Chapter 5 Spark #2
Kas turned, a slow pivot that delivered the full weight of his focus. “You are always trying to make everything lighter. It is not necessary.”
“It’s who I am,” Theo said. “I mean. I think it is.”
Kas studied him, hands loose at his sides now, the hush of the corridor swelling. “It is what you do. Not what you are.”
Theo had been called worse and felt less exposed. Theo took a breath; the window fogged faintly where he leaned. “You make it sound easy.”
“It is not easy,” Kas said. “But it is real.”
Theo expected the usual detachment. What he got was Kas with the jaw slightly loose, the careful composure gone in a manner it never went on court: just a person, looking at him with nothing arranged over his face.
He recognized his own reflex, look for the camera, find the angle, make it a story, and let it pass unanswered. There was no camera here. For once he hadn’t even checked the dark glass for his own face.
“Do you ever…” he started. The words refused to finish.
Kas waited.
He tried again. “Do you ever wish you could turn it off? The wanting?”
Kas’s gaze flickered, a tiny tremor of surprise. “I have tried,” he said. “It does not work.”
A soft sound escaped Theo, more exhale than laugh. “Yeah. Same.”
Neither moved. The corridor held them, the distance between their shoulders down to inches and no longer neutral.
Kas shifted first, turning so they faced each other. “Stop hiding behind jokes.” He said it as he might read out a line score: no argument invited.
Theo’s body remembered the court: tension in the quads, the anticipation before a serve, time dilating at match point. His brain reached for a default, a comment about romance novels or the Freudian implications of doubles pairings, and for once the words didn’t rise.
Kas put a hand on Theo’s forearm, barely there at first, then with intention. The thumb moved in a small circle, grounding him. “I want the version of you that does not wait to see how the crowd reacts,” Kas said.
Theo couldn’t help it. He laughed, not cruel, just startled at the simple impossibility of the request. He heard himself say, “Careful what you wish for,” and heard the flatness of it even as it left his mouth.
“I do not care,” Kas said. “I want it anyway.”
Theo swallowed, looking down at the hand, at the lines of Kas’s knuckles, while every cell in his body argued for leaning in and closing the gap. Nothing left to hide behind. So he said, “You can take that back, you know.”
“I will not,” Kas said, and Theo believed him, which was worse.
They stood a breath apart, and the only question left was one you answer by playing it out. Theo’s hand rose, almost on its own, thumb hovering at the edge of Kas’s collar, unsure whether he meant to straighten it or just learn the texture.
“You sure about this?” he asked, his voice dropped to a register that wouldn’t reach the end of the corridor.
“Yes,” Kas said.
The panic came after the yes, when there was nothing left to hide the wanting behind.
No audience. No bit. No angle to play. Only Kas looking all the way down to the floor of him and waiting there.
Theo’s pulse kicked hard. His hand, an inch from Kas’s collar, gave one small tremor, he watched himself do the thing he always did with a lead.
He let the hand fall. He stepped back half a pace, too fast for grace. “Not yet,” he said, and it came out wrong, came out scared, and both of them heard it.
The corridor stayed very still. Kas didn’t reach after him. He simply looked, and there was no win or loss in his face at all, which somehow made it worse. Theo had lost in front of twenty thousand people and grinned. Retreating in front of one was the first loss all summer that felt like one.
“That,” Theo said, hating the shake in it, “wasn’t about you.”
“I know,” Kas said.
“It’s not even about…” He gestured vaguely at the corridor, the hotel, the world with its cameras in it. “Nobody’s watching. That’s the problem. I don’t know who does this when nobody’s watching.”
Kas absorbed that with terrible patience. “Then that is the version I am waiting for.”
Theo exhaled, shaky at the edges. He reached for a joke and, for once, set it down unused. “You know it’s going to get weird.”
“It has been weird since the second set,” Kas said, and almost smiled.
It was enough. For now. Theo kept his eyes forward the whole walk back, off the dark glass and the version of himself that lived in it. They moved down the corridor side by side, the windows holding the city’s indifferent sodium glow, the morning still hours away and no longer impossible.
Back in his own room, Theo stood at the window a long time without turning on the lights.
Twenty floors down, Atlanta arranged itself into grids and ribbons, somebody else’s traffic, and his reflection hung over it in the glass, faint and unavoidable.
He made himself look properly: twenty-nine, alone by his own choreography, famous for warmth, terrified of the unwitnessed version of it.
The phone sat dark in his pocket. No clip to check tonight, no mentions worth the scroll.
The algorithm had already moved on to tomorrow’s semifinals, and the strange vertigo of mattering to no feed at this particular hour was exactly the condition he had just told a man in a corridor he could not survive.
Nobody’s watching.
The words kept replaying in Kas’s voice, machined and certain.
Then that is the version I am waiting for.
It was not a line or a move. It was a standing reservation from the one person on the circuit who had watched him without the performance and wanted more of whatever that was, not less.
Theo brushed his teeth. He set two alarms he would not need. He lay in the dark replaying the evening like match film: the bar, the baseline-and-variable exchange, the corridor, the near-touch he had flinched back from.
At the edge of sleep, his brain served up the only summary it had.
The second set, it said, in a Hungarian accent. It has been weird since the second set.
He fell asleep almost smiling, for absolutely no professional reason.