what you actually find, scrolling with your thumb shaking slightly, is mostly noise, and the noise is mostly delighted.
there are entire threads doing forensic archaeology on your friendship group's instagram, finding a photo from a birthday in march, a blurry background shot from a wnba game in may where you're apparently visible in the crowd wearing her number, a comment she left on a photo of yours in june that someone's now dissecting word by word like it's the dead sea scrolls.
there's a fancam there's already, unbelievably, at not-quite-2am, a fancam, cut to a pop song, of the eleven seconds looped four times with hearts drawn around your faces in bad photoshop.
"the way she just STARTED SINGING i'm never recovering," one reply says. "juju's face in the last second i am NOT okay." "pls be soft with them you guys they're just two girls in love let them cook."
and then, threaded in between all of that, the other kind fewer than you feared, but present, unmissable once you see the first one; a reply calling it disgusting. a quote-tweet with a bible verse and nothing else, someone dragging up an old, cruel joke about women's sports that has nothing to do with either of you specifically and everything to do with the fact that the internet has never needed a real reason.
you feel juju's chest go still under your ear she's awake she's been awake this whole time, and she felt you tense, and now she's looking at your screen too. "don't read those," she says, low. "you're reading them too."
"i've had longer practice at not letting them land." a beat. "doesn't mean they don't. just means i've got scar tissue you don't have yet."
"i don't want you to need scar tissue for this."
"i know. i wish that for both of us too." she takes the phone gently out of your hand and sets it face down again, and pulls you in closer, chin resting on the top of your head. "can we just — not do this part tonight. can we let tomorrow be the day we deal with the ugly stuff, and let tonight just be the day we admit we're happy underneath all the scared. i think we're allowed to have that. one night. before the discourse cycle really gets going."
you let yourself exhale for what feels like the first time in three hours. "yeah. i think we're allowed to have that."
so you let yourselves have it somewhere around 2:30am, still tangled together, still half-lit by the useless glow of a city that never sleeps, juju hums the first few bars of the song quiet, almost to herself, like she's testing whether it still feels like something you can touch without flinching you still go against her chest. "too soon?" she asks.
"no." your voice comes out thick. "no, i just — i can't believe you remember it well enough to hum it."
"i've had it stuck in my head since you started singing it at me in a ballroom. it's not exactly a song i'm gonna forget the melody of anytime soon." she hums another bar, and this time you feel her smile against the top of your head. "you know you can't ever sing to me in public again, right. legally. it's a liability now."
you laugh a real one, surprised out of you the way hers was surprised out of her, eleven hours ago and a lifetime ago, across a ballroom. "i genuinely didn't decide to. my body just did it."
"i noticed. i almost dropped my drink."
"you did not."
"i absolutely did. ask literally anyone who was standing near me. i had a whole conversation with paige about free-throw percentage and i don't remember a single word of it because i was watching you do a full spin like you were auditioning for something."
"i wasn't auditioning for anything, i was just —" you stop.
"just what." you're quiet for a second, turning it over honestly, the way she asked you to turn over the scared parts honestly.
"just done pretending i didn't want everybody to know," you admit. "i think some part of me has been done for a while. i think some part of me heard that song and thought good. let them see. i'm tired too. i just didn't let myself know i was tired until three vodka sodas made the decision for me."
juju's arms tighten around you. "that's the part i keep coming back to," she says, quiet. "underneath the scared, underneath everything i'm gonna have to deal with tomorrow with my team and my sponsors and my grandma there's a part of me that's just so happy someone loves me enough to make a fool of herself over it in public. i don't think i've had that before. i don't think anybody's ever wanted me like that, out loud, where people could see."
"i've wanted you like that the entire time. i just kept doing the math instead of saying it."
"i know. i was doing the same math. i think we're gonna have to learn how to stop." morning comes anyway, the way it does, indifferent to how little either of you slept.
it comes with juju's phone buzzing itself half off the nightstand her agent, her PR contact, a group text from three teammates variously supportive and losing their minds, a missed call from her mom that turns out, when she calls back with you sitting cross-legged beside her on the rumpled comforter, to just be her mom laughing so hard she can barely get words out, saying something like "i TOLD you, i told you back in april, you two are about as subtle as a marching band"— and it comes, for you, with a single text from your own mother that just says: you didn't tell me you had a girlfriend. we'll be discussing this. i'm proud of you. call me later.
you cry a little at that one good crying, the kind that doesn't need explaining by ten am there's a statement not from either of you, from the league's official account, a bland, professionally warm little post about "celebrating our players' full, authentic lives on and off the court" that both of you read together, propped up against the headboard with coffee neither of you has touched, and juju snorts. "that's corporate for 'please stop asking us to comment on this.'"
"is that bad?"
"no. actually that's — that's them not making it weird. that's them not making me issue some big coming-out press release i didn't write and don't want. i'll take vague and warm over a headline any day." by noon, her actual, personal instagram the one she barely posts to, four photos a year, mostly gameday fits and one dog picture has a new post.
it's not dramatic it's a single photo, one you didn't even know she'd taken; you, from the side, mid-laugh at some point earlier in the weekend, unposed, unaware, before any of this happened, before the song, before the eleven seconds, before the two hundred thousand strangers with opinions.
the caption is four words. she's the whole thing.
no hashtag, no grand statement, no acknowledgment of the clip at all, which is, you realize, watching the comments flood in within seconds, exactly the point she's not confirming a scandal, she's just quietly, unbothered, letting you be real your phone buzzes in your hand a text from her, even though she's sitting eight inches away from you on the same bed.
i figured if the internet's gonna know either way, i wanted the first real thing they see from me about it to be true instead of somebody else's clip. hope that's okay.
you look up at her she's watching you with the same face she had in the ballroom, dumbfounded and delighted and just slightly scared, all running together and you don't have a single careful, mathematical thought left in your entire body. "it's okay," you tell her. "it's more than okay."
the discourse doesn't die that day you don't expect it to, not really juju was honest with you about that, and honesty means you know there will be a cycle of it, days maybe weeks of strangers having opinions about a relationship that used to belong only to the two of you.
there will be the ugly comments, thinner than you feared but not zero, and there will be interviews where she has to find careful new sentences that are the opposite of the old careful sentences, sentences that finally get to include your name.
there will, probably, be a conversation with a grandmother that neither of you is looking forward to, and a longer conversation with sponsors, and a slow unlearning of six months of practiced distance that neither of your bodies will forget overnight, the way you'll probably still flinch, just slightly, the first few times you reach for her hand somewhere public and open, before you remember you're allowed.
but that's a tomorrow's problem, and several tomorrows after that right now, it's just early afternoon, hotel light slanting warm and gold across a bed neither of you have made, and juju is teaching you the second verse of the song properly this time sober, unhurried, no vodka soda involved, just her voice low and a little off-key, laughing every time she messes up the words, you laughing harder at her getting them wrong than you ever laughed at yourself getting them right.
"okay but you have to actually sing it back to me now," she says. "properly. sober. no excuses this time."
"i already sang it to two hundred thousand strangers, i think i've filled my quota."
"you sang it to me," she corrects, pulling you closer by the hand until your knees are tangled together on top of the comforter. "the two hundred thousand strangers were just an accident. i want the version that was actually for me."
so you sing it again quieter this time, no ring light twenty feet away, no accidental audience, just her face six inches from yours, still doing that helpless, overwhelmed, all the feelings running together thing it did the first time, and you understand, singing it slow this time, on purpose this time, exactly what the song was asking for all along not the eleven seconds the internet got, but this: the version where you mean it, and she gets to hear it, and neither of you has to do the careful math anymore.
when you get to the end she doesn't say anything clever she just leans in and kisses you soft, unhurried, the kind of kiss that isn't performing anything for anyone, that exists purely because two people who love each other are finally, finally allowed to be looked at doing it. "for the record," she murmurs against your mouth, "i would let you make a fool of both of us in public again. any day. any song."
"even though it's a liability."
"especially because it's a liability." she pulls back just enough to look at you properly, eyes soft, the fear from last night quieter now, not gone, just sitting alongside something bigger. "i spent six months being careful and it turns out i didn't actually want careful. i wanted this. i wanted you brave enough for both of us."
"i wasn't brave. i was tipsy."
"you were tipsy and brave," she says. "those aren't mutually exclusive. and for what it's worth — i've never in my life been so glad somebody risked it all on me."
months later after the discourse has mostly gone quiet, after the grandmother conversation turned out gentler than either of you feared, after the sponsors issued their own bland warm statements and moved on, after "she's the whole thing" became a phrase your friends won't let either of you live down you'll still find the original clip sometimes, resurfacing in some corner of the internet during a slow news week, eleven seconds looped and re-looped, captioned by strangers who will never know the half of what came after it.
you'll watch it, sometimes, just the two of you, curled up on a couch that's actually yours now, in an apartment you actually share now, and juju will laugh every single time at the exact moment you do the unplanned spin, and you'll groan and hide your face in a pillow every single time, and neither reaction will ever get old. "i still can't believe you just started singing," she'll say, for maybe the fortieth time.
"i still can't believe you didn't drop your drink."
"i told you, i almost did." and somewhere in there, underneath the teasing, underneath the running joke you'll probably still be making a decade from now, there's the quieter truth neither of you says out loud very often, because you don't have to anymore that the scariest night of your relationship turned out, eventually, to also be the best thing that ever happened to it.
that being seen, once the fear burned off, was never actually the threat it felt like at 12:41am with your hands shaking over a phone screen. that some things are worth the eleven seconds of exposure it takes to finally stop doing the math that some things are worth risking it all.
