"People are always watching. That's what happens when you're a professional athlete."
"That is easy for you to say." His voice was even but his hands were not. They were at his sides, fingers opening and closing in a rhythm that was not voluntary. "You came out and the world applauded. Your teammates threw you a party. You did an interview and people called you brave. You have no idea what it costs the rest of us."
The words landed like a body check. Clean, technically. But they knocked the wind out of me.
"You think it didn't cost me anything?" I said. My voice was steady but my chest was not. "You think I lost nothing?"
"I think you lost less than I would."
"My father hasn't spoken to me in two years, Mik. Two years. I call him on his birthday and he lets it go to voicemail. I send Christmas presents to my parents' house and my mom sends a thank-you text and my dad sends nothing. I sat in the same room as him at Thanksgiving and he talked to everyone except me. Like I was furniture. Like I was less than furniture, because at least furniture you acknowledge when you bump into it."
Mik's expression didn't change but something behind his eyes shifted. A recognition. One kind of loss seeing another.
"So don't tell me I don't know what it costs," I said. "I know exactly what it costs. The difference is that I decided the cost of hiding was higher."
"Your father did not put his hands on you."
The sentence stopped me cold. Because he was right. My father's weapon was silence. Mik's father's weapon was violence. These were not equivalent currencies of pain, and I knew that, and the knowing made me feel small and ashamed for the comparison.
"You're right," I said. "I'm sorry. That's not the same."
"No. It isn't."
We stood in the parking lot, three feet apart, in the space between two arguments that were both valid and both true. The afternoon sun was absurdly bright for a conversation this heavy. Atlanta didn't care about our problems. Atlanta was seventy-two degrees and sunny and completely indifferent to two men standing in a parking lot trying to figure out how to love each other across a gap that neither of them had created.
"What do you want to do?" I asked.
"I want this to go away."
"The photo or us?"
He flinched. It was small, barely visible, but I saw it because I had spent weeks memorizing his face and I knew every expression it was capable of and every expression it was trying to hide.
"The photo," he said. "Not us. Never us."
Something in my chest unclenched. Not all the way. But enough.
"Then we're careful," I said. "We're more careful. No restaurants. No public places. We keep it inside the walls until you're ready."
"And if I'm never ready?"
The question hung in the air. I heard it the way you hear a fire alarm in the distance. Not close enough to run from but close enough to know something is burning.
"Then we deal with that when it comes," I said. "But I need you to hear something, Mik. I agreed to the rules. I respect the rules. I understand why the rules exist. But I can't do this forever. Not because I don't want to. Because hiding is poison and I've already survived it once and I don't know if I can survive it again."
His face did not change. "Is that an ultimatum?"
"No. It's the truth. There's a difference."
"In my experience, there isn't."
He got in his car. He did not slam the door. He closed it with the same controlled precision that he did everything, and the quietness of the closing was worse than if he'd peeled out of the lot with his tires screaming. He drove away at exactly the speed limit, and I stood there watching his car disappear around the corner and felt the specific, terrible helplessness of loving someone who was fighting a war you couldn't fight for them.
I sat in my truck for a long time. The parking lot emptied around me. Guys heading home to their wives and girlfriends and dogs and lives that didn't involve hiding in parked cars after arguments about photographs.
My phone buzzed. My agent.
Photo's been taken down. Blog got a cease and desist from the team's legal. It's dead. Don't worry about it.