Good night, Griffin.
I set my phone on the bathroom counter and stood up,my legs stiff from sitting on the tile floor for so long. My reflection in the mirror looked tired, worried. Still scared.
I moved to the living room and collapsed on the couch, staring at my ceiling.
This afternoon should have been simple—watching a movie with Griffin, enjoying his company, the kind of normal Sunday afternoon that people in regular relationships took for granted.
Instead, we’d been reminded in the starkest possible way that what we were doing was dangerous, risky, the kind of thing that could destroy both our careers.
And yet I was staying. Why?
He trusted me with his fears. He was trying so hard to be brave despite being terrified. The way he looked at me like I was someone worth risking everything for made my heart clench.
It was the connection we’d built over the past few weeks—the coffee-shop conversations, the stolen moments, the sense that we understood each other in ways that went beyond physical attraction.
It was the hope, fragile and probably foolish, that maybe this time could be different. That we could make this work despite all the odds stacked against us.
I recognized that hope for what it was: classic blind optimism, the kind that had gotten me in trouble before. The belief that if I just tried hard enough, wanted it badly enough, I could make the impossible possible.
But I couldn’t seem to stop hoping anyway.
I went to bed but couldn’t sleep.
At two in the morning, I gave up trying and opened my phone, scrolling mindlessly through social media. I wasn’t looking for anything specific, but I found myself navigating to Griffin’s social media profile.
His feed was exactly what you’d expect from a professional athlete: team photos, game highlights, charity events. Everything carefully curated, professionally shot, to project an image: Griffin Lapierre, elite hockey player and team captain.
I scrolled through his posts from the past month. Griffin at practice. Griffin signing autographs for kids. Griffin in a suit at some team function, looking polished and untouchable.
Not a single personal photo. No friends, no family, nothing that revealed who he was behind the captain’s mask.
And certainly no photos of me.
But scrolling through his feed, seeing this sanitized version of his life where I didn’t exist at all, made something in my chest ache.
I clicked on the comments on his most recent post—a photo from Friday’s practice, Griffin in full gear, focused and intense.
Best captain in the league
Why is he single? Such a catch!
Griffin Lapierre is literally perfect. Someone wife him up already.
Any woman would be lucky to have him.
The comments went on like that, fans speculating about his love life, debating which celebrities or models he should date. People creating narratives about him based on literally nothing.
And Griffin couldn’t correct them. Couldn’t say “Actually, I’m gay and dating my PR manager, so thanks but no thanks on the female celebrity suggestions.”
He had to let them speculate, let them create this fictional straight version of him and fill in the blanks with assumptions that were completely wrong.
This was Griffin’s public face. The image the world saw. Straight, single, available.
And I would never be part of it.
The thought hit harder than I’d expected. I would never be in his social media photos. Never be acknowledged as his partner. Never exist in the public version of his life.
Even if we made it through the next four to six years, even if Griffin eventually came out, we’d have lost all that time. All those years where our relationship would be erased from his public history, invisible, like it had never happened.
