"Not tonight." "I'm not ready." "Can we just—" The excuses are automatic now, and I don't even know why I keep saying them. He never pushes. He just adjusts.
But the line holds, and I don't know what I'm saving or who I'm saving it for.
Tonight, I hit the wall earlier than usual. He’s on top of me, sweaty and focused, whispering “come for me” into my hair, and I’m halfway there when my brain just…stops.
Like someone hit mute on the inside of my skull. My body keeps going, but my mind is on a seventeen-hour delay.
I finish with a sound I barely recognize, and when Vincent kisses me, I bite down a little too hard.
He laughs, breathless. “Easy, tiger. Didn’t know you liked it rough.”
I fake a grin, wipe my mouth, and flop onto my back, letting him settle into his victory sprawl. I say I have early practice, that I need sleep, and he buys it, which is the only miracle left in my life.
He pulls the sheets over both of us, tugs me in tight, and falls asleep with his hand draped over my chest like a trophy.
I wait until his breath gets regular, then slide out from under him and sit on the edge of the bed, naked, cold, staring at the blue light from his wireless charger.
I pick up my phone and scroll.
The last real conversation with Darius is from twenty-one days ago: “good game man” and a thumbs-up. Before that, it was a stream of inside jokes, shit-talk, late night rants about Netflix shows we both claimed to hate but secretly binged.
I scroll back further, the day we broke the running PR, the night at the beach, the time he sent a photo of a cat sleeping on a baguette with the caption “remind you of anyone?” My eyes go fuzzy reading it. I forget to breathe.
Somewhere behind me, Vincent shifts, mumbles my name, then quiets again. I feel the weight of his arm still on my skin, like a bandage that won’t stick.
I tell myself what I always tell myself: Darius lost interest. That's why he pushed me toward Vincent. That's why the gym changed, the runs stopped, the texts dried up.
He saw whatever he needed to see and decided I wasn't worth the risk. Why else would he have told me to go?
I keep scrolling.
All the way to the top of the thread, back to the first message he ever sent: “You really think you can out-skate me?” I read it twice, then close my eyes, letting the tears pool before I wipe them away.
It sneaks up on me, the crying. It doesn’t feel like anything at first, just an itch behind my eyes, a prickling at the base of my nose. But then my throat locks up, and the sob comes out so quiet I’m not sure it even happened.
I don’t make a sound, don’t move, just sit there in the dark, phone cradled in my hand, letting the tears fall onto the bedsheet like spilled gin.
Vincent doesn’t wake. I could be anyone in this bed, in this city, in this world. I could be a mannequin for all he knows.
When the tears finally stop, I look at myself in the black mirror of the phone screen. Eyes puffy, lips raw, hair sticking up like I’ve been struck by lightning.
I look like a guy who lost a fight with the only thing he ever wanted.
I put the phone down, crawl back under the sheets, and let Vincent’s arm find me. I lie there, staring at the ceiling, waiting for morning.
And when it comes, it’s still just me, and the echo, and the empty space where a voice used to be.
THE FILE
Game three, semis, the kind of night you remember for the rest of your life or erase with enough whiskey that it never happened.
The arena’s only half-full, but every seat’s alive, humming, every face craning to get a look at the "team that survived."
That’s what the banner says, hanging limp above the Zamboni doors, "Survivors." The joke is, the city didn’t give a shit about us until we got shot up.
Now it’s all candlelight vigils and trauma porn and reporters in the tunnels with their hungry, wet eyes.
I tune it out. Try to.
