Chapter 25
I wake in the middle of the night. We fell asleep wrapped around each other, but now Diego is on the other side of the bed, shirtless, propped against the headboard. Wide-awake.
At first, I just watch him as he stares into the darkness of the room. Stubble peppers his normally clean-shaven face, and I remember it scraping against me last night—my cheek, my neck, my thighs. He barely blinks, his eyebrows scrunched in stoic thought. He’s lost somewhere I want to visit.
“Hey, what’s up?” I say, my voice sandy.
He turns to me. “Nothing. Just couldn’t sleep,” he says, adding a small smile, polite but impersonal.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” he says quietly, and returns to his staring. A coldness has settled over the room—over him—like I woke up from a bad dream with a stranger in my bed. What the hell happened?
“I think I have to go back to my room…I’m worried about getting enough sleep,” he finally says.
“Yeah, sure. Okay,” I say. But it isn’t.
When I was a kid, I had a hard time sleeping over at friends’ houses.
I couldn’t fall asleep if I wasn’t in my own bed, so any attempted sleepover usually ended with a late-night phone call to my parents and a bathrobed escort across the street.
I think my friends took it personally. One of them even cried.
They didn’t understand that it wasn’t about them.
It was about me. I try to remember that now.
But the fact that Diego wants to leave, that he can’t sleep well next to me, that he doesn’t want to be here, hits me hard.
He gets out of bed, his body a silhouette against the window. I forgot that he was naked, and I look away by reflex. But my eyes return to him as he pulls on his briefs. He angles away from me—on purpose?
“How about one more hang before our match? Tomorrow night?” The question slips from my mouth before I can catch it. It sounds desperate. Because I am. It feels like our wonderful night is slipping away, and I don’t understand why.
From somewhere inside his hoodie, he says, “Yeah, sounds good,” as he shoves his arms into the sleeves. When his head emerges again his eyes aren’t on me—they’re on the door, like he can’t leave fast enough. “Have a good night,” he says from the hallway, and the door clicks shut.
I sit there alone, my face frozen. What the fuck just happened? What the actual fuck?
I don’t sleep the rest of the night.
—
“Where’s my phone?” I brush past Robbie as soon as he opens the door to his room.
“Good morning to you too,” he replies.
I’m dressed and ready to go, have been for two hours, because I had nothing else to do but spiral about Diego and how our night mysteriously went to shit.
“I’m gonna use my phone a sec. I’m not asking for it back.
I’ll sit here and use it supervised.” I start looking around his room.
I need to text Diego and ask him if he’s all right.
I’m probably overthinking this. He was tired.
I was tired. I just want more context here, so I can escape my brain and put this to rest.
“You’ve come this far. You can’t wait a little longer?” He eyes me before stepping into the bathroom to finish his hair.
“No, I don’t want to do that.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea today,” he shouts over the faucet. “We need your mind clear, and I guarantee that whatever you want to do right now is not gonna be a step in that direction.”
“It was my decision to do this, to give it up, and it should be my decision to start using it again.”
“I thought you just wanted to use it for a second.”
“Yeah—yeah, that’s what I meant.” Kind of. He returns from the bathroom.
“Look, it’s not my job to police you about this. It’s my job to be your coach.”
“So give it to me.”
“It’s just…not a good idea. What are you gonna tell Helen?”
“It’s two seconds.”
“Yeah, good. Great idea. Keep things from your therapist. That’ll work well.”
“Give me my phone, Rob. I’m not fucking around. You can watch me use it.”
“What is wrong with you today?”
“Nothing.” I’m not going into this with him. I’m not telling him that Diego Cruz and I blew each other and he vanished like a ghost in the night, with barely a goodbye. It’s embarrassing. It’s complicated. And it will send him into some kind of judgment spiral that we’ll be stuck in all day.
Robbie squints at me. Our eyes lock in a standoff.
“Espresso martini,” I say. My final card. The safe word we decided on when this stupid phone experiment started, because somehow we knew it would come to this. I’m not proud of it, but it’s for my own good. I have to text him. I have to find out.
Robbie twists his mouth, pained. Worse than that, he looks disappointed. I don’t care. “Do I need to say it again?” I ask.
He snorts, and walks over to his bag, sitting on the desk, a charging cord snaking into it. He grabs my phone and tosses it to me across the room, barely looking. He’s lucky I have a professional athlete’s hand-eye coordination.
I consider saying thank you, but I’m not in a mood to be nice. “Did you wanna supervise?” I ask him as he goes back to the bathroom.
“I’m not your dad,” he replies.
The sentence, quiet but sharp, enters my ears and sinks straight to my stomach. I stand there with the pain, squeezing my phone so hard it could break. What an asshole. What a fucking asshole.
And then I do what I always do to escape emotions I don’t want to deal with. I start to scroll. Days and days of notifications fill my screen, hundreds of them, thousands. Everything I’ve been missing from the outside world comes flooding in. I don’t know where to start.
Until I see it.
A text—just a text—from a name that hasn’t lit up my phone in years. I still have the picture of us at the beach as his contact photo, his arm dangling around me. He bleached his hair that summer. It was white as the sun.
Jake.
The protein bar I had an hour ago climbs back up my throat.
this is amazing !! so proud of u
I stare at it as everything screeches to a stop. I feel sick. I feel worse when I click the link he sent with the message.
“Rob,” I say, barely able to get it out. “Rob, what is this?”
It’s a New York Times article—with my photo, published yesterday.
OPENLY GAY AT THE US OPEN.
HARDY MAKES MEN’S TENNIS HISTORY.
Rob emerges from the bathroom, and I flip the phone screen to show him. “Did you know about this?”
He watches me as I go back to the article and thumb through paragraphs and paragraphs and photos outlining my childhood, my run at the US Open, my fall, Burpgate, a quote from my high school tennis coach.
“Did they not want to talk to me? They didn’t want an interview?”
“They—they reached out, but—”
“They reached out? And you didn’t tell me?”
“Austin, a lot of people have been reaching out—”
“But this is the New York Times!”
“—and we’ve been declining everything, to keep us focused. You’re doing enough interviews already.”
“But they’re writing about me and I didn’t get a fucking say in it.”
“It’s…it’s a good article. They did a good job.”
I shake my head and go back to the article, at a complete loss for words.
“Wait,” I say. “You gave them a quote. Shit, you gave them multiple quotes. You gave them an interview! You did and not me?”
“They—yeah. The journalist wanted to talk to you. We said no. Then they wanted a quote from me instead, so I hopped on the phone—for ten minutes. We thought that was the best way to end the back-and-forth.”
“We? Like, you and Char?”
He nods, a reluctant confirmation. She’s in on this too. Maybe she even pitched the article. Jesus Christ, I can’t believe this.
“So, let me get this straight. You can talk about me, but I can’t?
I can’t even comment? This is my story, Rob!
” I basically scream it at him, blood rushing to my face.
“It’s my story! And I didn’t get a fucking say in it because you think you’re—what?
You’re protecting me or something?” I glare at him, waiting for some kind of apology or explanation or anything.
“I know you’re upset…” Fucking understatement. “I didn’t want to give you one more thing to worry about. It felt like it was the right thing to do.”
“Or you just wanted a little attention for yourself, relive the glory days.”
His mouth falls open.
Everything about today is fucked. Robbie. Char. Jake. It’s so fucked that I forget about Diego for half a second. I want to cry. I want to scream. But most of all, I want to leave.
I bolt out of Robbie’s room, phone in hand. Fuck this experiment. Fuck everything.