It came out quieter. Honest in a way I didn’t like being, even with myself.
“I don’t,” I repeated. “I don’t know how to be the person who,” I gestured, uselessly, at the space between us, at the couch, at the years. “Who has this. Who lets himself have this and keeps the rest of it. The team. The game. The life I’ve built around not needing anything I couldn’t control.”
Silence.
I made myself look at him. Not at the floor, not at the plant, not at the ceiling. At him.
“But I know,” I said, “that I don’t want you to leave.”
That was the whole thing, distillable down to one sentence. If everything else was variables, that was the constant.
“I don’t want you traded,” I said. “I don’t want you on another team. I don’t want to watch some other line figure out the timing it took us four years to build. I don’t want to walk into a locker room where you’re not in it. I don’t want a life where this,” I let out a breath, “was the closest I ever got because I was too afraid of a cost you were willing to pay.”
I realized, distantly, that my hands were shaking.
I made them stop.
“I love you,” I said again, because if I was finally going to ruin my system I might as well make the data set robust. “And I’m sorry it took this long. And I don’t know how to do this. But if you’ll let me, I want to figure it out with you. I want to stay. I want you to stay.”
The room was very, very quiet.
Shay didn’t fill it.
He had filled every silence I’d ever been in with him. The bar, the locker room, the hotel rooms, the Tuesday couch. He had always stepped into the gap, made noise so I didn’t have to. Now he didn’t.
He just looked at me.
The seconds stretched. Ten. Fifteen. Long enough for my brain to start trying to spin up versions again , damage control, exit routes, alternate futures where this conversation hadn’t happened.
I didn’t let it.
For once, I just stood there and held the thing I’d put in the air.
Shay exhaled.
Not a dramatic sound. Just the breath of someone who had been holding theirs for a very long time.
“You’re going to have to be loud sometimes,” he said.
His voice was steady. Not flat. Not the careful evenness of the past weeks. Just steady.
“For me,” he added.
I blinked.
“Because I need to know you’re choosing this,” he said.
He didn’t sayover the teamorover your career. He didn’t have to. We both knew that wasn’t the equation. He meant: over fear. Over silence. Over the version of himself that never asked for anything.
I nodded, once.
“I know,” I said.
I did. That was the worst part and the easiest. I knew exactly what he was asking for. Not grand gestures. Not public declarations. Just visibility. For me to stop hiding behind the system and act, occasionally, like a man who could say what he wanted and live with the consequences.
Shay watched me for another moment.
I could see him weighing it. Not my words , he’d heard enough words from me to know their limitations , but the fact that I was standing in his apartment saying the thing I had been refusing to say, and not taking it back, and not dressing it in caveats or conditions.
