He saw the slides first.

Cardinal red, Nike, block letters spelling STANFORD across the strap—team issue, the kind you only got if you were actually on the roster, not something you could buy at the campus store even if you tried. He knew because he'd tried to buy Danny a pair as a joke sophomore year and the equipment guy had laughed him out of the building.

She was wearing them with white socks pulled halfway up her shins, which should've looked ridiculous and somehow just looked like her.

Then his brain caught up with the rest of the outfit and short-circuited a little.

The zip-up. His zip-up. Team-issued, half-zip, STANFORD VOLLEYBALL stitched small over the left chest where his own last name usually sat when he wore his personal one, sleeves pushed up her forearms because it drowned her, hanging loose enough that it swallowed most of whatever soft, worn-in t-shirt she had on underneath. His backpack—the actual gear bag, cardinal and white, HORCOFF printed on the side tag that nobody but equipment staff ever saw—slung over one shoulder like she'd just walked out of his locker instead of her own apartment.

He stood in Marcus's kitchen holding a lukewarm beer and forgot, for a full three seconds, how to form a coherent thought.

"Bro." Danny appeared at his elbow, already grinning like he'd won something. "Bro."

"Don't."

"I'm not saying anything." Danny took a slow sip of his drink, eyes flicking pointedly across the room to where she was laughing with some girls from her econ cohort, hip cocked, his gear hanging off her like it had been made for her instead of him. "I'm just saying that's the third time this month."

"It's not the third time."

"It's literally the third time. I counted. There was the hoodie at the football game, the t-shirt she wore to brunch that one time she definitely thought nobody would recognize, and now this whole—" Danny gestured broadly at her, at the slides, the zip-up, the bag. "This whole look. Head to toe. She's basically wearing your locker."

Marcus wandered over, already smirking, because apparently this was a group activity now. "Didn't you make that stuff off-limits? Like officially? I remember there being a rule."

"There's not a rule."

"There's absolutely a rule," Liam said, joining the pile-on uninvited, because his teammates operated as a single hive mind whenever there was an opportunity to mess with him. "Becca asked to borrow your Stanford hoodie sophomore year and you told her it 'wasn't that kind of hoodie.' Which, at the time, we all thought was the weirdest sentence you'd ever said."

"It's not the same."

"It's extremely the same," Danny said. "You don't let anyone touch the team gear. Recruits ask to try on jerseys and you act like they're asking to borrow your kidney. And she's just—" He gestured again, unable to finish the sentence through his own laughter. "Walking around in the whole starter pack. Bag included."

Across the kitchen, she caught him staring. Smiled—easy, unbothered, completely unaware she was currently wearing three years' worth of evidence against him—and lifted her cup in a little toast before turning back to her friends.

She had no idea. That was the part that got him. She'd shown up tonight, grabbed whatever was clean and comfortable off the back of her desk chair, thrown it on without a second thought, because at some point over the last three years his stuff had just quietly become part of her rotation. Not a statement. Not a callback to anything. Just—hers now, somewhere along the way, the same way his hoodie had ended up permanently living in her passenger seat, the same way she had a toothbrush at his place that nobody talked about, the same way half his childhood was just also her childhood by default.