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“I think I’ve been in love with him for three years.”
The words come out. I don’t believe I said them out loud until I hear them in the room. They are the first true sentence I’ve said about this to another human being and they came out in a hotel room in Georgia to a man who tapes his left boot before his right.
“Okay.”
“Just okay?”
“Did you think I was going to be surprised.”
“I thought—“
“Vež. I’ve seen your phone screen by accident and noticed which account is open more often than any other. How you react when his name comes up. I’m not surprised.” He drinks his coffee. Sets it down. “I’m asking you what’s happening NOW. Because last night was a dinner where something happened between you, and I want to know if you’re okay.”
I put my face in my hands. “I don’t know if I’m okay.”
“I know you don’t.”
“Do you remember the draft party for Tobík? Three years ago. Tomáš‘s place. Tobík was nineteen and already taller than everyone in the room except me. Something almost happened that night. But after the party, I went home and called it a weird night. I called it a weird night for three years, Šíma. Every day for three years I ignore that night and call it a weird night.”
Šíma doesn’t move. He sits on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees and his coffee in both hands and he listens.
“But it wasn’t a weird night. It was the night I found out something about myself and then I spent three years trying to ignore it every single day. In Munich I have a system. The same café every morning, the same physio at the same hour, the same route to the training ground. I’ve walked it for four years. It works. It’s clean. And every night at one in the morning I’m in my apartment in Munich looking at a man’s Instagram account. His walking route. The golden retriever that sits on his foot. The woman at the flower stand who gives him sunflowers. Three years of knowing every corner of a life I wasn’t in.”
He takes a breath. He waits.
“And then I came here. And I walked to a coffee shop I’d never been to because I knew he’d be there because I’d memorized his schedule from social media like a person who’s fine. Then he walked in and his face opened up and I felt it in my whole body.”
“Then you spent time with him,” Šíma says.
“He showed me the city. In nine months he walked himself into a city and the city knows his name. In four years in Munich I don’t think the man at my café knows mine. He knows my order. That’s a different thing.”
Šíma is still watching me.
“I think I knew before the Beltline. I knew at the coffee shop. I maybe even knew at the draft party three years ago that there was the start of something.”
Šíma is quiet and let’s that sit in the air between us.
“The contract’s been sitting in my inbox for three months. Kessler’s retiring. The captaincy’s right there. Everyone I know has the same explanation for why I’m stalling and none of them are right and all of them sound reasonable. And the reasonable is what’s insane about it. Because the reason I haven’t signed is a man who has made Atlanta his home. The reason is standing in a coffee shop on Moreland Avenue.”
“And last night?”
“Last night I cut him off at a dinner table. He was talking about me to his teammates. He was saying my name in a room and I couldn’t take it. I interrupted him. In front of his friends. And he left. He walked out. He stood on the sidewalk and told me I was managing him the way Tomáš manages him and he was right. He was right about that and that gutted me. And I watched him walk away and I didn’t go after him because going after him would’ve meant admitting what I’ve been trying to not admit to myself at one in the morning for three years.”
My voice has been steady the whole time. It is not steady anymore.
“He walked home alone, Šíma. Eighteen blocks. I know it’s eighteen because I know where his apartment is because I’ve been in to his place. And I let him go.”
Šíma doesn’t move. When I finish, the room is quiet for a long time. The coffee in my hand is cold. I don’t remember when it went cold.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
