Chapter Ten

The first thing I did when I woke up the next morning was make tea.

That's a lie. The first thing I did when I woke up the next morning was attempt to move and realize my entire body was an aching, throbbing mass of agony. I'd never felt anything like it, and I did CrossFit for like two months this one time at a super-gay CrossFit place, except I got intimidated by the cultish vibe and stopped going, but of course didn't cancel my membership for like three more months because I kept telling myself I'd go back tomorrow.

Point being, doing four days a week of CrossFit, even if you only do it for two months, really puts you in touch with your inner pain receptors or whatever it is that makes you feel like death after an hour and a half of jumping on and off boxes and doing pull-ups. And this? Was worse.

Who knew that you didn't need a gym membership if you just lived somewhere it snowed all the damn time.

Orion had said, as if casually, that I'd lasted longer shoveling snow than he'd thought I would. Which sounded like a compliment until he'd added, "I gave you five minutes out there, tops."

I was too afraid to ask how long I'd actually been attempting to dig myself out of the nightmare I'd landed myself in. What if he said it had been twenty minutes? Upon reflection, I'd made very little progress. I hadn't even fully dug out the car, just sorta pushed snow away from the door (which I hadn't actually managed to open), then attempted to kind of find two tire tracks. But I'd never even gotten ten feet from the tires themselves.

Had I lost my mind, thinking I could get all the way to the highway? Was there some kind of mental break I'd experienced in the face of all that snow? Or maybe it was just a temporary loss of ability to cope due to cohabitating with a dude who detested me.

It would have been better if he'd said he hated me. I knew how to be hated. Growing up queer gave you a lot of practice being hated, walking around every step of every day knowing that somewhere strangers were imagining you burning in hell with a fiery poker up your urethra. If Orion simply hated me, I could have dealt with it.

Detesting me felt so much more personal. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever detested me before. I didn't know how to respond to it. What to think about being detested. Did it hurt? Did it itch? Did my emotional nerve endings know how to process it? Detestation. Deforestation. Desolation.

After taking long, slow breaths just so I could move off the couch (and thinking again about what a lie that bullshit nursery rhyme about words shall never hurt me was), I made tea. I made one strong cup first, begging my head to stop hurting so much. Then I rebrewed the three bags from the day before in one cup and left it to steep for fifteen minutes before squeezing every bit of flavor and caffeine I could get out of it.

Vile as fuck, but every little bit helps when you're dying of lack of caffeine.

I was drinking out of a coffee mug with a yellow rubber ducky on it and the words You're the one. Which was a reference to something that tickled the very corners of my memory, but I couldn't quite place it except that the sight of that rubber ducky charmed me. It had been one of the first mugs in the cabinet and it wasn't dusty, so it must've been in common rotation. He must actually use the rubber ducky mug.

The thing about it—one of the things about it—was that Orion Broderick had been A Figure to me. An object in a way. I wasn't proud of it now, and hadn't been for years, but that's how it had been. I'd grown up in Conquistos, started watching the FC the second they formed (because when your dad who doesn't know how to bond with you is British and both of you like football, that's what you do), wore the merch even when I was old enough to feel weird about being a queerboy in sports merch. And I loved soccer as a kid. Loved playing it, loved tracking the US professional teams, and loved watching the World Cup, even though FIFA was problematic as fuck.

And the women were allowed to be gay. These hot, strong, exquisite pro athletes who were also gay, like I was. Like my friends were. They got to be people, with girlfriends, partners, even wives eventually.

But the men didn't. And I don't mean that like waaaah, poor cis dudes. I just mean it seemed like it was time. It seemed like the twenty-first century could make space for queer men to come out while they were still playing.

Oh, how fucking wrong I was. I stared out at the snow, now entirely covering everything I'd shoveled the day before as if I'd never done anything (my muscles protested this blasphemy, but the evidence of my eyes was snow all the way down), and contemplated the moment I'd seen the picture of Orion snogging his physio in a Porsche parked in the shadows out behind the eleventh hole of a rather famous Conquistos golf course. It was one of those weird things where I knew someone who knew someone who happened to be at the clubhouse of Famous-Ass Golf Course for an event, but this someone my someone knew also happened to be anxious AF, so she'd gone out for a walk in the early twilight, when no one was supposed to be on the course anymore.

She was trying to stay invisible because she was afraid she'd get kicked out. Orion was trying to stay invisible because he was kissing his boyfriend and he wasn't allowed to have a boyfriend. Shortly after the article came out, the photographer released a statement apologizing for having taken That Photo and regretting its use in the paper, somewhat conveniently leaving out the fact that she'd given it to us to publish, signed paperwork accordingly, and been paid the going rate of fifty bucks.

Not that I didn't understand. By then I desperately wished I'd used a pseudonym and could cower behind it like a cornered weasel. But I'd thought all along that I would write this brilliant piece on the history of queer people in modern sports; I would end by ... I thought of it as "liberating" the fantastic Orion Broderick from his shackles of homophobia, that the right-wing crazies would go nuts, the team would demonstrate their solidarity by sticking by him, and fifteen, twenty years out, he'd say it was the best worst thing that had ever happened to him.

It sounded so, so stupid when I thought about it later. I'd practically designed the rainbow armbands the guys would wear on the field. Imagined other teams picking up the trend. Maybe some other men in the American League Soccer Association would also come out.

In short: I would be the slightly problematic hero whose questionable decisions would be proved right by history. I had even, and I cringed to remember it, fantasized that Orion would thank me someday.

But that hadn't been Orion because I didn't know Orion. That had been this ... Famous Athlete (TM) action figure with Orion Broderick's face and jersey number. I knew he was from a small town in the middle of California (because that was in his bio), and that he'd dropped out of college at San Luis Obispo to play for the Conquistos FC, just up the coast (also in his bio). I had no idea who he really was, which hadn't even mattered to me at the time. I hadn't cared. I thought he was wealthy and famous and invulnerable. I thought he had nothing to lose by being outed.

And then the brand deals fell through and the team lost a couple of sponsors, and then they dropped Orion Broderick from the roster. They fired the physio immediately, of course. He'd moved to Australia and refused to do interviews, though at least he was still working in soccer. Not snowed in up a mountain with a guy he detested. Did it even snow in Australia?

The thing was, I'd known I'd fucked up almost immediately. It didn't take the lost brand deals or the canceled sponsorships for me to get that. I knew it the second a pretentious poli-sci gay of the "I'm not queer, I'm normal like everybody else" variety congratulated me on doing the right thing . "Why should some soccer hotshot get to pass, right?" That's what he'd said to me.

The words had echoed in my head, bouncing around like buckshot, making divots and bruising my brain. I hadn't been trying to punish Orion Broderick for not coming out earlier. I understood why he'd been hesitant! I just thought the world could handle it. I thought we'd seen that with the women's teams. I thought I was helping . Him, me, every other queer soccer fan.

But this asshole I'd never liked even though we ran in similar circles acted like I'd righteously outed someone who didn't want to be outed because I thought they shouldn't have the option to stay in the closet.

There's really nothing more illuminating than discovering that reprehensible people agree with you.

It had been way too late to take it back by then, way too late to apologize. Before I'd graduated that spring, Orion had disappeared from the public eye, cut ties with pro soccer, and was the subject of the most vague of rumors. Maybe he'd gone to the UK to play there. Maybe he'd gone to Kenya to take part in a volunteer league trying to raise money for local schools. Maybe he was in Mexico, or Latvia, or Nova Scotia. But no one really knew. You could tell from the flavor of the rumors themselves, the way all of them felt like recitations of dream logic, half-formed ideas that didn't totally make sense ... but didn't totally not make sense either.

And I swore to never lift my journalistic pen again and embarked on the series of jobs I disliked that led me to Innovations in Branding.

But now both of us were here. In this cabin. Halfway up a mountain. Trapped by the weather and a tricky shared history. Maybe Orion had thought of me as more of an Evil Villain (TM) than as a person. Maybe there was still some way to clear the air between us so that we could both just be people instead of adversaries, or enemies, or detestable .

If I could just explain to him how dumb I'd been, how I'd learned from it, how sorry I was, and how much I regretted making the decisions that had triggered all those other things happening. Not that he'd forgive me necessarily, but if he at least understood what my intentions had been, even if that wasn't how it all worked out ... then at least we could just be two dudes who didn't mind each other instead of two dudes who couldn't stand each other.

Which had to be better. An improvement. It had to be, at the very least, worth the shot. Maybe he would continue detesting me after I'd explained my reasons for doing such a fucked-up thing, and okay, that was his right. But he might just find a way to accept that I wasn't actually a monster, which would be so much better.

Good. Great. I had a goal. A focus. Something to do with my brain that felt a lot more likely than digging my way back to town. Also, I wouldn't be good for digging anymore. Or lifting my arms above shoulder height.

The caffeine was enough to keep me from wanting to cry, but my body felt stiff and strange, even apart from being sore. Clearly I needed to make another cup of tea and then return to my couchnest to think and strategize.

Project Get Orion Broderick to Stop Detesting Des Cleary: commence operations.