“He likes everyone.”
“He likes you specifically.”
He says it without weight. The way Tomáš says things he hasn’t seen all the way to the end of. I make another small noise and Tomáš lets it land and goes back to his glass.
“Šíma. With me.” Novotný stands as dinner ends. “Let’s find a bar where the lighting is wrong.”
“My favorite kind.”
They go. Tomáš and Kovár and Polášek head back to the hotel. I tell them I want to walk. The night air is warm in a way Munich nights have not been since I have lived there. The streetlights pool on the asphalt and the city is still wide awake at nine and I am not Tobík, I do not know this city, but the city is being kind to me anyway.
My room is quiet at nine-thirty. Šíma’s bag is gone. He texted that he might not be back until late, which I have learned to translate as not back until breakfast.
I pull off my shirt. I drink the water on the desk. The phone is on the nightstand.
I open the app. I tell myself I am checking the team channel.
I am not checking the team channel.
New post. Tobík. Twenty-three minutes ago.
A candid shot, the kind a friend takes when the subject doesn’t know. Tobík is in a kitchen, the back-of-house chaos of a pop-up event. He is laughing at something the man next to him said. The man is leaning into him with his shoulder. The man is good-looking in a way I can objectively appreciate. Fitted shirt. Tattoos visible at the cuff. He is looking at Tobík and Tobík is laughing.
The caption: Atlanta foodie supper club. Chef Diego cooked us seven courses and I ate every one. Number three made me emotional. Five had crab in it. Six was the most beautiful plate of food I have seen in my life. Seven was dessert and that is when we lost the room.
Three hundred and forty-seven likes. The first comment is from a handle with a chili-pepper emoji.
hájek you owe me a rematch at that natural wine place. last time doesn’t count, i had a meeting after [wineglass emoji]
I read it. I read it again. The “rematch” sits there. The “doesn’t count” sits there. The emoji sits there.
I tap the chili-pepper handle.
I do not know what I am hoping to find. The handle belongs to someone named Drew. Drew has nine hundred followers. Drew posts pictures of pasta and his own forearms. Drew is, by any reasonable metric, fine.
I close the app. I open the app.
I look at the photo again.
The man’s shoulder is touching Tobík’s. Maybe not. Maybe the angle is doing it. Maybe Drew is a man who knows Tobík and likes wine and posts comments because his entire personality is comments. The wine recommendation could be platonic. The “rematch” could mean nothing. The shoulder may not even be touching.
I am a defender. I have watched the body language of strikers for fifteen years. I have read the hip rotation of the South African forward to predict his cut. I am a professional reader of bodies in space and I am sitting in a hotel room in Atlanta deciding what a man named Drew’s shoulder means based on a phone photograph. Scientists should be looking into this. I should be studied.
There is a thing that happens in my chest. I have felt it before. Once, a long time ago, in a different city, with a different person,of a different sex, who was actually mine. The shape is familiar. The shape is also slightly different and slightly worse, because there is no version of this where the answer is “go home and talk to him about it.” There is no home. There is no him. There is a man currently laughing at something a chili-pepper handle said over crab, and I am sitting in a hotel room having opinions.
I am a man with opinions about the proximity of a stranger to a person who is not mine.
I should note that “not mine” is not a thought a person who is fine has in a hotel room.
I put the phone down. I pull the laptop off the desk and open it and there is the same email from the club that has been there for three weeks. They have been waiting long enough that my agent told me earlier, in the polite tone he uses when he wants me to feel something, that the club has started checking on my Munich apartment lease.
I close the email.
I open the browser. Atlanta United MLS roster 2026.
The names come up. Coach. Goalkeepers. Defenders. A center-back from Argentina who has been there four years and is extended through 2027. A right-back from Atlanta who came up through the academy. A left-back who is twenty-three. The third center-back slot is a Colombian on loan who returns to his parent club at the end of the season.
The third center-back slot will be open.