Chapter 37
I didn’t know what to expect the next morning, but I wake up to find his mouth on the back of my neck. He’s breathing deeply, with little snores. He slept through the rest of the night. I know this because I was up every twenty minutes.
When he wakes, he turns to me with sleepy eyes and a soft, grateful smile.
“How are you feeling?” I ask him.
“Good, I think,” he says, rubbing his face. “But also…like nothing happened.”
“Yep, isn’t that weird?”
“It’s very weird.”
After a moment, he pulls his body up and sits against the headboard. “I know that was probably confusing,” he finally says, “calling you out of nowhere.”
“We don’t have to get into that.”
“I feel like shit about it. I know we haven’t talked in a while. And it’s not that I didn’t know who else to call. It’s that”—he lets out a long breath—“I wanted it to be you.”
Now it’s my turn for a heavy sigh. I meant what I said. We don’t have to talk about it—not right now, at least. He doesn’t need one more thing to worry about when he has the final tomorrow. That should be the only thing on his mind. “Glad I could be here,” I tell him, and I settle on that.
He looks away and is quiet for a bit, like he’s winding up to say something else.
“When do you leave?” he asks.
“Tonight. I stuck around to get more time with my therapist after…everything. And I’ve got one more session today. Then I’m flying back to California.”
“And you’ll go to China from there?”
“Yeah,” I tell him. I don’t have the energy to get into the Robbie drama.
“So the flight is tonight,” he says.
“Yep, a red-eye.”
He’s thinking again. “You can say no to this…”
“To what?”
“I would really like you to be there—tomorrow.”
My mouth falls open. I don’t know what to say. “Oh.”
“You can say no,” he repeats. “I just—I wanted to ask you.”
“Yeah, I’ve got my flight. And—I don’t have a ticket for the match.” I’m fumbling over stupid excuses, but I can’t help it. I’m shocked that he’s asking me this.
“No, like, I want you to sit with everyone—my team, my family.”
“You want me to sit in your box?”
“Yes.”
Mouth open again. Holy shit. “Isn’t that a little…intense?”
“Intense how?”
Players’ boxes show up on camera all the time. Like, they get constant attention. I’d be all over the TV. Again. Plus, there would be talking. The world knows we’ve been hanging out, and now I’d be the gay guy sitting in his box? Yeah, that would cause commotion.
“You know what that’s gonna look like,” I tell him.
“I want to win. And I feel better when you’re here.” He says it so matter-of-factly. “I want to look up there and see you. So I guess I don’t care about the other stuff.”
My heart flutters, but I catch myself before I fall.
“See, this is all a little confusing, because we had a whole conversation about how this is distracting.” I gesture between the two of us.
“And now that I’m out of your way…you want it back?
” I tried to keep things chill, but I can’t ignore that part.
“You don’t have to. I said you don’t have to.”
“But you asked me—”
“Fuck, Austin, I’m really trying to figure this out, okay? I’m trying to.”
“I know you are, but I’m the one who gets thrown around. That’s not good for me.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Don’t come. I’m sorry for asking.”
“It’s just so fucking public. You’re not ready for that either.”
“It’s not like I’m saying anything. Let people speculate. It’s a small step.”
“A small step toward what?”
He’s silent for a moment. “There might be another reason for last night, I think,” he says. “I felt it all slipping away, all of it at once.”
“What slipping away?”
“At first it was about my ankle. It was freaking me out. I didn’t know if I would be strong enough for tomorrow.
But the other part—the other part was about you.
I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me.
I felt responsible, for everything, so I left you alone.
But, Austin, I promise you, I hated every second of it.
Every day I felt like you were slipping further and further away, and it felt like…
it feels like a hole burning in my heart.
” He turns fully toward me on the bed. “I want to know everything there is to know about you. I want to find New Jersey go-karts in every city with you, at every tournament, all around the world. I want…” he says. “I want to be with you.”
Before I can reply, he bolts up, heads straight to his desk, and returns with a hotel notepad. He rips off the first page, hands it to me. I can read some of the individual words, but not the full sentence.
Corazón. Rápido. Tú.
“It’s in Spanish,” I say, looking back up to him.
Diego stares into my eyes.
“No one makes my heart beat faster than you.”
I swallow. My eyes move back down to the paper. At the bottom, tiny in the corner, there’s a drawing of him hitting a heart-shaped tennis ball. It slices through the words, across the page, and up and out of the roof of a stadium, high into the sky.
He hands me the notepad. The first page has the same words, another version of the drawing. I flip through the pages, dozens of them, all with the same sentence, over and over and over—until I arrive at the last one.
A picture of us.
Standing in the middle of the stadium, his hand pressed to my face. Small, abstract circles surround us. People. Watching.
I let out a breath. “Why…are you showing me this?” I ask him.
A shiver runs up my neck as he gently takes my hand and pushes it onto his chest—into his chest. His heart pounds against my palm.
He holds it there. “Because it’s true,” he says.
I take my time before I reply. “It may be true,” I tell him, “but it doesn’t change our situation. It doesn’t change what you told me.”
“It could,” he says. “Someday.”
“Someday,” I say, shaking my head, because there it is again, the reason this will never work.
We are miles and miles away in our coming-out stories, and I cannot wait around for him to catch up.
I cannot wait around only for him to eventually change his mind.
That will not happen to me again. That is not my story. I have to protect myself.
I have to recover.
“I’m scared, Austin.”
“I know. I know exactly how you feel,” I tell him, because I do. “But…” I pause, summoning all the courage in my sleep-deprived body. “This is not going to work. I am not a secret.”
I watch as his face slowly changes. The fall of his eyes. The twitch of his mouth. The breath exiting his nostrils.
He understands.
Our foreheads touch, each of us resting our weight on the other. I lean in first. My nose slides against his, and I find his lips for one last kiss.
“I wish it could be different,” he whispers when our mouths part. And, maybe to lighten the mood, maybe to say anything to fill the heartbreaking quiet that follows, he adds, “I wish we were mechanics.”
I snicker through the pain. “Or librarians,” I whisper back.
“Or doctors.”
“Sure, doctors.”
“Astronauts.”
“Astronauts on the same ship, you and me. That would be easier.”
“Yeah, that would be easier,” he replies.
We nod at each other. There’s nothing more to be said. My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I know it’s Charlotte before I even look.
Have you been kidnapped? she texts.
yes send help, I reply.
To where?
the back of a van i think? I fire back.
Seriously where are you?
I scroll through a few GIF options and quickly land on the perfect response: Diego wagging his finger after winning a point.
My goddd I can’t keep up, she says.
Me neither.
I pull on my clothes from their pile on the floor, and he walks me to the door.
“I’ll let you know about tomorrow.”
“Okay,” he says.
“But, no matter what, that trophy is yours. I know it in my heart,” I tell him. “Break a leg, Diego.”