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She was 0–13 against the Czechs.
Was.
Because about five seconds ago, you overhit a baseline return, and now she’s clutching her head with both hands, her eyes disappearing into little more than lines as her entire face lights up with joy at winning the Birmingham 2026 title.
Alex Eala is now 1–13 against your flag.
All thanks to you—Nikola Bartůňková, the only Czech who couldn’t beat the most popular girl on tour right now.
The crowd continues to roar as you walk to the center of the court, stopping just shy of the net. You raise your right arm, suddenly nervous. You’ve watched so many videos of her leading up to this match, and more often than not, Alex goes for a hug instead of a handshake. You’re not sure what unsettles you more: the fact that getting a hug matters to you, or how disappointed you’ll be if she opts for the latter.
But before your brain can short-circuit from anticipation, Alex is already closing the distance and curling an arm around your neck. The gentle tug of it has you leaning down slightly, your head fitting over her shoulder, your chin barely brushing its soft slope.
You take a deep breath to exhale your congratulations, but that turns out to be your first mistake.
Breathing in Alex Eala, fresh off a win, is the final shove you’ve been desperately avoiding—the one that sends you tumbling straight into her rabbit hole.
Suffice it to say, the reaction you get is mixed. Not only from the media (who have nothing but praise for Eala) but from your compatriots, too. The group chat you keep with them wasn’t a decision made by the players themselves, of course. The federation wanted everyone gathered in one place for important events and directives, but mostly to manufacture a sense of camaraderie among you—something that has become increasingly rare as the field within the country grows ever more competitive. If not for Karolína’s random memes every couple of days—which almost always land with the grace of a tumbleweed rolling across a deserted town—the chat would be otherwise dead.
Today is different, however. In less than 24 hours, everyone’s chimed into the conversation about Alex Eala finally ending her “Czech Curse”.
Barbora Krejčíková: Tough luck, Niki. I remember her being a tricky one. You’ll get her next time.
Tereza Valentová: 🤣🤣🤣
Sára Bejlek: Saw the highlights. You did your best!
Marie Bouzková: Congrats on the plate 👍
Linda Nosková: I thought I told you to do that thing I told you about! 🙄
A couple of minutes later:
Karolína Muchová: Awwww… beautiful hug at the net, Nikoooo 😜
And that message from Karolína attracts reactions like bees to honey. Your cheeks warm almost instantly, panic coursing through your body until it reaches your hands. Before you can think better of it, your fingers are already moving, tapping the “Leave Group” button without a second thought.
Your phone rings a minute later. A laughing Karolína greets your ears, and as though she can read your mind, she blurts out, “Wait, wait, wait—don’t hang up!”
You heed her plea. You’ve always been obedient. You’ve always followed your parents’ advice and their rules, your coaches’ game plans and training programs. You’ve always been a good girl, and they tease you about it, though you’ve never quite understood what’s wrong with being one.
But this is one of the few moments you wish you weren’t.
All you want to do is hang up, burrow beneath a pile of heavy blankets, and think about how good Alex smelled—
“Niko... Niko!”
It only dawns on you then that you haven’t uttered a single word since picking up the call.
“Are you... okay?”
You nod, then immediately shake your head when you remember Karolína can’t see you. Ugh. Stupid.
“I’m fine, Karo!”
Karolína snickers. “You don’t have to yell. Did you seriously leave the group because of what I said?”
The thing about Karolína Muchová is that she doesn’t sound apologetic about it. Not one bit. You’d think a sorry would follow a question like that, but you can hear it plainly in her voice: she isn’t sorry at all. If anything, the teasing has simply followed you from the group chat to this call.
“It...” You sigh, trying to focus. “...was an accident.”
“Mmm... Can I add you back?”
“No.”
That earns her a full-blown laugh. Karolína doesn’t wait for you to elaborate.
“You know, they’re all wondering how it happened. How she managed to beat you, I mean,” she says.
You shrug, even though she can’t see it. “They can watch the tape if they want to know how.”
“The thing about a 0–13 record is,” Karolína continues, “she probably lost most of those matches in her head. The Inner Game of Tennis talks about—”
“I’ve read the damn book, okay?”
A beat passes.
“Then maybe,” Karolína says, amusement curling around every word, “you should read it again.”
The thing is, it’s been brewing for a while now.
And if you’ve correctly guessed what Karolína was insinuating during that infuriating call, then she’s wrong. You didn’t lose the match in your head. You’ve always wanted to win more than anything. Not even a beautiful, talented, charismatic, and charming—to a fault—girl from the other side of the world is enough to make you forget that. She played better on a day you played average. As simple as that.
During the ceremony, Alex didn’t stop smiling, her unilateral dimple practically glaring at you beneath the sunny skies of Birmingham. Seeing that smile, it took some effort to sulk. Your own lips betrayed you too, curving upward of their own accord. They stretched wide enough for your teeth to show, your eyes narrowing until you and Alex had matching squints.
Alex was practically vibrating with excitement, leaning in every so often to whisper random comments in your ear because she couldn’t seem to keep her happiness to herself. And you didn’t remember saying much in return. Mostly, you nodded and agreed with whatever she told you.
Losing to other players had never felt like this.
“Do you have a doubles partner for Wimbledon?” you blurted out, the question escaping before you could stop to wonder why you were asking it in the first place. You’d played doubles here and lost in the first round. You were fairly certain you hadn’t left a good enough impression as a doubles partner for Alex to want to team up with you moving forward.
“No. Do you?”
You shook your head.
“Wanna play together?” Alex asked with a grin.
You weren’t ready to admit it yet, but it felt like you had won something too.
Your first mistake was hugging her at the net.
Your second was saying yes despite every warning sign telling you exactly how much trouble you were going to be in the more time you spent with her.
It’s two days before the main draw matches of another Grand Slam, and you can tell by the way Tereza has been side-eyeing you for the last half hour how much she disapproves of you teaming up with Alex again for Wimbledon doubles. More than anyone, she knows your chemistry with Alex is a disaster waiting to happen, especially because she’s the last doubles partner you had before the Filipina. And that was three years ago.
You pretend to ignore her, attacking your salad with a little too much concentration.
“You’re not being serious about this,” Tereza says slowly.
“About what?”
“Playing doubles.”
You think you know where this is going. Still, you’re curious enough to hear her out.
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you could’ve asked me,” Tereza says matter-of-factly. “If you were seriously coming back to doubles, you would’ve asked me first.”
You don’t have an answer for that. At least not immediately. The two of you played plenty of doubles together in your junior years, and it was a good partnership, making deep runs often enough.
“Well, you were teaming up with Viktorija,” you point out.
Tereza rolls her eyes. “Mine was a last minute thing. The news that you were playing with Eala at Wimbledon came out two weeks ago.”
You gently set your fork down and blink at her.
“She was the one who asked me,” you mumble, barely avoiding a stutter.
Tereza snorts. “As if you couldn’t have said no.”
Maybe you could have.
You just didn’t want to.
The first time you met Alex Eala was seven years ago, at the 2019 ITF World Junior Finals. You were barely a teenager; she was a skinny fourteen-year-old. That first meeting came in the quarterfinals, a match you won. Everything about it was brief—the match itself, the handshake afterward, the post-match ceremonies. Before you knew it, she was already walking off the court as though nothing had happened.
At the time, you were too busy being ecstatic about reaching the semifinals to think much about her. You didn’t think about Alex again until last year, when she seemed to take over every corner of the internet—from her historic Miami run, to her first Wimbledon Centre Court match against the defending champion, to her first Grand Slam win at the US Open. She was everywhere.
And of course, people talked.
Not all of it was complimentary. It was hard to ignore the fact that she was becoming more popular than girls who had spent the entire year lifting trophies.
It was tempting to agree with those who thought she didn’t deserve the spotlight, but it was almost impossible not to like her.
At least for you, it was.
The more you watched her interviews, the more you observed her at tournaments you both happened to enter but never quite crossed paths in, the more you began to understand the effect she had on people.
Plenty of players won matches. Plenty of players made headlines. There was simply something disarming about the way she carried herself, as though she had somehow missed the memo that everyone in professional tennis was supposed to be guarded.
She smiled easily. Spoke generously.
You told yourself it was curiosity. Besides, it wasn’t as though you knew her.
You only found yourself looking for her name in draws. Not because you wanted to play her, of course. Just to see where she was. How she was doing. Whether she was still smiling in post-match interviews.
And now you’re completely—as Tereza would put it—indoctrinated. A moth helplessly circling a bright, overwhelming flame.
So when you slid into her DMs to ask if she wanted to play doubles together in Birmingham, you fully expected the message to disappear into the void. Alex had more than a million followers on Instagram, and you imagined her inbox was flooded with messages by the hour.
What you weren’t expecting was a reply.
And you definitely weren’t expecting her to say yes.
It’s doubles match day for the Eala–Bartůňková partnership (or Bartůňková–Eala, whatever—you couldn’t care less) on Court 6. You both take the first set, and Alex is beaming beside you, taking a sip from her Evian while recounting some self-deprecating joke about almost slipping during her match against Maya Joint.
You can’t help the grin on your face as you tell her to be more careful. You’re not brave enough to text her yet—to ask if she wants to grab lunch together or maybe practice. The line of players willing to be Alex’s hitting partner is long enough as it is.
So you take what you can get, like a few minutes between changeovers.
“How far do you think we’ll get in this tournament?” you ask, because you want to know how big her dreams are.
Alex mulls it over for a moment before answering.
“Actually, I try not to think about it.”
A more serious look settles over her face, subtle but unmistakable. Immediately, you want to hit yourself in the head. Of all the things to bring up.
“Sorry,” you say quickly. “Bad question.”
“No, it’s okay.” Alex takes another sip of water. “I just learned that whenever I start thinking too far ahead, I stop paying attention to what’s in front of me.”
You nod. “Yeah, me, too.”
She shrugs. “Or maybe I’m just scared of jinxing myself.”
That draws a laugh out of you.
“You? Superstitious?”
“A little.”
“A little?”
“Okay,” she says, grinning, “a lot.”
The seriousness disappears as quickly as it came, and you find yourself oddly relieved by that. You’re beginning to learn that there are two versions of Alex. The Alex everyone sees—the smiling interviews, the confidence, the glass half-full. And then there’s Alex—the one sitting beside you right now.
You like this one too. Maybe a little more than you should.
The umpire calls time.
You both stand, racquets in hand, and head back onto the court.
“Just for the record,” Alex says as you walk to your positions, “I think we can win this.”
You stare at her.
A minute ago she was talking about not looking ahead. Now she's talking about winning the whole thing.
When she catches your expression, she laughs.
“I said I try not to think about it,” she says. “I never said I don't dream about it.”
And somehow, for the rest of the match, that sentence stays with you.
You both end up losing to Ostapenko and Kenin. Still, you make the third round in singles, while Alex makes the fourth.
Nevertheless, that ends up being your favorite day at Wimbledon.
Inspired by this Wimbledon photo from X account: @maraiahbliss
