I press my palms harder into the granite. The cold helps. “He saw me standing inside your reach while you were on my table. There is no reasonable explanation for why I was still standing that close. And you were touching my arm.”
“He didn’t see that. You had the chart in your hands.”
“I had the chart because I grabbed it when the door opened. One second earlier, he would have seen more.”
“So the chart is the story. I had a question about the trap. You were checking range.”
“That’s not a story. That’s a cover. And covers work until someone thinks about them for ten seconds.”
He watches me. His face is doing what it always does, every thought right there on the surface. The openness I used to find disarming now looks like a liability because this man has never learned to hide anything.
“We’ll be more careful.” He says it simple, direct, like the answer is obvious. “We got comfortable. It won’t happen again. We keep distance when we’re at work.”
“We.” I hear myself repeat it. My hands leave the counter. “We’ll be more careful.”
“Yeah. Both of us. Together.”
“What does careful look like for you, Teo?” I’m not asking to be difficult. He doesn’t get it. He can’t.
He blinks. “The same thing it looks like for you. We pay attention. We don’t let our guard down.”
“No. What does careful look like for you specifically? You stop touching my arm at the facility. You stop coming to sessions early. You stop humming the song you sent me at one in the morning on your way into my treatment room. That’s what careful costs you. A little restraint. A minor adjustment to how you move through a building.”
“I know the stakes are different for you...”
“You don’t.” The words come out level. Not raised. The opposite. Everything in my voice flattens to a frequency I don’t use with patients, with Guy, with anyone. This register has no warmth in it and no room for the person on the other end to feel comfortable. “You don’t know, Teo. You have never had to know.”
His mouth closes. His hands press into his knees and he is working to keep them there, I can see the effort in his forearms, every instinct telling him to reach and the reach dying before his hands leave his legs.
“Tell me.” Two words. Quiet. Plain. The sunshine gone from his voice and what’s left is just a man asking.
I’ve been running this math since USC. Since my advisor pulled me aside junior year and told me how I needed to be better than anyone to be thought of as someone. She didn’t say it in those words. She said the field was competitive and I should be strategic about visibility. But I understood what she meant when she looked at me and saw a queer Black man who wanted to work in professional sports and gave him advice calibrated to the world she knew was waiting. I stopped arguing with the math a long time ago. You don’t argue with gravity. You learn how to walk with it.
“You think this is cute?” My voice is steady and the steadiness is what makes it cut. “You think we almost get caught and it’s a funny story? A close call?”
“I don’t think...”
“You get caught and coach gives you a lecture, or maybe they don’t even say anything to you.” I am looking at him and my hands are at my sides and I am not pacing, not moving, every word placed where I put it. “I get caught and I’m done. Not just here. Everywhere. Because the story isn’t going to be ‘two people caught feelings.’ The story is going to be ‘the bisexual Black PTwho couldn’t keep his hands to himself.’ And that story follows me into every interview for the rest of my career.”
The room holds the words. I’ve never said them out loud. Not to Guy, who would have listened. Not inside my own head, because naming it doesn’t change the outcome.
“I told you in September it was about my job.” My voice sounds like it belongs to someone I’ve never met. No armor. No angle. “My job is the only thing between me and a story that erases everything I’ve built. The DPT. The years at Georgia State. Being the lead trainer at Carolina in the AHL. Gary putting his name next to mine because someone had to vouch for me, because that’s how it works. One story, and I’m not the clinician with the best credentials in that building. I’m the one who couldn’t keep it professional.” I take a breath and let it out. “And every hiring manager who digs into my name finds that version first, because that version is always louder.”
“Zay...”
“Don’t.” The word stops him. His mouth closes and I watch it close and I can’t stop because everything I’ve been shelving since September is on the floor.
“You walk into every room like it belongs to you. You touch people without thinking about it. You close distance because that’s what your body does, and you have never once had to calculate whether closing that distance costs someone else their career.” I hear my own breathing and it’s even, controlled, and the control is the last wall standing. “I have spent every day since September measuring the exact space between your body and mine in every room in that building. Watching the door. Watching the hallway. Watching Tyler’s face when you book with me for the fifth straight week instead of rotating like the other players. And on top of every bit of that, performing straight in a building full of men who have never had to wonder whether the person treating their body is attracted to it.” Myjaw tightens. “That’s not the same math you’re running. It’s not close.”
His eyes are wet. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t look away.
“And sometimes I don’t know if you want me or if you want to be in a love story and I’m the person who’s here and can be part of your angsty star-crossed romance.” The words leave my mouth and I feel them land in my own chest, heavier than I expected, a weight I didn’t know I was carrying because I’d filed it so deep I forgot the drawer existed. “You read romance novels. You believe in grand gestures. You send songs at one in the morning and you think the feeling is enough because the feeling has always been enough for you. And I’m standing here trying to figure out if the feeling is about me specifically or if I’m the nearest warm body for a story you were already telling yourself.”
He’s on his feet. I don’t remember him getting up but he’s standing with his hands at his sides. He’s hearing the cost of what I’ve been carrying, hearing it without defense, without the deflection that protects him from everything the world puts in front of him. Because the world has put very little in front of Teo Marchetti. That’s not his fault. But it’s the truth.
I wait for the counter-argument. The rebuttal. The man who argues about pecorino ratios and whether penne is a legitimate pasta shape. The man who has never met a silence he could leave unfilled.
He doesn’t fill this one.
