Chapter Twenty

The day moved slowly, but not slowly enough. The plow sounds kept up for a while, passed, then came back toward town. I mostly tried to block it out.

I'd been waiting for days, and now that they were here, I wished they would hold off just a little longer. My caffeine headaches were lighter now. The body aches were gone (except the ones I'd earned through physical exertion of various kinds). And there was all that kissing we hadn't done until last night, which I wished we could do forever in this bubble of not giving a fuck about anything else.

Not that we moped around or anything. We had sex. And read the best bits of "Where's Sporty?" out to each other. And had more sex until we were both legitimately sore (I'd forgotten—or maybe never known—how much of a cardio workout sex could be when you weren't just mutually getting off as fast as possible so you could go home or send the other person home). We tried out Orion's pathetic collection of herbal teas, all of which basically tasted like grass clippings. And he tried to bake chip-less chocolate chip cookies in a little foil-wrapped parcel on top of the wood-burning stove, but they didn't really come out.

We ate them anyway, with spoons, huddled over the counter.

"Still good," I said with my mouth full. "Even not totally baked and sans chocolate chips."

"Agreed."

We took a cookie-induced nap afterward, and Scraps, huffy from being locked out the last time, followed on our heels and curled up in the dead center of the mattress.

"Sorry, Giz, but no." Orion pushed her over so we'd have the prime real estate.

I'd never lain with someone like that, their arm touching mine, one of their legs thrown over one of my legs, their breaths beside me until we were breathing in sync. It was strangely comforting until I reminded myself that it was only for this moment, and then it would be gone.

After that it was merely sad.

"Do you think it's possible to have joy without ... I don't know, fear?" Orion was looking up at the ceiling. At least that was the direction his eyes were pointed in, though it didn't seem like that's what he was seeing.

Maybe he was feeling a little bit sad too. "What do you mean?" I propped myself up on my elbow. "It must be, don't you think? Though I'm not sure I've felt a lot of joy."

"Not even when you were writing?"

I considered this. "I guess there was joy. And this sense of ... focus, maybe? But not in a boring way. In a transcendent way. Like it was me and the keyboard and the words, and nothing else mattered. I guess that was joyous." I smiled, thinking about the way I'd come up for air after writing two thousand words without pausing. "Man, it was so euphoric sometimes. Not all the time. Not even that often, probably."

"But often enough you'd keep chasing it, right?" he asked, and now he was watching me.

"Hell yes." I tapped his sternum. "You know what doesn't give me that feeling? Press releases about corporations suddenly deciding they'll spend fifty thousand dollars on wildlife preservation, coincidentally just moments after a study comes out about how their frigging factory devastated the natural habitats of like seventeen different species, two of which are endangered. Not inspiring."

"No, doesn't sound inspiring."

"Nope. But I guess it doesn't make me afraid either. Aside from feeling mildly complicit. What are you afraid of?" It felt simultaneously like a question I hadn't earned the right to ask and a question he seemed to want to answer.

"I'm not afraid now, I don't think. I guess ..." He swallowed, and I had the pleasure of watching his expression change from contemplative to ... flushed. "Actually, I guess I was thinking about how nice today was. It's been an issue before, trying to walk a line between honesty and, you know, worrying about what if this is the one guy on Grindr who figures out who I am."

"I know who you are," I said.

"Yeah." A line creased his forehead. "But what if who I am—at least, who I was—is a person who can only feel joy when he's constantly afraid his whole life is going to fall apart? Because that thing I used to feel on the field, that euphoria? I don't feel that anymore, you know? I'm less afraid, but also less ... less ..."

"Less real?" I suggested. "That's how I feel about writing. Like, I can live without it, but everything's a lot more flat. I'm a lot more flat—still myself, but in two dimensions." This conversation felt so surreal. In some ways, we barely knew each other. Most ways, even. But I'd never thought I'd talk to anyone who'd understand that feeling, that strange absence I'd felt when I'd stopped writing.

"Less real, yeah. I mean, there are flashes. I love seeing the kids stop by the café after ballet or their martial arts classes or whatever; it's always fun to ask what they're learning and try to mimic it. But it feels like even that only works because they have no idea who I am."

"You think if the kids in Bakers Mine knew you used to be a big shot soccer star, they wouldn't like you anymore?"

"Or maybe I wouldn't like me anymore if I felt like that person again. I don't know." He smiled ruefully. "It's complicated. My relationship with my past self."

I fell backward, leaving my arm against his. "Ain't that the truth. Half the time I want to throttle my past self; the other half I just want to ask him who exactly he's trying to impress."

"Hmm." Orion wiggled his toes beneath the quilts. A nervous tic? Or just a thinking gesture? "Who was young-me trying to impress? My parents. My coaches. My teammates. The rest of soccer. The world. Who wasn't I trying to impress? That's a shorter list." He turned his head with eyebrows raised.

"Hey, don't look at me; young-Des was very modest." I gave it a beat before saying, "All I wanted was a Pulitzer. Is that too much to ask?"

He laughed lightly. "Nah. I mean, all I wanted was a World Cup. When you tally up the number of Pulitzer winners in four years with the number of team members on a World Cup team, I think you actually had a much bigger chance. Especially when you consider that you could win a Pulitzer at eighty. Far more opportunities."

"You could go into coaching," I suggested.

"You mean, if anyone would take a disgraced former footballer?"

I leaned up again. "You weren't disgraced. It's not like you were busted for something immoral or obscene. And look at the German team, right? They protested not being able to visibly support equality in their team photo. That's not nothing."

"I cried. When I saw that." He blinked at the ceiling again. "It hit me ridiculously hard." His hand came up, settling over his mouth, like he was muzzled all over again, unable to be himself.

I tugged his hand away and kissed him. "I cried too. I'm sorry." For outing him? For hurting him? For costing him so much? Maybe all of the above.

He didn't ask me to clarify. "I don't want to go back to living like that. Even if it means I can't ... feel that euphoria either."

"But I don't think those two are linked so exactly. It's more ..." I puzzled it out, drumming lightly on his chest, my gaze tracing the weave of the shirt he'd pulled on when we'd ceased our more aerobic efforts. "I think it's the vulnerability. For me, anyway. If I'm writing and everything else falls away, it's just me and the page; I can't help but expose myself, you know? I don't know if it's the same with soccer, but that's where the euphoria comes from. It's not the fear exactly—it's the vulnerability, that sense of putting everything I have on the line. That's the high. And I think you can be vulnerable, even if you're not living in fear."

Orion stared up at me, lips slightly parted. "Yes, the vulnerability, you're exactly right. When I played my best, when I was high with it, aware of every other player on the field, my brain humming with all these tiny calculations I didn't even need to think about, it was the most open I ever was, the most ... intense. The most real ."

"Yeah. I don't think it's living in fear. I think it's just this weird, glorious balance of exhilaration and playing and chance and practice, and it could all go to hell in a second but also, what if you lift off? What if you fly ?" My turn to flush. "I mean, you know, whatever."

He leaned up and kissed me. "What if you fly, what if you fall, what if you never come back to earth? Yeah, Des Cleary, that's what I miss. That moment when you no longer care what happens on the other side because you're in it ." He pulled me over him. "That's the thing."

"You're the thing," I mumbled, because I wasn't sure I could say anything more real without having feelings that were absolutely not suited to our inevitable parting.

Orion laughed and kissed me again.

Dinner, made in a candlelit kitchen, was tuna on the last of Orion's failed bread. In the middle of it he cleared his throat and said, "I guess we should talk about what happens next."

It was as if he'd dumped a bucket of ice water over me. Or no, that was too fleeting. This was as if he'd just pushed me into an entire tub of ice water and wouldn't let me out, the frigid cold taking over my entire body.

Of course I'd known it couldn't last. The second I heard the plows, I knew we were on borrowed time. I shouldn't have ... cuddled with him. Kissed him. It was too far outside the norm, too close to something I wasn't allowed to want. Something I didn't deserve. Orion was a good guy, the kind of guy who should be with someone else who was also good. It was one thing to mess around when you were stuck together in a cabin, but a very different thing to face the world and be ... more than that. And I got it. I really did. I liked him enough to not want to make this harder on him. (Or on me.)

I made my voice as neutral as I could. "Yeah. I guess we just ... pretend this never happened? I go back to work being a fuckup with no future. You go back to hanging out with ballerinas at the Wash and Brew." I glanced at Scraps. "I guess we try to figure out who owns our foster pup. And that's ... it."

Orion, very still, arms still crooked like he was about to take another bite of his sorta-sandwich, stared at me.

"What?" God, was he going to make me spell it out? How we obviously weren't right for each other? Was he going to make me describe just how little I deserved him? My chest went tight with an ache, as if all the longing I'd ever withheld in my life was just sitting there like that fatberg in the London sewers, collecting waste and rubbish and smells, blocking up the lines.

"So that's it?" he demanded, his voice sounding a lot more controlled than neutral . "That's how you see this? You just walk away?"

Wow, he was really trying to make this suck even more than it already did. Well, screw him. I didn't have to prostrate myself for his approval, or at least, I didn't plan to. "Uhh, I mean, what's the other option? Unless you decide you want to do this campaign—which you should, you'd be amazing—in which case, I don't know, we could still work together, if you wanted." I faltered when his gobsmacked expression shifted toward anger. "Or not, not is also fine; you can work with anyone. It's the campaign that's important."

"Not to me. Is that really all you've got to say? Some bullshit about this thing you tried to guilt me into and I said no to?"

"I wasn't trying to guilt you! I just think you'd be great." Which was true. I didn't even care about my dumb job anymore. They could land their own pro queer.

He set down his sorta-bread. "So in your head, what have we been doing for the last day? All this? The flirting, the kissing, the sex? That was just, what, a fling to you?"

"A fling ? Ew, no." The idea was abhorrent for some reason, even though I didn't know why.

"Then what?"

"Uhh. I guess ..." I faltered. Wait, what? What the hell were we talking about now? I'd missed a trick somewhere, and suddenly I wanted to restart the whole conversation. "I don't know," I temporized. "What is it to you?"

"Has all this just been to get me to agree to your campaign?"

"You think I fucked you for work? You think my boss sent me, the guy who royally screwed you over, as a honeypot? Seriously?"

"I have no idea what to think about you right now. I thought—it seemed like—" He broke off, shaking his head. "Your plan is really just to go away, and we never speak again? That's been your plan this whole time?"

Why did he make it sound like that? Like I was a monster? "I thought that's what you wanted. You detest me, remember?"

"I don't. I didn't. I told you that."

"Yeah, but you hated me for days."

He just stared at me in this brutal, eviscerating way, like in Orion's gaze I was stripped of my skin, all my nerve endings raw and exposed. "I can't believe I fell for this game you were playing. And I really did. Was all that crap about your dad a lie too?"

"Excuse me? I didn't lie about anything!"

"Oh, okay, I guess I'm the idiot for thinking a guy who kisses me the way you do had more feelings than just ‘I'm bored, so I might as well have sex with the only other human around, even though I think he hates me.'"

Now I was just getting confused. He thought I was using him for sex? How was that a thing that a guy like Orion could even think? "I didn't—I mean—I never thought—you kissed me first!"

He pushed back from the table. "Because, as we've covered, I'm the biggest idiot alive. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

"I didn't fool you! I never fooled you into anything."

"Only into caring about you. But you're right, I should have known better. Okay, then. I'm glad we've had this little chat." He turned and began to walk out.

"Hey!" I stood. "You were the one who didn't want to talk about anything real. You were the one who didn't want to even think about the past, who didn't want to clear the air. What was I supposed to take from that? Is that your way of starting a relationship?"

He spun back around. "I didn't want to listen to you cry about how sorry you are for what you did because frankly, I don't give a shit why you did it. You thought you knew best, you thought you were the arbiter of who gets to be in the closet or not in the closet, and with a couple of keystrokes, you exploded my entire life. Did you think I'd forgive you for that?"

"No, I—"

"And," he said, stepping up to me, "it wasn't just me you hurt. I wasn't the only one in that photo. The team was embarrassed by the drama. I had to go in to the board of directors and apologize for what you did. I had to stand there, like a naughty little boy, and say, ‘I'm so sorry this happened,' like kissing a consenting adult was something I was ashamed of doing. So fuck you, Des Cleary. And all your good intentions."

I had no response to that. I wanted to swallow my own tongue. "I'm sorry," I whispered, hating myself.

"And the worst part is that I thought I could move on from it. I did move on from it. Till you showed up with your brand-new plans for my future, and your ineptness, and saving a goddamn dog, and ..." His face contorted. "Whatever. I went temporarily insane, but I'm recovered now. Please feel free to sleep on the couch and leave as soon as possible."

A few seconds later, the door shut to his bedroom.

And, because there was nothing else for me to do, I cried.