Chapter 22 — ZAY
Teo is on the arm of my couch, perched like he’s ready to stand or stay depending on what I give him.
I’ve been at the kitchen counter with my hands flat on the granite since I got home, running the math on what Coach Bodie saw when he opened that door.
Where I was standing. How close I was. The chart I grabbed a half second later.
“Talk to me.” He’s asking for me to give him words that I am not sure I can.
“I’m thinking.”
“You’ve been thinking for fifteen minutes. You’re standing there like someone bolted you to the floor and I’m over here trying to figure out if you’re going to talk to me or if I should start guessing.”
“Don’t guess.”
“Is it the Hájek thing? Because Coach came in asking about the groin. That’s it. He wasn’t looking for anything.”
“He didn’t have to be looking for something to see something.”
“Okay. So what did he actually see? Walk me through it.”
I press my palms harder into the granite. The cold helps. “He saw me standing inside your reach while you were on my table. There is no reasonable explanation for why I was still standing that close. And you were touching my arm.”
“He didn’t see that. You had the chart in your hands.”
“I had the chart because I grabbed it when the door opened. One second earlier, he would have seen more.”
“So the chart is the story. I had a question about the trap. You were checking range.”
“That’s not a story. That’s a cover. And covers work until someone thinks about them for ten seconds.”
He watches me. His face is doing what it always does, every thought right there on the surface. The openness I used to find disarming now looks like a liability because this man has never learned to hide anything.
“We’ll be more careful.” He says it simple, direct, like the answer is obvious. “We got comfortable. It won’t happen again. We keep distance when we’re at work.”
“We.” I hear myself repeat it. My hands leave the counter. “We’ll be more careful.”
“Yeah. Both of us. Together.”
“What does careful look like for you, Teo?” I’m not asking to be difficult. He doesn’t get it. He can’t.
He blinks. “The same thing it looks like for you. We pay attention. We don’t let our guard down.”
“No. What does careful look like for you specifically? You stop touching my arm at the facility. You stop coming to sessions early. You stop humming the song you sent me at one in the morning on your way into my treatment room. That’s what careful costs you.
A little restraint. A minor adjustment to how you move through a building. ”
“I know the stakes are different for you...”
“You don’t.” The words come out level. Not raised.
The opposite. Everything in my voice flattens to a frequency I don’t use with patients, with Guy, with anyone.
This register has no warmth in it and no room for the person on the other end to feel comfortable.
“You don’t know, Teo. You have never had to know. ”
His mouth closes. His hands press into his knees and he is working to keep them there, I can see the effort in his forearms, every instinct telling him to reach and the reach dying before his hands leave his legs.
“Tell me.” Two words. Quiet. Plain. The sunshine gone from his voice and what’s left is just a man asking.
I’ve been running this math since USC. Since my advisor pulled me aside junior year and told me how I needed to be better than anyone to be thought of as someone.
She didn’t say it in those words. She said the field was competitive and I should be strategic about visibility.
But I understood what she meant when she looked at me and saw a queer Black man who wanted to work in professional sports and gave him advice calibrated to the world she knew was waiting.
I stopped arguing with the math a long time ago.
You don’t argue with gravity. You learn how to walk with it.
“You think this is cute?” My voice is steady and the steadiness is what makes it cut. “You think we almost get caught and it’s a funny story? A close call?”
“I don’t think...”
“You get caught and coach gives you a lecture, or maybe they don’t even say anything to you.
” I am looking at him and my hands are at my sides and I am not pacing, not moving, every word placed where I put it.
“I get caught and I’m done. Not just here.
Everywhere. Because the story isn’t going to be ‘two people caught feelings.’ The story is going to be ‘the bisexual Black PT who couldn’t keep his hands to himself.
’ And that story follows me into every interview for the rest of my career. ”
The room holds the words. I’ve never said them out loud. Not to Guy, who would have listened. Not inside my own head, because naming it doesn’t change the outcome.
“I told you in September it was about my job.” My voice sounds like it belongs to someone I’ve never met.
No armor. No angle. “My job is the only thing between me and a story that erases everything I’ve built.
The DPT. The years at Georgia State. Being the lead trainer at Carolina in the AHL.
Gary putting his name next to mine because someone had to vouch for me, because that’s how it works.
One story, and I’m not the clinician with the best credentials in that building.
I’m the one who couldn’t keep it professional.
” I take a breath and let it out. “And every hiring manager who digs into my name finds that version first, because that version is always louder.”
“Zay...”
“Don’t.” The word stops him. His mouth closes and I watch it close and I can’t stop because everything I’ve been shelving since September is on the floor.
“You walk into every room like it belongs to you. You touch people without thinking about it. You close distance because that’s what your body does, and you have never once had to calculate whether closing that distance costs someone else their career.
” I hear my own breathing and it’s even, controlled, and the control is the last wall standing.
“I have spent every day since September measuring the exact space between your body and mine in every room in that building. Watching the door. Watching the hallway. Watching Tyler’s face when you book with me for the fifth straight week instead of rotating like the other players.
And on top of every bit of that, performing straight in a building full of men who have never had to wonder whether the person treating their body is attracted to it.
” My jaw tightens. “That’s not the same math you’re running. It’s not close.”
His eyes are wet. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t look away.
“And sometimes I don’t know if you want me or if you want to be in a love story and I’m the person who’s here and can be part of your angsty star-crossed romance.
” The words leave my mouth and I feel them land in my own chest, heavier than I expected, a weight I didn’t know I was carrying because I’d filed it so deep I forgot the drawer existed.
“You read romance novels. You believe in grand gestures. You send songs at one in the morning and you think the feeling is enough because the feeling has always been enough for you. And I’m standing here trying to figure out if the feeling is about me specifically or if I’m the nearest warm body for a story you were already telling yourself. ”
He’s on his feet. I don’t remember him getting up but he’s standing with his hands at his sides.
He’s hearing the cost of what I’ve been carrying, hearing it without defense, without the deflection that protects him from everything the world puts in front of him.
Because the world has put very little in front of Teo Marchetti.
That’s not his fault. But it’s the truth.
I wait for the counter-argument. The rebuttal. The man who argues about pecorino ratios and whether penne is a legitimate pasta shape. The man who has never met a silence he could leave unfilled.
He doesn’t fill this one.
His mouth opens. Closes. His hand moves toward me, an inch, maybe less, and then stops and goes back to his side.
He stays. Standing in my kitchen with his hands at his sides and his eyes on mine and everything I just said sitting in the air between us.
Not fixing it. Not charming his way through it.
He is standing still and letting the silence hold everything I said and he isn’t trying to make any of it smaller.
Then he says, quiet, “The Hájek protocol.”
I don’t know what I expected. Not this.
“You came in on your day off to rebuild it. I was in the weight room and I saw you through the glass, at your desk, with the research spread across the table. Three hours.” His voice is low and stripped and has nothing in it that sounds like the man who fills corridors.
“And when Gary asked about it on Monday, you said it was just an adjustment. It wasn’t an adjustment.
You rewrote the whole thing because the standard version wasn’t good enough for his movement pattern, and you handed Gary the credit like it cost you nothing. ”
He stops. Swallows. His hands stay at his sides.
“I noticed. Not because I was telling myself a story. Because I was watching you and I couldn’t stop and the thing I couldn’t look away from was a man who does that and calls it nothing.”
It doesn’t fix anything. It isn’t enough. But the specificity of it sits in the quiet between us, undeniable, a fact that can’t be argued into a fantasy.
I put my hands back on the counter. The granite is cold.
“I don’t know what to do.” My voice comes out quiet.
“I don’t know how to want you and keep what I’ve built.
I don’t know how to stand in that treatment room and pretend you’re a chart number.
I don’t know how to watch you sing in the hallway and know it’s for me and act like it isn’t.
” I am looking at the counter and I feel like a man who has run out of walls.
“And I don’t know how to stop wanting any of it. ”
The silence holds. His breathing and mine, separate rhythms in a quiet room. The refrigerator hums. Traffic moves on the street below. The world continuing while everything inside these walls waits.
Then his hand finds my arm. Not pulling.
Just landing there. His palm warm against my bicep, his fingers resting with the weight of a hand that is asking rather than assuming.
I don’t pull away. I don’t lean in. I stay where I am with his hand on my arm and the counter cold under my palms and the room full of everything we’ve said and everything we haven’t.
He steps closer. His other arm comes around me. I let him. My forehead drops against his shoulder and his arms tighten and I am being held by a man who just stood still through the worst of me and didn’t leave.
Neither of us has words for what comes next, or maybe the words exist but neither of us can find them yet. We’ve said too much and not enough and we aren’t finished. For now, the silence is full and we stay in it.