paige x reader
flirty moments during a game or reader mic’ed up or something please
you’re live, you know that right
pairing: uconn!paige!girlfriend x uconn!reader!girlfriend
wc: 5.4k
summary: paige bueckers has no shame, a twitter thread with twenty-seven entries, and apparently zero interest in keeping her feelings about you private—which would be a problem if you weren’t so completely, helplessly, embarrassingly in love with her too.
🏷️: @333dee, @timunhater, @marleymarleymarleymarley, @yourmom-25s-blog, @authentic-girl03, @sammiejane22, @ladyluvbugs, @italy4life, @nervoussagittarius
the thing about dating paige bueckers is that she has absolutely no shame, none, zero you have checked repeatedly, thoroughly, across every possible context in the locker room, in the dining hall, in film sessions where geno is quite literally in the room and it is simply not there the shame it does not exist inside her body.
it’s not like you didn’t know this going in you’d been her teammate for two years before anything happened, two years of watching her operate in the world like the rules of social embarrassment were suggestions written for other people.
you’d seen her argue passionately with a vending machine for four full minutes after it gave her extra chips, not complaining, celebrating, giving it a genuine speech about integrity and reward.
you’d seen her walk into a film session fifteen minutes late with a breakfast sandwich and no apology and somehow make geno laugh anyway you had known, intellectually, what you were getting into but this, this is something new.
“you’re mic’d up,” you remind her during the first timeout of the second half you’re down four it’s a home game, gampel loud and close around you, and geno is at the whiteboard drawing out adjustments with the focused energy of a man who does not have time for anything that isn’t basketball.
paige is standing next to you with her elbow propped on your shoulder like you are a piece of furniture she has personally claimed like this is just where her elbow lives now. “i know,” she says pleasantly.
“paige. the whole country can hear you.”
“i know,” she says again, same tone, zero concern, and then she turns slightly toward her own collar and says, louder, with the deliberate energy of someone making an announcement: “my girlfriend is the prettiest player on this team and i will not be taking questions at this time.”
the timeout explodes nika loses it first full body, hand over her mouth, turning away like she can hide it. aubrey makes a noise that is not a basketball player noise.
ice throws her head back completely, done, gone, not coming back kk pulls her jersey up over her face. azzi, who is famously the most composed person on this roster, makes a sound in the back of her throat that is, without question, a wheeze.
even aaliyah, still operating under the impression that she should probably be professional, covers her face with both hands geno does not look up from the whiteboard.
“bueckers.”
“coach.”
“are you done.”
“yes sir.”
he keeps drawing, sets it up, taps the board twice a full five seconds of blessed silence while he walks through the adjustment and everyone pretends to be paying attention then, quieter so quiet it’s almost just for you, just breath and words and the weight of her elbow still on your shoulder: “she really is though.” and the mic catches every single syllable of it.
it airs on the espn feature two weeks later, tucked between a segment on the team’s defensive rating and a profile on geno’s coaching philosophy.
they give it a title card they use it as the closer the producer, you will later find out, fought for thirty seconds to include it and won unanimously as your phone doesn’t stop buzzing for four days.
your mom calls, your mom never calls during the season she calls to say, and these are her exact words she seems very nice, honey. paige, who is sitting next to you when you take the call, hears this and looks extremely smug about it for the rest of the evening.
the second incident and yes, there is a second incident, there is always a second incident with paige, this is what you have come to understand about your life during warmups before the villanova game.
it’s a road trip, a night game, the gym still mostly empty when you’re running shooting lines forty minutes before tip.
it’s routine catch, shot, rotate, the lights are up, the music is going, kk is talking too loud about something that happened at dinner and aubrey is responding with equal volume and it’s just it’s normal.
it feels like every other pregame warmup you’ve had for three years and then paige, who is supposed to be on the other end of the court working pull-ups with the assistant coach, cups both hands around her mouth and shouts across half court: “that’s my girlfriend.”
you do not look at her. “number —” a pause, like she’s checking, which she is absolutely not doing, she knows your number, “— that one. right there. she’s mine.”
there are maybe fifty people in the building, students filtering in early, a few parents, the opposing team still in their locker room, every single one of them looks at you.
“paige.” you catch the pass you do not look at her. “i’m just saying.”
“you’re always just saying.”
“because it’s always true.” a beat. “also she just made that shot which, statistically, proves my point.” nika, rotating behind you, makes a sound that she converts very quickly into a cough.
you make the next shot you rotate you are a composed and serious basketball player who is completely unbothered by her girlfriend’s complete lack of social self-regulation you are not smiling you are the picture of calm.
you are absolutely smiling, it is a losing battle and you know it aubrey catches it on your way back through the line and bumps your shoulder without a word.
nika raises both eyebrows so high they nearly leave her face entirely, a gesture that communicates i see you and i will never let you live this down without a single syllable.
you point at her in warning she holds both hands up innocent, uninvolved, completely blameless and she is also smiling, everyone within fifteen feet is smiling, this is what paige does, she walks into a space and somehow makes the whole room.
“still mine, by the way,” paige calls out from half court, just to make sure you haven’t forgotten.
“oh my god,” you say, to the basket.
“i love you,” she adds, bright and easy, and she’s already turned back to her pull-up, already mid-motion, like she didn’t just say that into the open air of a villanova gymnasium with witnesses present.
the ball comes to you, you hold it for a half second longer than you need to. “i love you too,” you say quietly, almost just for yourself.
almost.
azzi appears at your shoulder on the next rotation; she doesn’t say anything for a full beat, just exists there in that steady azzi way, and then. “you are so down bad.” delivered with great tenderness like a eulogy like she is sorry for your loss.
“i know,” you say. “it’s kind of sweet,” she allows, after a moment. “don’t tell her that.”
“she already knows.”
you look over without meaning to paige is on her pull-up again, mid-motion, and she’s not looking at you, but she’s smiling.
that specific smile, the one that means she’s aware of exactly what she just did and she’d do it again in a heartbeat you make the shot you make the next five shots you win by twelve.
the third incident is the one that ends up on twitter and you want this on the record, stated clearly, with full acknowledgement from all parties it was not your fault. not entirely.
you were running on adrenaline and forty minutes of game time and the specific kind of exhaustion that only comes when something matters, when the stakes are real and your body has been spending itself against them for the better part of an hour.
you had just hit the go-ahead layup forty seconds left, three-point game, you had taken the feed from paige on the baseline and gone up and kissed the glass and the crowd had come completely apart around you and then paige had come flying in from the perimeter like she’d been launched, full speed, arms already open, and you had caught her on pure reflex, no thought just hands, just instinct, both arms around her before your brain had even processed what was happening and she had said, right into your ear, warm and immediate. that’s my girl.
like it was the most natural thing like it was just a fact she was confirming and you had turned your head, and she was right there, and you had kissed her temple.
on the court with eleven thousand people watching and three cameras in the building and forty seconds still on the clock.
it lasted maybe one second, maybe less paige pulled back, and the expression on her face was something you’d never seen before not the grin, not the smug look, not the performed unbothered cool.
something quieter something that sat behind her eyes and didn’t have a name yet, something that made your chest do a thing you weren’t prepared for in the middle of a basketball game with forty seconds left and then nika was there, and aubrey, and the crowd was still going, and paige tapped your hip once and said let’s close this out in her captain voice, and the moment folded itself back into the noise.
you closed it out after, in the handshake line, two opposing players told you that was the cutest thing they’d ever seen on a basketball court but one of them said it twice as you didn’t know what to do with that information so you just said thank you and kept moving.
the clip is eleven seconds long whereas someone caught it from the student section, slightly shaky, the sound of eleven thousand people underneath it.
it opens on you going up for the layup and ends three seconds after the kiss just long enough to catch paige’s expression, that unnamed thing, before she pulls back and taps your hip and the camera loses you both in the crowd.
four hundred thousand likes by morning six hundred thousand by noon the caption is just a string of emojis a star, a flame, a broken heart, repeated and the quote tweets are a disaster, a beautiful unhinged disaster, and you watch the whole thing spiral from the hotel bed with your phone held above your face while paige showers.
she comes out in a t-shirt and sweats, hair damp, and looks at you, looks at your phone and reads the expression on your face. “how bad,” she says.
“it’s not bad,” you say. “it’s — there’s a compilation. someone made a compilation of every time you’ve done something like this on camera. it’s four minutes long.”
paige is quiet for a moment. then. “is it a good four minutes?”
“paige.”
“i’m asking.”
“it has eight hundred thousand views.”
she takes this in with the equanimity of someone who has long since made peace with being perceived then she crosses the room, takes your phone gently out of your hand, sets it face-down on the nightstand, and gets into bed with the decisive energy of someone who has made a decision and is not revisiting it. “go to sleep,” she says.
“my mentions are —”
“they’ll still be there tomorrow.”
“paige, there’s a thread. someone made a whole thread. they went back through like two years of footage and found every —”
“babe.” she turns toward you and there’s that thing again, that unnamed quiet, closer now and easier to see without eleven thousand people around it. “let them. okay? let them find every single one.” a pause. “i’d do all of it again.”
you look at her, the room is dim, just the glow from the parking lot through the curtain gap somewhere down the hall you can hear nika laughing at something, full and easy, the way she laughs when she’s really gone.
“you are the most embarrassing person i have ever met in my life,” you tell her.
the corner of her mouth lifts. “yeah,” she says, like this is not new information, like she has heard this before and filed it correctly. “but i’m yours.”
the city hums outside nika laughs again, further away now you look at her for another second two three. “yeah,” you say.
“you are.”
she reaches over and turns off the lamp in the dark, she finds your hand under the blanket and holds it with the easy certainty of someone who has decided and doesn’t need to keep deciding.
you fall asleep like that your phone buzzes twice on the nightstand you don’t check it until morning.
the twitter thread has a title now: someone with a uconn fan account with forty thousand followers and apparently a lot of free time has been updating it in real time since the villanova clip went viral.
it is called paige bueckers cinematic universe: a love story (documented) it has seventeen entries and is pinned to their profile; they update it within hours of any new incident.
you know this because kk told you kk told you while showing you her phone at breakfast with the expression of someone delivering genuinely important news, which, to be fair, she seemed to believe it was.
“seventeen,” she said. “and they’re not even counting the vending machine speech because you weren’t there for that one.”
“i was there for the vending machine speech.”
“then they should count it.” she scrolled. “look, they have timestamps.”
you had looked you had immediately regretted looking entry number fourteen was the temple kiss, and whoever ran the account had captioned it simply case closed. the court adjourned. we can all go home.
you showed it to paige paige read it, nodded once like it was a reasonable conclusion, and went back to her eggs this is your life now geno finds out about the thread on a tuesday.
you are not there when it happens you hear about it secondhand from kk, who was there, who describes it with the reverence of someone recounting a historical event.
apparently one of the assistant coaches mentioned it during a film session, offhand, the way you mention something you assume everyone already knows.
geno had stopped the film and asked, in the specific voice he uses when he is gathering information before forming an opinion, what exactly a twitter thread was and why it had seventeen entries about his point guard’s romantic life.
the assistant coach explained that geno had been quiet for a long moment then he looked at paige and said. “are you done.”
paige, who had not been the one to bring it up, who had been sitting there completely innocent for once in her life, said. “coach, i didn’t —”
“are you done,” geno said again.
“…yes sir.”
he had restarted the film kk tells you this in practice, in a whisper, while you’re waiting for the drill to reset, and you have to press your mouth together very hard to keep it from becoming something audible.
“he wasn’t even mad,” kk says. “that’s the thing. he just looked at her. and then he moved on.”
“that’s worse,” you say.
“so much worse,” kk agrees.
across the court, paige is running a ball-handling drill with complete focus and zero apparent awareness that she is being discussed.
she looks like an athlete, she looks like a professional, she looks, in this specific moment, like someone who has never in her life caused a four-hundred-thousand-like moment on twitter.
she catches you looking winks you look away. “entry eighteen,” kk says quietly, and you say “kk, i will actually end you,” and she smiles like she’s been waiting for that.
the road trip to providence is a six-hour bus ride and paige sleeps for approximately forty-five minutes of it before waking up restless and deciding that your shoulder is a better pillow than the window.
this is not unusual; this is, in fact, so usual that you don’t even clock it anymore, just shift slightly to give her a better angle and keep your headphones in and go back to whatever you were watching.
azzi, across the aisle, glances over and makes a face that communicates that you two are genuinely unbearable with great efficiency. “don’t,” you tell her. “i didn’t say anything,” azzi says.
“you had a whole sentence on your face.”
“i have no idea what you’re talking about.” she looks back at her phone. a beat. “she’s literally asleep on you.”
“she’s tired.”
“she slept the whole flight to the last road trip.”
“azzi.”
“i’m just noting,” azzi says, with the precise innocence of someone who is noting on purpose. “for the record. for the thread.”
“do not put this in the thread.”
“i don’t run the thread.”
“you know who runs the thread.” azzi’s expression does something complicated and she goes back to her phone very quickly and you narrow your eyes at her and she does not look up and you make a mental note to investigate this later.
paige shifts against your shoulder, resettles her hand, finds your arm without waking up, just pulls it slightly closer on instinct, and something in your chest does the thing it always does, the thing you’ve stopped trying to name.
azzi, from behind her phone screen, says nothing but she’s smiling you can tell.
the providence game is not close, you go up by eighteen in the second quarter and never really let it back, and by the fourth it’s the kind of game where geno is rotating deep into the bench and the starters are on the sideline in their warm-ups watching the younger players get minutes.
you’re sitting next to paige this is normal you’re always near paige on the bench when you’re both out, it’s just where you end up, gravitational, the way water finds level her knee is against yours this is also normal.
what is not normal is that kk, two seats down, is watching you both with the focused attention of a naturalist observing something in the wild. “kk,” paige says, without looking at her. “hm?”
“stop.”
“i’m watching the game.”
“you’re watching us.”
kk considers this. “i’m watching the game,” she says again, with no additional information, and goes back to looking exactly where she was looking.
paige looks at you, you look at paige some wordless agreement passes between you and you both look back at the court.
two minutes later, your team’s freshman point guard makes a ridiculous no-look pass that results in a layup and the bench erupts and in the chaos of everyone standing and reacting, paige leans in and says into your ear. “you played really well tonight.”
it’s quiet it’s just for you no broadcast, no audience, no mic it still gets you the same way it always does more, maybe, because it’s not a performance, it’s not for the thread or the clip or the eleven thousand people.
it’s just her voice close to your ear and her knee against yours and the noise of your teammates around you. “yeah?” you say.
“yeah.” a pause. “that drive in the third. that was you.”
“that was the play call.”
“the play call doesn’t hit the shot.” she pulls back enough to look at you properly and there it is again that thing behind her eyes, the unnamed one, the one you saw in the villanova gymnasium and again in the dark of the hotel room easier to see now that you know to look for it. “you hit the shot.” you hold her gaze for a second.
“you’re being normal,” you say.
“i can be normal.”
“you literally have a twitter thread.”
“that’s not my fault.”
“paige —”
“seventeen entries,” she says, like this is a reasonable defense, “is a reflection of the documentation, not the behavior.”
you stare at her she looks back at you with complete sincerity kk, two seats away, makes a noise that she converts into a cough so badly it doesn’t even almost work. “i hate you,” you tell paige.
“no you don’t,” she says easily she’s right she’s completely right and she knows it and that’s the worst part, that she has always known it, that from the very beginning she somehow knew exactly where this was going before you did, and she had just waited.
let you figure it out given you all the time you needed and not a single second of pressure. “no,” you say. “i don’t.”
she smiles not the grin, not the performed one the real one, the smaller one, the one that only comes out in the quiet moments that belong just to you the buzzer sounds uconn wins by twenty-two.
the locker room after is loud the way locker rooms are always loud after wins music up, everyone talking at once, the particular chaos of twenty people in a confined space all feeling good at the same time.
geno comes in, does his thing, says what he needs to say, and then pauses at the door on his way out he looks at you then at paige then back at the room in general.
“seventeen,” he says, and nothing else then he leaves the locker room and goes completely silent for approximately two full seconds then nika absolutely loses it.
ice is right behind her aubrey is gone kk is sitting on the bench with her face in her hands making no sound but shaking azzi is the only one who looks unsurprised, which you are filing away for later.
paige, for the first time in recent memory, looks genuinely caught there is something happening on her face that is almost, almost embarrassment she looks at you and you look back at her. “geno knows about the thread,” you say.
“geno knows about the thread,” she confirms.
“are you done,” you say, in your best geno voice, which is not very good something breaks open on her face she laughs, real and full, head back, and it’s the laugh you like best, the one that doesn’t have any performance in it, and you think distantly that you would do a lot of things to keep hearing that laugh, that you have been thinking this for a long time without saying it, that maybe you don’t need to say it because she already knows she already knows she has always known.
“come on,” she says, when she’s done, still grinning. she holds her hand out. “bus leaves in twenty.”
you take her hand kk, from the bench, says. “entry eighteen,” at a volume she clearly thinks is under her breath.
it is not under her breath. “kk,” you say. “congratulations on the win,” kk says.
you leave the locker room hand in hand and the music follows you all the way down the hall.
the thing about the final four is that nothing prepares you for it, not the practices, not the film sessions, not geno standing at the whiteboard drawing it out like a map you can follow if you just pay close enough attention.
not the two years you spent getting here, not the recruiting rankings or the expectations or the weight of what this program means to people who were wearing uconn blue before you were born.
none of it prepares you for the specific feeling of walking into an arena that size with something real on the line and understanding, in your body, that this is it this is the one you’ll remember.
you’ve been in big games you’ve been in games that mattered but this is different in a way that lives in your sternum, a low persistent hum that’s been there since the bus pulled into the parking lot and hasn’t left.
paige, walking beside you through the tunnel, bumps her shoulder against yours. “you’re in your head,” she says. “i’m focused.”
“you’re making the face.”
“i don’t have a face.”
“you have a face,” she says, easy and certain, the way she says everything. “you’ve had it since warmups, your jaw does the thing.” you consciously unclench your jaw.
she watches you do it and doesn’t say anything, which is somehow worse than if she had said something you walk another twenty feet in silence, the noise of the arena building around you, and then she says. “hey.” you look at her.
“we’re here,” she says just that we’re here like it’s the whole point, like it contains everything the two years and the practices and the film sessions and the vending machine speech and the seventeen entries and the hotel room in providence and all of it, every single piece of it, compressed into two words.
something in your sternum settles. “yeah,” you say. “so let’s go play,” she says, and she’s already moving, already ahead of you, already in it the way she’s always in it completely, without reservation, like she was made for exactly this floor.
you follow her you always follow her the game is everything it’s everything in the way that the best games are not clean, not easy, nothing handed.
you go up by six in the first half and lose it in the third and claw it back point by point in the fourth, and it’s the kind of basketball that takes something from you even when you’re winning, that spends you down to the last reserve of yourself and then asks for a little more.
paige is everywhere this is not unusual paige is always everywhere but tonight it’s different, tonight it’s the version of her that you’ve only seen a handful of times, the version where she’s fully unlocked, where every decision she makes is half a second faster than it should be possible for a human person to think.
she finds you twice in the fourth quarter in ways that shouldn’t work, passes that require her to know where you’re going before you’ve decided to go there, and both times you make the shot and both times you look at each other for exactly one second before the game pulls you back with forty-three seconds left you’re up two.
with eighteen seconds left you’re up two with four seconds left, after a stop and two made free throws, you’re up four.
the buzzer sounds and for a moment just a moment, maybe two seconds, maybe less the arena is so loud it becomes a kind of silence a wall of sound so complete it cancels itself out and leaves you standing in the middle of it feeling like the only still thing in the world then paige finds you.
she doesn’t come flying this time, no running start, no full-speed collision she just crosses the court and gets to you, and when she does she puts both hands on either side of your face and looks at you for a long moment without saying anything and her eyes are bright and she’s breathing hard and you are too and the confetti is starting somewhere above you and neither of you are looking at it.
she doesn’t say that’s my girl she doesn’t say anything for the record, nothing for the broadcast, nothing that will end up in the thread.
she just looks at you like you are the thing she wanted to see most at the end of all of this you put your hands over hers.
“we’re here,” you say, because it’s her words and they’re the right ones and there’s nothing else that fits.
something moves through her face that thing, the unnamed one, the one from villanova and the hotel room and the bench in providence except now it has more room, now it isn’t compressed into a single second between plays, now it can just be there, open and unhidden, and you can look at it as long as you need to.
you think maybe you know what to call it now. “yeah,” she says, low and certain. “we are.”
later much later, after the celebration and the trophy and the interviews and the photos and geno’s speech, after nika has cried twice and tried to pretend she didn’t, after kk has documented everything extensively, after azzi has said entry twenty-six with great satisfaction into what she thought was an empty hallway but wasn’t.
later, you find each other in the quiet it’s a hallway off the main locker room, not glamorous fluorescent light, the distant sound of music from wherever the team has migrated.
paige is sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and her legs stretched out and her medal around her neck and her eyes closed she looks like something poured out and left to rest you sit down next to her, your shoulder against hers. she doesn’t open her eyes. “hey.”
“hey.”
a long beat the music somewhere the hum of the building. “kk’s going to make a whole post,” she says.
“i know.”
“with pictures.”
“i know.”
“the thread is going to be unhinged tomorrow.”
“i know.” a pause. “azzi runs it, by the way. i figured it out.”
paige is quiet for a moment then, slowly, a smile. “i know,” she says you stare at her. “you knew?”
“since entry four.”
“paige —”
“she asked me before she started it,” she says, still with her eyes closed, still smiling. “she wanted to make sure i was okay with it.”
you sit with this for a moment, the specific image of azzi pulling paige aside, probably in the dining hall, probably with her phone already open, asking permission to document your entire relationship for forty thousand followers. “and you said yes,” you say.
“i said yes.”
“why?”
she opens her eyes then turns her head to look at you, unhurried, the way she does everything when there’s no game to get back to, no clock running.
the medal sits heavy and gold next her chest, the fluorescent light is unflattering and she looks like the best thing you’ve ever seen.
“because it’s true,” she says simply. “everything in it. every single entry. it’s all just — true. and i didn’t want to hide any of it.” a beat. “i never wanted to hide any of it.”
you look at her for a long moment the music is muffled the light hums somewhere nika laughs again, her real laugh, the full one.
“i know,” you say, finally and you do.
you have always known, maybe from before you had the language for it, that paige was never going to be someone who hid things.
that choosing her meant being seen, consistently, in front of everyone, with no take-backs and no footnotes.
that the thread and the mic and the warmup announcement and all of it were never really about showing off they were just her.
all the way through. no performance, no edit just paige, pointing at you in a half-empty gymnasium and saying she’s mine like it was the most natural thing in the world because to her, it was. “i love you,” you tell her.
not quiet this time, not almost, just for you just said, clear and easy, in a fluorescent hallway off a championship locker room.
she smiles, the real one, the small one and the one that has always been yours. “i love you too,” she says she leans her head on your shoulder.
you stay there for a while, the two of you, while the celebration goes on without you somewhere down the hall.
the medal is cold when it brushes your arm her breathing evens out slowly, the way it does when she’s finally letting herself come down.
you don’t need to say anything else you don’t need to entry twenty-seven, posted at 2:47am by a fan account with forty thousand followers, is just a blurry photo taken through a doorway. two figures sitting on a hallway floor, shoulder to shoulder, one of them with a gold medal catching the light.
the caption is; that’s it. that’s the whole thread it gets more likes than any of the others.