He walks toward me. Not quickly. The pace of a man who is aware that the act of approaching someone in an empty hallway at 10:30 PM is a choice with implications and who is making the choice anyway.
"Good game tonight," I say, because professional is what I have.
"Thanks." He pauses. "Can I walk with you?"
The question is so simple and so loaded that I stand there for a moment processing the two layers: the surface layer (can I walk in the same direction as you through a parking garage, a request so mundane it barely qualifies as a question) and the underneath layer (can we be in each other's proximity by choice, not by professional obligation, because I want to be near you and I'm running out of ways to engineer it accidentally).
"Yeah," I say. "Of course."
We walk. The corridor leads to the back exit, which leads to the player lot, which is adjacent to the media lot. The walk is two minutes. The conversation fills all of it and then some, because we stop walking when we reach the exit and we stand there, in the doorway between the building and the night, and we keep talking.
He asks about my family. Not in the way that sources ask journalists polite questions. In the way that a person asks another person about the things that made them. He asks about Ghana, about Accra, about my father's printing business and what it was like to move to Atlanta at seven and learn English while learning a new country.
I tell him. I tell him about my mother's jollof rice, which is the best in East Atlanta and possibly the world, a claim I will defend with data and emotion. I tell him about my father's printing press, an ancient machine that he keeps running through sheer will and a relationship with a mechanic in Decatur who specializes in equipment that should have been retired in 1997. I tell him about my brothers, who are both older and who communicate through emojis and who showed up at my first published piece in the AJC with a framed copy and a cake that said "OUR BROTHER IS FAMOUS" in blue icing.
Jamie listens. The listening is not polite. The listening is the thing I identified during the first interview: total, focused, physical. He listens with his whole body. His posture angles toward me. His eyes don't leave my face. The attention is so complete that I feel it the way I felt it in the media room with the recorder off, like sun, like warmth, like a specific frequency of focus that my body registers as something more than being heard.
"Your family sounds amazing," he says.
"They are. Loud and amazing and completely incapable of respecting boundaries, but amazing."
"Do they know about..." He pauses. The pause is the gap between the beginning of a sentence and the end, the space where the word he's looking for should be but isn't, because the word he's looking for is one he hasn't given himself permission to use yet. "About your life. All of it."
He's asking if my family knows I'm gay. The question is wrapped in enough ambiguity to be deniable (about your life, all of it, could mean anything) but the emphasis on "all" is the tell. He's asking about the all. The part that isn't career or geography or family dinners. The part that is orientation. The part that is the unnamed thing he's carrying.
"Yeah," I say. "They know. My mom cried for one afternoon and then made jollof rice and said 'you are still my son and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.' My dad took longer. A year. Then a hug on Christmas Day that said everything he couldn't say in words."
Jamie is very still. The stillness is not his podium stillness (guarded, managed, performed). It is the stillness of a person absorbing information that is personally relevant and emotionally overwhelming and that he is processing in real time, in a doorway, in a parking lot, at 10:45 PM, standing two feet from a man he should not be standing two feet from.
"A year," he says quietly.
"A year. And then everything was okay. Not perfect. Okay. And okay was enough."
The silence that follows is the loudest silence I've experienced since I started covering this team. The silence contains the conversation we're having and the conversation we're not having and the two feet of distance between us that feels simultaneously infinite and insufficient.
"I should go," I say.
"Yeah."
Neither of us moves.
The not-moving is the most honest thing that has happened between us. More honest than the hallway conversations. More honest than the recorder-off interview. More honest than the texts and the feature and the press conferences where our eyes meet. The not-moving says: I know I should go and I don't wantto go and the reason I don't want to go is the reason I should go and the circular logic of that sentence is the shape of the problem we're standing inside.
"Declan." He says my name. Not Mr. Osei. Not the journalist. Declan. My first name in his voice, two syllables, spoken in a doorway. The sound of it changes something in my chest that I cannot change back.
"Jamie."
"Thanks for the family stuff. For telling me."
"Anytime."
He turns. He walks to his car. I watch him go for three seconds (the same three seconds as the Frank Ocean conversation, the same three seconds that keep happening, the same duration that seems to be the unit of measurement for whatever this is).
I walk to my car. I sit. I do not start the engine.
The journalist has done his job. The game recap is filed.
The person behind the journalist is sitting in a dark parking lot thinking about the way Jamie said "Declan" in a doorway.