Page 44 of The Tiger in the Sack

We talked. Easier here, sitting still, the road noise gone. He pointed out places in the city and the river and the things he’d found when he first moved here that had made it feel like somewhere he could stay. He knew OTR the way you only knew a neighborhood when you’d walked it at every hour. The coffee place on Vine that opened at five-thirty, the bar that had the best jukebox, the park where Vito had his ongoing situation with a certain pigeon.

The city lit up completely across the water. Somewhere behind us two people walked past talking quietly and didn’t look at us, two helmeted people on a wall, which was maybe a little strange from the outside and felt from the inside like the most natural thing I’d done in weeks.

I took my helmet off.

The air was perfect and smelled like the river and the city and the end of summer, and I held the helmet in my lap and looked at Cincinnati and let the world settle around me.

He didn’t take his off.

I’d known he wouldn’t. Not yet. But the not-yet had a different quality now that we were sitting still and the ride was over and it was just us and the city and the question I’d been carrying since I scrolled back through our texts on Friday morning and found the word that didn’t add up.

“You know how you’ve been calling me cheerleader since the first night you texted me back?”

“Yeah,” he said. Careful. Like he’d been waiting for it.

“I never told you I was a cheerleader.”

Silence. The kind that had a different texture now. Not the comfortable kind. Maybe this was it. Maybe he was finally going to reveal his real identity to me. Let me in.

“You had a shirt,” he said finally. “When I caught you jumping out of the tree. Chadwick University Cheer. I saw it when you landed.”

It was a reasonable answer. It was probably even true. But reasonable wasn’t the same as the whole truth and we both knew it.

“Okay,” I said. “So you saw my shirt.”

“Yeah.”

“And that’s why you’ve been calling me cheerleader.” The tone of my voice was not quite as easy now. Suspicion was rightfully creeping in.

“Yeah.”

I looked at the city for a moment. Enough was enough.

“I’m gonna ask you something else and I don’t want you to deflect this time.”

“Clover—”

“Why aren’t you taking the helmet off?”

He was quiet long enough that I heard a boat on the river somewhere below us.

“It’s not — it’s not about you,” he said, and I heard him trying to find the words for something he hadn’t said out loud before. “When I have it on, nobody knows who I am. They just see a guy on a bike. And with you... you met me as just that guy. You didn’t know anything about me. You just...you chose this anyway.” A pause. “The second I take it off that changes. You’ll know who I am and you’ll have a whole set of... things. Expectations. History. And I don’t want that to change what this is.”

I listened to all of it.

I heard what he meant to say.

And then I heard what it meant, sitting in my body, in my specific history with doors that didn’t open wide enough and rooms that recalibrated and fantasies that were clearly visible and clearly not quite mine.

“You don’t want to be seen with me,” I said.

“What? No⁠—”

“You don’t want anyone to know.” My voice came out level. I was proud of how level it came out. “A hot athlete who doesn’t want to be seen with a fat girl.” I set my helmet down on the wall. “I will not be somebody’s dirty little secret. That is a you problem, not a me problem, Tiger.”

“That is not what I’m saying⁠—”

“Then take off the helmet.”