Chapter 8 Damián
The lobby is cool after the afternoon. The woman at the front desk nods. The elevator opens on the first push of the button and I am grateful for the lack of waiting because waiting means standing in a hotel lobby with a feeling I have not yet given a name.
Fourth floor. Key card. Green light.
?íma is on his bed with his laptop on his stomach and a protein bar hanging from his mouth like a cigar.
“Vě?. Where have you been? You missed Ková?‘s attempt at American barbecue.”
“How did that go?”
“He ordered something called pulled pork and complained it wasn’t schnitzel.
Novotny tried to explain smoked meat and Ková? kept asking why it was pink in the middle.
They went on for twenty minutes, Vě?. Twenty minutes on the moral character of smoked meat.
The waitress brought him coleslaw at some point and he looked at it like it had insulted his mother.
He is deeply unwell about American food. ”
“Ková? doesn’t understand anything he can’t cover in breadcrumbs.”
“He understands pasta.”
“That’s true.” I take my shoes off and sit on my bed against the headboard.
“Where were you?”
“Walking. Tobík showed me his Beltline.”
“What did you do?”
“Walked. Ate tacos. Met half the small businesses on the path.” I smile thinking about all the people we talked to on the Beltline.
“You found tacos?”
“He found tacos. Better than the place Novotny found.”
“Novotny found a chain restaurant with a margarita menu longer than our defensive playbook. They are not comparable.”
I sit on the edge of my bed. My hand is on my thigh and my thumb is moving against the pad of my palm and I notice it and I stop it.
?íma is looking at me.
“What?”
“You’ve done that twice.”
“Done what?”
“That. With your hand.”
“It’s nothing. Cramp from training.”
“Cramp from training. In your hand.” He raises his eyebrows.
“Yes.”
“Vě?.”
“It’s a cramp.”
He looks at me one beat longer than the conversation needs. Then he goes back to his laptop. The screen is showing a Bundesliga highlight reel he is not really watching. I take my phone out so I have something to look at that isn’t ?íma.
Tomá?.
How was the tour? Did he take you to the taco place?
He took me to the taco place. Maria called me tall.
Ha. She does that. She told me my hair was nice and tried to set me up with her daughter.
She tried to set Tobík up with her daughter too.
She tries to set everyone up with her daughter. It is a community service.
The dots appear. Disappear. Appear.
Listen. I’m not going to see daylight until next week with all the video review coaches want me to do. Take another day with him if you can. Let him show you the morning walk. He’s been a little quiet since we landed. He won’t tell me anything but maybe you can find out whats going on.
I’ll see how recovery goes.
Make an effort. He’ll be happy.
I put the phone down. Tomá? telling me to spend more time with his brother. The brother whose shoulder I had my arm around this afternoon. The brother who has, apparently, been a little quiet since we landed. Tomá? noticed it. Tomá? noticed it and decided the right person to hand it to is me.
“That Tomá??” ?íma says.
“Yes.”
“What did he want?”
“He wants me to take another day with Tobík. He’s tied up in film review.”
“And you said yes. Tomá? asks you for anything and you say yes. Last summer he asked you to read a poem at his friend’s wedding and you’d never met the friend.”
“They were very emotional. The poem helped.”
“The poem was eight pages long, Vě?.”
“It was a long wedding.”
He laughs. The room settles back into the laptop click and the air conditioning, and through the window the Atlanta light is doing what it does at four in the afternoon, gold pulling east.
“Vě?.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re doing the hand thing again.”
I look at my hand. I am doing the hand thing again.
“Cramp,” I say.
“Sure.”
He says it the way Tomá? says “I’m thinking about it” to me. He doesn’t push.
Then he pushes a little. Not in the direction I expect.
“Whoever it is, just text them back. You don’t have to say much. You don’t have to say it well. You just have to send the sentence. Then you can go back to lying about cramps and I can go back to pretending I haven’t been watching you do this. We can both have what we want.”
He says all of it without looking up from his laptop. ?íma talks too much and notices everything, which is a combination I have never figured out how to manage.
“It’s not like that,” I say.
“Sure.”
He flips the laptop closed and swings his legs off the bed.
“Dinner in twenty?”
“Yes.”
“I’m getting steak. Ková? banned me from steak commentary at the table. I have things to say.”
“You always have things to say.”
“That’s why he banned me.”
He goes to the bathroom. I look at the spot on my palm. The palm is fine. The palm has been fine for thirty years.
The restaurant is two blocks from the hotel, one of those places with brick walls and Edison bulbs and a staff who have decided we are charming.
?íma is across from me, three drinks deep before the bread arrives.
Ková? is next to him cutting into a steak with the focused expression of a man performing surgery.
Novotny and Polá?ek are bickering about a Champions League match from March that neither of them watched.
Tomá? is on my left and Tobík isn’t here.
On the Beltline he mentioned, casually, the way he says things that are not casual, that he had a foodie group event tonight. Some restaurant opening. He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t ask. He has his own evening planned. The small thing of it arrived and went past.
We eat. The wine is fine. Atlanta restaurants run cold in summer, the air conditioning set to a Bavarian winter for reasons I cannot understand. The food keeps coming and ?íma keeps drinking and Ková? keeps narrating his steak like an Italian uncle.
Tomá? leans toward me near the end of the meal. He takes a drink. He is quiet for a second, the way he is when he is about to say something he has been thinking about for longer than he wants to admit.
“I came here at Christmas. I came for four days. I knew he was doing well. I did not know he was building this. He has built a life at twenty-two that I probably won’t know how to build at thirty-two. I’m really proud of him. I am also slightly afraid of him.”
I make a small noise. Tomá? sets his glass down. He waits a beat.
“Take another day. He likes you.”
“He likes everyone.”
“He likes you specifically.”
He says it without weight. The way Tomá? says things he hasn’t seen all the way to the end of. I make another small noise and Tomá? lets it land and goes back to his glass.
“?íma. With me.” Novotny stands as dinner ends. “Let’s find a bar where the lighting is wrong.”
“My favorite kind.”
They go. Tomá? and Ková? and Polá?ek head back to the hotel.
I tell them I want to walk. The night air is warm in a way Munich nights have not been since I have lived there.
The streetlights pool on the asphalt and the city is still wide awake at nine and I am not Tobík, I do not know this city, but the city is being kind to me anyway.
My room is quiet at nine-thirty. ?íma’s bag is gone. He texted that he might not be back until late, which I have learned to translate as not back until breakfast.
I pull off my shirt. I drink the water on the desk. The phone is on the nightstand.
I open the app. I tell myself I am checking the team channel.
I am not checking the team channel.
New post. Tobík. Twenty-three minutes ago.
A candid shot, the kind a friend takes when the subject doesn’t know.
Tobík is in a kitchen, the back-of-house chaos of a pop-up event.
He is laughing at something the man next to him said.
The man is leaning into him with his shoulder.
The man is good-looking in a way I can objectively appreciate.
Fitted shirt. Tattoos visible at the cuff.
He is looking at Tobík and Tobík is laughing.
The caption: Atlanta foodie supper club. Chef Diego cooked us seven courses and I ate every one. Number three made me emotional. Five had crab in it. Six was the most beautiful plate of food I have seen in my life. Seven was dessert and that is when we lost the room.
Three hundred and forty-seven likes. The first comment is from a handle with a chili-pepper emoji.
hájek you owe me a rematch at that natural wine place. last time doesn’t count, i had a meeting after [wineglass emoji]
I read it. I read it again. The “rematch” sits there. The “doesn’t count” sits there. The emoji sits there.
I tap the chili-pepper handle.
I do not know what I am hoping to find. The handle belongs to someone named Drew. Drew has nine hundred followers. Drew posts pictures of pasta and his own forearms. Drew is, by any reasonable metric, fine.
I close the app. I open the app.
I look at the photo again.
The man’s shoulder is touching Tobík’s. Maybe not.
Maybe the angle is doing it. Maybe Drew is a man who knows Tobík and likes wine and posts comments because his entire personality is comments.
The wine recommendation could be platonic.
The “rematch” could mean nothing. The shoulder may not even be touching.
I am a defender. I have watched the body language of strikers for fifteen years.
I have read the hip rotation of the South African forward to predict his cut.
I am a professional reader of bodies in space and I am sitting in a hotel room in Atlanta deciding what a man named Drew’s shoulder means based on a phone photograph.
Scientists should be looking into this. I should be studied.
There is a thing that happens in my chest. I have felt it before.
Once, a long time ago, in a different city, with a different person, of a different sex, who was actually mine.
The shape is familiar. The shape is also slightly different and slightly worse, because there is no version of this where the answer is “go home and talk to him about it.” There is no home.
There is no him. There is a man currently laughing at something a chili-pepper handle said over crab, and I am sitting in a hotel room having opinions.
I am a man with opinions about the proximity of a stranger to a person who is not mine.
I should note that “not mine” is not a thought a person who is fine has in a hotel room.
I put the phone down. I pull the laptop off the desk and open it and there is the same email from the club that has been there for three weeks.
They have been waiting long enough that my agent told me earlier, in the polite tone he uses when he wants me to feel something, that the club has started checking on my Munich apartment lease.
I close the email.
I open the browser. Atlanta United MLS roster 2026.
The names come up. Coach. Goalkeepers. Defenders.
A center-back from Argentina who has been there four years and is extended through 2027.
A right-back from Atlanta who came up through the academy.
A left-back who is twenty-three. The third center-back slot is a Colombian on loan who returns to his parent club at the end of the season.
The third center-back slot will be open.
I sit with that for a second. The third center-back slot will be open. I have read this sentence on the screen and the sentence is doing things in my chest that the email from Munich has not done in three months.
The browser is still on the page. The names are still there.
The center-back slot is still going to be open in December.
My contract in Munich expires at the end of the month.
Drew the chili-pepper is somewhere in this city right now, possibly leaning into Tobík’s shoulder over a glass of natural wine, and I am looking at the third center-back slot of an MLS team because I have apparently decided that this counts as research.
I put the laptop on the desk. I do not close it.
Recovery at nine. Weights at eleven. Group stage match Saturday. Tomorrow Tobík is going to text me about a morning walk because Tomá? told him to, and I am going to say yes because Tomá? told me to and because I want to.