Page 142 of Gamebreaker

I clicked on an interview with a retired midfielder from a Spanish club, two decades of professional play behind him. He'd come out at thirty, six years into his career.

I thought it would end my whole life. My team, my sponsors, my reputation. I spent years building the perfect wall between who I was at work and who I was everywhere else, and I believed with complete conviction that the wall was what kept me standing.

I read the next line and stopped.

I thought my career would end. Instead, my life began.

I sat with it for a long time.

Had I been living? Twelve years of discipline and excellence and carefully managed control. Had any of it been a life? Or had I been building an increasingly elaborate performance of one, filling in the outline of a person without ever letting anyone see who was inside?

Harper had seen.

That was the part I couldn't get past. In all the years of keeping people at manageable distances, of letting them know Russo and never Cam, Harper had looked straight through the wall like it was made of glass and found the person behind it, and hadn't run.

She'd stayed. She'd fought with me. She'd made me laugh. She'd let me be dominant in ways I'd never trusted anyone enough to ask for, and then she'd held me afterward like I was worth the tenderness.

And then she'd walked away, because I couldn't give her the one gift she needed.

Not because she didn't want me. Because she did. Because she wanted all of me, in daylight, and I'd handed her half a person and asked if that was enough.

It wasn't.

I closed the laptop.

At eleven, I picked up my phone and pulled up my mother's contact.

It was two in the morning in Providence. I knew that. I called anyway, before I could talk myself out of it, the way I'd talked myself out of it last Saturday.

She answered on the third ring. Daytime, it would've been the first ring.

"Cameron?" Her voice was thick with sleep and already serious with worry. "Baby, it's two in the morning. Are you hurt?"

Just her voice, warm and completely uncomplicated in its love for me. My throat closed around it. I'd called her from locker rooms and hotels and airports across twelve years. She'd always picked up, no matter what time it was where she was.

"I'm not hurt," I said. "Not like that. Ma, I need to tell you a few truths. I need you to just listen for a little while."

A rustle on the line. It was my father mumbling a question, then my mother hushing him. I heard the sound of a door closing, and the creak of the stairs I'd run up and down a thousand times as a kid. She was going down to the kitchen. She was going to sit at the table in her robe in the dark and listen to me, because that was what she'd always done.

"Okay, baby," she said. "I'm listening."

I told her all of it.

Not the part she already knew. She'd known I was gay before I'd found words for it myself. She'd held me in that same kitchen when I was twenty-two and finally said it out loud and cried like the admission had cost me blood. What she didn't know was the weight of the twelve years since. The art I'd made of hiding. The endorsement math I ran every single time I thought about being honest. The way I'd let Karlie go and spent three years telling myself it was the right call.

And then Harper.

I didn't plan what I said about her. It just came out of me, the way the truest shots always had. Off the dribble. In rhythm.

"She's loud, Ma," I said. "She's the loudest person I've ever met. She talks with her hands like the words won't fit in her mouth. She called me Captain Miserable to my face the first time we met, in a tunnel, in front of my whole team, and I wanted to explode. And then I couldn't stop thinking about her. She documents everything: her coffee, her shoes, the sunset, because she's spent her whole life making sure she's seen. Her family threw her away for being who she is, and she still walked into the world with her head held high. And she looked at me, Ma. Not at Russo. At me. Like she'd found me under all of it, and she wasn't scared of what was there."

My voice was going. I let it.

"She stood in my doorway a week ago with her heart breaking, and she told me to eat real meals. That's the last request she made of me. Eat real meals. Sleep more than four hours. You matter. She was leaving me, and she was still taking care of me." I pressed my fist against my mouth. "I'm in love with her. I'm so in love with her I can't breathe right. And I let her walk out the door, because I'm still hiding, and she can't be with someone who's hiding, and she's right. She's completely right. And I can't keep doing this, Ma. I can't keep choosing fear. It's taken every single person I've ever loved."

The last word broke in half. There was silence on the other end of the line.

I braced. Even now. Even knowing her. Even after twenty-two, in her kitchen, in that hug that had felt like being told I know, I know, of course I know, some animal part of me still braced.