Someone that you could throw away.
Someone that didn’t deserve to be loved.
Maybe Marcus was right to be afraid of me.
Maybe it was never real.
Maybe I built things up because I wanted it so badly.
Maybe they were right about me and I just couldn't see it.
Maybe the way I am is wrong.
I pressed my face into my pillow and I stayed there until I couldn't breathe and then I stayed a little longer. Then I turned over and stared at the ceiling until it got light.
Got up.
Went to practice.
Scored.
I filed the transfer paperwork shortly after. Sat at my desk on a Tuesday morning and filled out every field and hit submit and sat there afterward in the silence of a decision made.
No one asked why I was leaving. I didn't tell them anyway. I just put my key on the desk and walked out. Didn't look back.
I didn't feel better.
I didn't feel worse either.
I just drove to a new place and I put an ad out for a roommate.
Not because I needed one. Because I had learned what it was like to be alone and I was not going to pay that price again. I would rather have a stranger than have silence. I would rather have awkward and present than distant and empty.
My roommate's name was Blake. I walked in with my bags andhe looked up from his textbook and said —
You made it. You good?
And I stood there in the doorway of a new room in a new school in the ruins of what the last year had made me and felt relief, somehow.
Getting there, I said.
He nodded like that was a perfectly complete answer.
Three days later he made me breakfast without being asked and slid the plate across the counter and went back to his reading like it was nothing. Like showing up for people was just something you did. Like he could feel everything I was feeling without having to put it into words.
I didn't tell Blake everything for months. Some of it I've never told anyone. It lives in me in a room I don't open.
But mostly I just focused on building myself. The version of me that walks into every room like he owns it. The version that makes everything a joke before anyone can make it something worse. The version that is so loudly, visibly, unapologetically himself that nobody can use it as a weapon because I got there first. The version with the walls so high and so thick that nobody — nobody ever — gets the version Marcus got.
I came out immediately. Completely. Loudly. Without apology. Because I had learned what hiding cost and I was never paying that again. And when I got to Harlow Jamie Nash came at me from day one. Hostile. Wound tight. Looking at me like I was a problem that had arrived without his permission, like my presence on his ice was a personal offense he hadn't forgiven yet.
Another captain.
Another closet.
Furious at me for existing the way closeted men are furious at the thing they want and can't have. And I looked at him and I thought—
I know exactly what this is.I know exactly how this ends.
