Chapter 6 #2
“Oh, thanks. That’s…nice.” That’s really nice, actually. “I just overheated a bit.”
“Yeah, I saw your post. It was rough out there today. Has that happened to you before?”
“No, not really like that. I’m good now, though, perfectly fine.” I feel a tinge of guilt lying to him, but we barely know each other. I don’t need to get into the details of what happened.
“Good. Good that you feel good.”
“Yeah.”
Another awkward moment. More nodding. A bunch of bobbleheads over here.
“Do you like Mario Kart?” he finally asks.
“I’ve…been known to shred some rubber as Princess Peach,” I say, and instantly want to die. My trusty yeh would have been fine here, but I had to get fancy.
Luckily, he breezes right past this and jerks his shopping bag up. “Wanna play?”
And before I have time to answer, he pushes into my room and starts fiddling with cords behind the TV. I stand back and watch as he sets up a Nintendo Switch.
“Sometimes they lock these TVs down,” he says, crossing the room and grabbing the remote off the nightstand. He pulls up a blue screen and arrows through complicated settings I’ve never seen before. “You gotta switch the HDMI input through the service menu…”
Diego Cruz—tennis by day, Geek Squad by night. His Men’s Health interview failed to uncover this one. A second later, the Mario Kart theme song bursts through the TV speakers. “?Claro!” He rustles in his bag, tosses me a controller, and hops on my bed like he lives here too.
I walk over to the other side of the bed, adjust the pillows against the headboard, and join him—careful to leave a healthy distance between us.
I mean, he’s the one invading my space, and he’s the one who chose the bed when he could have picked the chair, but as the only gay guy in the room—I think—I don’t want to give him the wrong idea.
That may be fucked, but it’s how I’m wired, and it’s how I’m gonna operate tonight.
He’s here because he wants to be my friend—for some reason.
My phone lights up with a text from Char. UPDATE?? I flip it over face down and grab my controller. Diego’s already choosing his character.
“Who do you normally pick?” I ask.
“Bowser all day. He’s the heaviest, knocks everyone out of the way. Takes his time accelerating, but after that, can’t stop him.”
“Solid choice.”
“Why do you go with Peach?”
“I get tired of her waiting for Mario up in that castle. She deserves to see the world.” My approach is far less strategic.
“Fair,” he says, starting to build his kart, “but you should really use Pink Gold Peach instead, so you can up your weight class and stand a chance.”
“ ‘Stand a chance.’ Has the shit talk already started?”
“Just some friendly advice,” he says, with a confident shrug.
“Welp, not sure I need it,” I quip back as the countdown starts. Is bragging about a game I haven’t played in over a year a good idea? Unlikely. But more than I want to win, I want to impress Diego. I flood the engine with gas. Peach, don’t fail me now.
Diego wins the first race, and the second, and the third—and I should have seen this coming, because this dude loves Mario Kart so much that he travels to strangers’ hotel rooms with it.
Plus, it’s a challenge to weave through a bunch of bananas when Diego’s leg keeps creeping closer and closer to mine.
He’s the kind of gamer who puts his whole body into playing, twisting and turning his shoulders as Bowser powerslides around corners.
A few times, he takes his hand off his controller to smack my chest after hitting me with a shell, and it takes me an entire lap to catch back up—and settle back down.
After another four-part Grand Prix, we switch to Super Smash Bros. at his request. I sneak a glance at the time—it’s almost eleven—and I guess he doesn’t have other plans tonight, which seems strange for someone as social as he is. “So, do you play this with the other guys on the tour?” I ask.
“Sometimes, but not that much. Usually I’m just playing with myself in my room.”
I love the fact that he didn’t even hear himself there. I don’t love the fact that getting bricked in these shorts would be impossible to hide. “What do you do when you all hang out, then?”
“I don’t really hang out with other players that much. I’m usually wiped after a match or practice and don’t really wanna talk to anyone.”
But you wanna hang with me? Asking that feels too direct. “But you post with them, like, all the time,” I say instead.
“Do you follow me or something?” he asks, with a cheeky grin. Yup, should have seen that coming. I chuckle through the embarrassment.
“I mean, some of the guys are cool,” he continues. “I dunno. The posting, the tagging—it’s good for social, keeps the sponsors happy. I kinda have to do it,” he says, and then he turns the inquisition back on me. “Who are your friends here?”
“My friends…hmm…my friends…Well, I have Robbie, my coach.” I pause, thinking.
Everyone on tour pretty much sticks with their teams, or they have a core group of two or three players they’ve known forever and grew up with, and it’s hard to break into those circles.
“My sister, Charlotte, lives in New York, so I have her for a bit here. I have some home friends, but I don’t see them much anymore.
And I have…a bunch of books.” I cringe as I point to my backpack, on the floor, housing half a dozen paperbacks.
God, run me over. Why am I such a loser? Why am I surprised none of the other players have shown interest in wanting to hang out? I literally just told someone that books are my friends.
“Wait. Austin Hardy…Do you know the Hardy Boys books?” Diego asks, going through an enormous revelation.
I laugh. “Yeah, I know them. Got that a lot growing up. Very fun.”
“Well, in Spanish they’re Misterios de los Hardy Boys. My mom has a bunch of those books in our library for some reason.”
Our library—a big upgrade from an IKEA bookshelf in a bedroom. I knew he came from money, but I didn’t know he came from our library kind of money. “Have you read any of the series?”
He grimaces. “I haven’t, actually.”
“Hey, I’m not offended. We’re not related,” I reply.
“My brother watched the show, though.”
“Ah, thank you for the support,” I say, adding a little salute.
“I don’t really read a lot. You’ll have to let me borrow something good. I’ll get back into it.”
“Yeah, sure, I can do that. I’m fresh out of books about boys solving mysteries, though.”
“So, who are your friends in your backpack, then?”
Roasting me already. Deserving. And also…hot? I laugh as I thumb through the titles in my head. Most of them are pretty gay. I’m not sure The Song of Achilles would be my first choice for a straight man who hasn’t picked up a book in years. “You can’t meet them tonight. They’re sleeping,” I say.
“And speaking of, I should be sleeping too,” he replies, glancing at the time on his phone. “Gotta get back to my hotel.”
“You’re not in this one?”
“No, I’m up at Hotel Renée.”
Oh, so he made a whole trip? It’s one thing to take an elevator down a few floors, but he walked from the fanciest hotel in New York and marched his shopping bag down Park Avenue to see me, which seems a little more involved than a convenient check-in.
“How’d you know I was staying here?” I ask.
“They put most of the players here. This was me for a while,” Diego says.
“And this year you got bumped to five-star accommodations?”
“Exactly. One sponsored post, and I live in luxury,” he says, swinging his legs off the bed.
“Oh yeah—don’t forget your Switch,” I say as he slides his shoes on.
“Nah, I’ll just leave it here. We can play another time.” My face must be doing something funny, because he adds, “If you want.”
“Yeah, sure, I want.” Holy hell.
“Okay, then,” he says with a nod, and he leans toward me with a goodbye that makes my heart sink.
A fist bump.
Suddenly, the grand gestures of net jumping and traveling to my hotel and chilling on my bed are erased by the bro-iest thing you can do.
A fist bump places us firmly back in friends territory, and now I’m confused.
I’m confused about what he wants. I’m confused about what I want.
And before I know it, I’m up, and I catch him at the door.
“Hey,” I say, and he turns to me in the hallway. “I meant to ask you…I didn’t see it happen in real life, obviously, but I saw the video of you, like, hopping over the net and…rushing over to me…”
“Was there a question in there?” he asks with a squint.
Right, yeah, that would be helpful. “I mean…thank you…for that…” I take a second to swallow my heart out of my throat. “And yeah, I guess my question is…why did you do it?”
He pauses. The silence is excruciating. Why did I even ask? Please just put me out of my misery.
“Well, I was running to the ball at the net. I saw you fall, and…” He looks down, as if he’s searching for the answer. “I guess I was already headed in your direction.” He says it softly, adding a shrug, and looks back up with the tiniest smile, the tiniest glimmer of something in his eyes.
My cheeks flush, and we hang there, just looking at each other, my pulse pounding harder with each lingering moment.
“Um,” he finally says, an idea taking over his face, “we’re in New York City.”
“We are…”
“We should do something about that. We have the day off tomorrow.”
“We do, kind of, yeah.”
“Do you want to hang out again after practice?”
“What do you have in mind?”
He thinks. “This, but bigger,” he replies. I have no idea what that means, and I don’t get an exact answer as he turns to the elevator. “Night, night, Hardy Boy. We’ll talk tomorrow,” he calls down the hall. “Glad you’re feeling better.”
In a daze, I close the door and float back to my bed. Normally, this would be the moment when I replay every single thing I said and wish I could rewrite the entire night. But this time feels different.
I grab my phone to find a flurry of texts from Char. What’s going on over there? and Hi hello remember me and I cannot sleep until I know
we played mario kart and super smash, it was chill, I reply.
She starts typing immediately. Is super smash an innuendo
Charlotte and I had a scheduled phone call at nine p.m. every Thursday during the semester I was at Arizona State.
We called it “whine o’clock,” because I would tell her about the amazing plans I didn’t have for the weekend and she would tell me how I should be out there trying to find a boyfriend—while she drank half a bottle of wine.
Needless to say, she’s very invested in my nonexistent love life, but I’m way too tired to catch her up on this platonic hang session right now.
no haha call you tomorrow, I text her.
Another instant response. Auz tell me now did you smashhh
I smile to myself, reach over to plug my phone in, and fall asleep with the lights on and the woodsy scent of Diego Cruz on my pillow.