Chapter 9 Clean Break
CLEAN brEAK
Café Louisa is slammed, every table claimed by a laptop zombie or a pensioner triple-fisting espresso shots.
The line snakes out the door, Seattle’s finest elbowing each other for precious square inches of bench space, but somehow Nia’s scored the back corner, the one under the window with the view of the cracked crosswalk and the bagel place that never lasts a whole lease.
Three years running, and we’ve never met anywhere else.
She sees me at the door, lifts two fingers in a crisp V, our signal since freshman year.
She looks exactly like I expected, Huskies volleyball hoodie, hair cinched so tight it could anchor a suspension bridge, Nike slides with socks even though it’s wet as hell outside.
Her face is set in neutral, jaw relaxed, but her eyes do the scan, hair, hands, how I’m standing, like she’s triaging a shanked serve.
I drop my parka, let it drip dry on the ancient radiator, and weave past a gauntlet of bodies to the corner.
She’s already got two cups, mine black, hers with the foam art you need a PhD to pour, and she pushes one across without a word. I take a sip, mouth too dry to taste it, and let the ceramic burn my palm.
“You’re late,” she says, but there’s no heat in it. It’s the opening volley, the way we always start.
“Bus broke down. Or maybe my will to live did.” I try for a grin but it dies halfway up my face.
She’s not buying it. She leans forward, elbows on the tiny round table, and eyes me like she’s reading the X-ray of my skull. “You okay?”
“Define okay.”
She rolls her eyes. “You know, standard issue: sleeping, eating, not on a federal watchlist.”
I make a show of considering. “I’m at two out of three. Not bad for Thursday.”
She snorts, then glances down at her phone, probably checking her patient notes.
She hates to be away from work this time of day, peak injury hour at the campus clinic, but she never cancels on me, even when she should.
“So,” she says, tucking the phone away. “Team drama?”
There’s a phrase for this, deflection by exasperation. Nia’s never liked hockey.
She tolerates it the way you tolerate a roommate’s pet snake, you get used to it, but you never pretend it’s cuddly.
I swirl the coffee, stare at the brown tide pooling on the rim. “It’s not team drama. Not really.”
“Then what is it?” She leans back, folds her arms. “You called this. Said it was ‘important.’”
I feel my own hands, fingers tapping a dumb staccato against the cup. “You ever feel like you’re living someone else’s life? Like, you wake up and every decision was made by a version of you that had better hair and way more confidence?”
She frowns, not getting it. “I don’t have time for existential dread, Darius. My existential dread is orthopedic. Try again.”
There’s no good way to do this, so I do what I always do: stall.
“How’s your rotation going?” I ask.
She softens, just a little. “Good. Two new referrals this week. Both pitchers, both convinced their labrum is a time bomb.” She cracks her knuckles. “You?”
I almost say, “We lost another guy last week.” I almost say, “Practice is just punishment now, nobody even pretends we’re going to win.” But the words stick.
All I manage is, “I think I’m done with it.”
She cocks an eyebrow. “The season?”
“All of it.”
She processes that for a second, then shrugs. “I mean, you’ve got options. You always did.”
“That’s what you said when I switched to goalie.”
She grins, flashes perfect teeth. “Best decision you ever made. You were a dogshit winger.”
I let her have that one. I look at the window, watch the rain start to slant sideways. A dude with an umbrella the size of a parachute tries to open the café door but gets jammed, and everyone in line groans in unison.
For a second I wish we were outside, stuck in the noise, so I wouldn’t have to say what comes next.
But Nia’s too good. She’s already circled the conversation, found the wound, and is waiting for me to show it.
I set the coffee down. My fingers leave a faint crescent of sweat on the glazed ceramic. “I’m going to say something and I need you to not… I don’t know. Not freak.”
She blinks, just once. “Okay.”
I stare at my hands, the black smudge of ink on my knuckle from taping my stick this morning, the nick on my thumb from the knife at breakfast. I focus on the pain, let it anchor me.
“There’s someone on the team,” I say. My voice is too quiet. I force it up a notch. “A guy. I mean, there’s a guy on the team, and I can’t stop thinking about him.”
Her face does a thing, closes off, then opens again, then freezes somewhere in between.
She’s not shocked, not really, but her eyes flick to the window, then back to me, then to her own hands, like she’s re-calibrating the conversation.
I think she’s going to say something clinical, something like, “That’s normal, you know. Intense environments create strong bonds,” but what she says is, “Do you want to fuck him?”
It’s so blunt I nearly laugh. Instead, I look up, meet her gaze dead-on. “Yeah,” I say, voice rough. “But I also want to know if he dreams about me. Or if he ever wonders if we could… I don’t know.”
She lets that hang. The café hums with other people’s lives, but right here, right now, it’s just the two of us.
“How long?” she says, after a while.
“I don’t know.” I pick at the napkin, tear off a corner. “Maybe since the shooting. Maybe since forever.”
She nods. There’s a sadness to it, but not the kind I expected.
“I always thought…” She trails off, then finds the thread. “I always thought you’d leave me for a law student, or maybe a girl with a trust fund. Not for a defenseman with impulse control issues.”
I smile, because she made it easy for me, like she always does.
“He’s a forward, actually,” I say.
She laughs, loud enough that the girl at the next table glances over.
For a second, I think that’s it. That we’ll do what we always do, make it a joke, move on. But then she sets her coffee down, both hands flat on the table, and looks at me like she’s about to set a bone.
“I appreciate you telling me, D.” Her eyes are glassy, but her voice is iron. “But if you’re looking for permission, you don’t need it. I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t know what.”
I nod. The relief is physical. My spine uncoils, my lungs work again.
"Is it Ash?" she says, because of course she's already guessed.
I don't answer. She reads that loud and clear, and lets it go.
She looks at the rain, then at me. “Are you going to tell him?”
I think about it. Really think. “I don’t know if he even wants that.”
She shrugs. “You won’t know until you do.”
There’s a pause. I can tell she’s winding up to say something kind, something I probably don’t deserve.
Instead, she just leans across the table and grabs my hand. Her palm is cold and dry, but the grip is familiar, grounding.
“Do what you have to do,” she says. “Just don’t disappear, okay?”
I squeeze her hand. “Never.”
We sit like that, two idiots in a coffee shop, holding hands over the ruins of three years of history and one honest conversation.
When we let go, neither of us looks away.
———
She takes a long sip of her coffee, sets it down, and says, "So. When did you know?"
I could lie, say it snuck up on me, but there’s nothing left to protect.
“I think I always knew,” I say. “But I didn’t want to look at it too closely. I figured it was just… admiration, or whatever.”
She huffs. “Is that what you call it when you want to lick the sweat off someone’s neck?”
I choke on my coffee, and it breaks the tension, just for a second. “Probably not, no.”
She softens, the humor shifting into something like real curiosity. “Was it just Ash?”
I shake my head. “No. There were others. Not like this, though. Not… Not like I want them to be the first thing I see in the morning.”
She bites her lip, and her voice drops to a near-whisper. “So, you’re… what? Gay?”
I wince. “No. Not exactly. I still—I mean, I still like—” I stop, look at her, really look, and say, “I don’t know what I am. I just know this is the first time I’ve ever felt like I wasn’t playing a part.”
She blinks, and a single tear wells up, just enough to glint before she wipes it away with the heel of her hand. “Okay. I can work with that.”
I laugh, because it’s either that or fall apart. “I’m sorry, Nia. I should have told you sooner.”
She shakes her head. “I think I knew before you did. The last couple months, you’d check out every time you got a text.
And when you talked about the team, it was always about Ash.
What he said, what he did. How he looked in practice.
” She gives me a look, half fond, half exasperated.
“I just didn’t want to lose you, so I ignored it. ”
“I’m still here,” I say. I mean it.
“I know.” She reaches across, grabs my hand again, squeezes. “But I want you to be happy, D. Really happy. Not just… surviving.”
The rain thickens, turning the world outside into a watercolor. I watch the drops race each other down the pane, and for a second, the hurt in my chest is matched by a weird kind of hope.
“We don’t have to tell anyone,” I say, but she shakes her head, gentle but firm.
“No. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it honest. We’ll tell people we grew apart. No drama.”
I nod, grateful. “You’re the best.”
She smirks. “I know.”
The barista calls her name for a refill, and she grabs it, comes back, this time crowding a little closer on the barstool.
For a while we just sit, sharing space, letting the noise of the city replace anything we’d otherwise have to say.
Eventually, she taps my wrist, the universal sign for, “I’m out of time.”
We walk to the bus stop, umbrella or not.
She pulls her hood up, ties it under her chin like a little kid. I want to tell her she looks ridiculous, but all I can see is how brave she is, to stand there with me, to let me go.
The bus hisses up to the curb. She hugs me, brief and tight, face buried in my jacket.
Before she pulls away, she whispers, “Go figure yourself out, D. You deserve to know who you are.”
I hold on a half-second longer, then let her go.
She boards without looking back.
I stand in the rain, soaked to the skin, and I feel lighter and heavier at the same time, lighter because the lie is gone, heavier because I just lost the best woman I've ever known, and both of those things are true at once.
———
I walk home alone, hands jammed deep in my pockets, the city flattening out around me in layers of wet asphalt and neon and noise.
Every block is a memory, that’s the bodega where Nia and I bought ramen at two a.m. during finals, that’s the corner where I got into my first and last fight outside a club, that’s the crosswalk where Ash crashed his bike and called me a “fucking cyborg” for not even wincing at the blood.
All of it looks different now, not better, just… real.
The Space Needle hovers in the distance, a UFO bleeding blue light into the cloud lid. When I was a kid, I thought it was a spaceship waiting for the right moment to take off.
Right now, it looks like it might just fuck off to the moon and leave the rest of us behind.
The rain doesn’t let up. My shoes squelch with every step, and the hem of my jeans is soaked through by the time I reach my building.
The elevator smells like Lysol and fake citrus, the hallway carpet is so ugly it should be a crime. I unlock the door, and the silence inside hits like a punch.
It’s not that the apartment is empty, Nia barely stayed over since last year, but it feels emptier, like the walls are mourning the version of me that’s gone.
I drop my wet jacket on the tile, peel off my hoodie, and stand in the center of the living room, not sure what to do next.
The city view is the only thing I ever liked about this place, the floor-to-ceiling windows, the way the light leaks in, the feeling that you’re standing on the edge of a world that won’t notice if you jump.
I watch the rain trace crooked paths down the glass, the city lights smeared into a wash of orange and blue.
I want to call someone, want to text Ash and say, “Hey, I’m an emotional disaster, come laugh at me,” but I don’t.
Instead, I just stand there, watching my own ghost in the reflection.
My phone buzzes, and I ignore it. It buzzes again, and this time I look.
It’s the team group chat, guys talking shit about tomorrow’s practice, someone posting a meme about the “wettest city in America.” O’Doul makes a joke about “moist goalies,” and Raz chimes in with a GIF of a cat getting blasted by a garden hose.
I could reply. I should reply.
But all I can think about is Ash, and how he’ll be at the gym at 5:04 on the dot, and how I need to see him more than I need to breathe.
I rehearse a thousand conversations in my head.
“We should talk.”
“I broke up with Nia.”
“I think I’m—”
None of it is right. None of it gets to the point.
The point is, I don’t want to hide anymore.
The point is, for the first time in my life, I want to walk into that gym tomorrow and let the world see exactly who I am.
I stand at the window for a long time, the city a watercolor, my reflection overlaid like a double exposure.
It’s not pretty. But it’s true.
And that’s enough.