This Is Not
a Love
Story
(Yankees)

Colin and I stood at the curb, rats scattering nearby as he fished for cigarettes while I checked the route on my phone.

After years spent mostly apart, our reconnection felt like more than just hanging out—we were testing a real friendship, now that he was with someone else. Years had passed since our last hookup.

Earlier that night, he’d texted me—just one word: Hi, with an exclamation mark. I ended up inviting him over. Well, actually, he invited himself—asked what I was up to, if I wanted to hang out, if he could come over. I said yes. He’d be there in thirty.

It all happened so fast—his arrival, the way he sat on my couch, legs akimbo, with the confidence of someone who knew he could have anyone he wanted.

The aftertaste of tequila lingered on our tongues well after the round of drinks I’d fixed up for us—and the shot I’d swigged to ease my nerves—when we found ourselves outside in the cold, on our way to a bar, like so many times before.

Colin finally lit a cigarette, his gaze fixed on my building—a four-story brownstone carved into eight units, with my own being that additional one perched above the back-facing bedroom on the parlor floor that had, miraculously, fallen into my possession in the spring of 2021, when the rental market collapsed after New Yorkers began fleeing the city, many believing that New York, at least the one they knew, had abandoned them first.

“Gimme that,” I said, already reaching for the cigarette. It was the same brand he smoked in college—cheap and a little metallic on the exhale.

I took the cigarette from his lips and placed it between mine, taking a deep drag as I gazed at the row of million-dollar brownstones behind us. If photographed, we’d look like a Brooklyn postcard sold in the queer-owned bookstore down the street. But up close, those buildings with their varied facades, ornate cornices and iron railings seemed to taunt: Why rent when you could buy one of us? Oh, wait—you can’t afford to.

The menthol didn’t hit my throat like I had expected. That’s when I remembered that Colin never crushed the capsule in the filter. I always wondered why he didn’t just buy regular ones.

Colin took the cigarette back, smoke coiling between us like threads of memory pulling me back to my apartment, to the tarot cards I’d consulted after his unexpected text interrupted my meditation.

---

“Hi!”

I’d just relaxed my gaze enough to see the space between me and the wall vibrate with energy when his text interrupted my meditation.

A text from Colin?

Usually, I was the one texting him. I didn’t know how to respond—or whether I should respond at all. Some part of me had grown dependent on these sporadic initiations as proof that I mattered, that I was worthy of his attention.

I reached for the tarot deck and shuffled.

What does Colin want? I asked Spirit.

I should have been able to answer this question. Colin and I went way back—we’d known each other for nearly a decade, since sophomore year at Wesleyan. But Colin was hard to read.

At my birthday party—also a housewarming for my move from a roach-infested studio to a one-bedroom in central Bed-Stuy—Colin had shown up unexpectedly. I’d invited him more out of habit than expectation.

I’d never mentioned Colin to Jared, my date of several months. I was performing the evolved gay man who maintained friendships with former hookups.

Once he was drunk, Colin became impossible to ignore. He flung his shirt off near my cake and danced with abandoned confidence. His body spoke of discipline and disposable income, announcing, “I have the time and resources to sculpt myself into exactly what I want to be.”

Later, while I was sitting cross-legged on the rug talking with a writer’s assistant, Colin appeared. Without a word, he lowered himself directly in front of me, pressed his back against my chest, and casually inserted himself into our conversation. Jared noticed but didn’t react, as if this was just something friends do.

I felt the transgression immediately. It became painfully clear, with Colin’s weight settled against me, that he wasn’t like my other friends. He knew precisely what he was doing—knew I’d accept this invasion of my physical space because I had before, back in college, when he would drunkenly climb onto my lap at parties, turning me into furniture, into scenery for his performance of affection. The difference was that in college, I’d welcomed it. But at my birthday party, nearly a decade after meeting each other for the very first time, I was just letting it happen, unsure why I couldn’t bring myself to push him away.

I first met Colin outside Wesleyan’s student center on a late afternoon when the sky burned orange. He approached as I discussed graduation requirements with a friend, introducing himself as a transfer from Tufts joining the film program.

He wore raw denim jeans, a plain T-shirt, and white sneakers. His dark brown hair fell just short of his eyes, and two scars—one across his forehead, another dividing his bottom lip—hinted at stories I hadn’t yet heard.

His handshake was warm and deliberate, his amber eyes locking onto mine with what I once called the gay twinkle—a flicker of something knowing yet open-ended. Days later, someone would tell me that he had found me beautiful.

Meeting Colin felt like discovering a hidden fireplace behind a piece of plywood—something that transformed the entire atmosphere.

---

Once the cards were sufficiently shuffled, I pulled the Seven of Cups, the image of his text—“Hi!”—now permanently installed in the gallery of my mind.

Shit.

Colin didn’t know what he wanted. Or was the card about me? I typed out a reply: “What’s up?”

He wrote back right away: “At a party. What are you up to?”

“Just got out of the shower” A lie.

“Wanna hang out?”

I was still half in my tarot reading: “Yeah”

The typing bubbles appeared, then disappeared. Then—

“Want me to come over?”

There were plenty of things I wanted but knew better than to take. His question was simple—on the surface.

“Sure,” I wrote back.

A moment later: “What’s your address again”

I gave it to him.

He responded: “Be there in 30”

I set my phone down, my hand shaking slightly, adrenaline pumping through my veins.

My eyes landed on the Seven of Cups.

A card of fantasy, distraction, projection.

The many cups represent illusions—dreams, desires, dangers—and the need to choose with discernment.

I kept the card upright and placed it back into the stack.

I wondered which object in the card represented me: the shrouded figure? The elusive snake? The castle? The salamander between truths and lies? Or the jewels—glittering with imagined worth?

Colin was coming over. I showered quickly, the steam blurring my overanalysis as I considered what to wear. Nothing too polished, but enough to show effort.

This isn’t a date, I reminded myself. He has a boyfriend.

Though his relationship with Diego was open—Colin had worried aloud at my party that Diego might give him an STI. Still, the reward outweighed the risk. Diego was the definition of tall, dark, and handsome—a talented animator who checked nearly every box for Colin, who always had a thing for Latino men—except “committed.”

Could this be a date? The question clung to me like water. I tried to shake it off as I dried, but couldn’t. Was he just hanging out, or was this something more?

Colin and I became lovers days after meeting. We hooked up across semesters, just often enough to keep me from moving on. When I wrote a four-page letter confessing my love, he replied with two pages explaining we were better as friends. Then, the night before graduation, I learned he was dating my ex, Malcolm. No conversation, no acknowledgment of our past. He’d made his decision, leaving me to process alone that whatever we’d been had already been relegated to his past.

For years I wondered if breaking my trust had been worth a relationship that barely outlasted summer.

I’d stopped hooking up with Colin to date Malcolm—something I conveniently forgot when resentment surfaced. Colin never mentioned feeling betrayed by this. He’d just ended a relationship while I was seeking one. His response was to date Malcolm after we broke up, leaving me to imagine them comparing notes, transforming our history into something beyond my control.

That felt worse, somehow—not the act itself, but the silence around it. The way Colin refused to acknowledge what we both knew was a deliberate choice.

I wondered if he’d even registered losing my trust, or if he had and simply deemed it a fair exchange. This was Colin’s pattern: calculating worth, making trades, moving on.

And he did move on—to Diego, the relationship that finally stuck. Meanwhile, I constructed elaborate mythologies around our brief entanglement, fighting against occasional bouts of reminiscence that demanded I acknowledge Colin’s continued hold on me.

I told myself I never looked back—until a single text proved how completely I’d deceived myself.

I’d learned early that love was a negotiation, not a gift. Affection came in fragments, like my father’s occasional remittances to family in the Dominican Republic. Colin was another conditional connection: sporadic, precious, never guaranteed, yet worth every uncertain moment spent pulling tarot cards for clarity.

I chose black jeans, a T-shirt, and my leather jacket—an impulsive post-layoff purchase that had only deepened my financial insecurity. I decided to add a sweater, and was pulling it over my head when my phone buzzed.

“Here!”

Colin was waiting. I gave myself a quick cologne spritz and headed down, hair still damp, heart caught between anticipation and restraint as I opened the door. There he was—alone, his Uber already disappearing around the corner. I’d half-expected him to bring someone, especially after mentioning he’d been at a party. But no, just Colin.

The thought I’d been suppressing settled deeper: maybe this really is a date after all.

Seeing him alone awakened something complex. I flashed to my birthday—Colin arriving late, then competing for my attention all night. Dancing wildly. Removing his shirt. Sitting in my lap while my date looked away. I’d drunkenly told my new friends about my college crush on him.

I could still feel his weight—but now I was the one being pulled, drawn by the magnetic force of something unstable I’d sworn to avoid.

These feelings existed beyond the safe boundaries of friendship. They were an overgrown battlefield—rusted helmets in tall grass, artillery shells beneath fallen leaves, tripwires between memories. One misstep would detonate emotions, leaving craters in my life. I’d returned from this battlefield before with shrapnel in my heart. Never again.

Yet here he was, accepting the drink I poured. He claimed the party in Bushwick was lame—but was something else pulling him here? His animated gestures and sprawling posture showed he’d already been drinking. His voice bounced between registers, words spilling out with the same restless energy as his movements.

I took a shot of tequila to catch up, then handed him his drink and sat opposite him. He sipped once before his attention caught on my tarot deck.

“I’m still learning,” I said quickly, hoping he wouldn’t ask for a reading. I couldn’t trust my judgment with him there.

“Did you do anything for the holidays?”

I told him that I visited my parents in Massachusetts, how I was still recovering from the inevitable regression that comes with being around the people who raised me. “I feel like a kid whenever I’m with them.”

I expected him to say he felt the same way when he was with his mother, but he didn’t. He was distracted by his phone, the kind of distracted I assumed meant he was updating Diego on his whereabouts, though it was just as possible he was texting someone else. Colin had a lot of friends. I preferred to keep my circle tight.

“Should we have another drink here or go to a bar?”

Colin put his phone down and met my eyes, his gaze more purposeful now, as if trying to make up for the time he’d spent typing out a text.

“Let’s go to a bar!”

“I know exactly where to take you,” I told him, leaving out the part where I’d spent the minutes leading up to his arrival scrolling through Instagram, checking the accounts of every nearby bar for events.

We finished our drinks, grabbed our things, and headed out. I tossed my Yankees cap on my head as we stepped into the night. The heat of tequila coursed through me, momentarily shielding me from the frigid air. Car exhaust mingled with the familiar stench of garbage and rat shit by the front gate—a threshold I typically crossed alone.

---

Outside, the clouds formed a ring around the moon, which was nearly full and gazed down at us like an eye.

Colin towered over me against the backdrop of brownstones, smoking his cigarette, bleach blonde hair with dark roots catching the streetlight. His hair was the physical manifestation of some internal shift, a signal to the world that he wasn’t his old self anymore—though ironically, the bleached look only made him blend in with every other liberal arts graduate roaming Brooklyn, all of them convinced their transformation was unique.

That calculated dishevelment—his faded denim jacket, cashmere scarf, and perfectly scuffed sneakers—was the uniform of someone who brought high quality down to earth. He stood with shoulders slightly hunched, caught between wanting to disappear and demanding more space than allotted, a contradiction that defined him.

Yet when he snatched my Yankees cap and placed it on his head, I felt that familiar flutter of amusement. His playfulness softened his intensity just enough for me to feel comfortable around him, even as he tilted the brim with his thumb, claiming it as effortlessly as he claimed everything else.

Although Colin was a filmmaker by training, with a day job as a television producer, his athletic build made him seem more like a professional baseball player than an artist—and my hat only emphasized that. It was a fitted cap, one I wore almost religiously to hide my thinning hair, but on him, it looked like it had always belonged there—like he’d just stepped off the field after hitting a game-winning home run.

Working out was second nature to Colin—like breathing—and without it, he felt untethered, not quite himself. But I rarely hit the gym. I preferred long walks—or a jog when I was feeling particularly motivated. And while we both hailed from Greater Boston, our worlds couldn’t have been more different—he, a white, affluent European-American from Wellesley; me, a mixed-race, working-class Dominican immigrant from Lawrence. I grew up cheering for the Red Sox with my father in our closet-sized living room while my mother cooked up feasts in the kitchen. Colin spent summers in Cape Cod and Christmas in Jupiter, Florida. So, when I bought Yankees gear online on a whim, it felt like a quiet rebellion—a way to step into the New York life I’d always imagined for myself, one that felt more mine than the life I was born into.

As we passed the parking lot across the church on Bedford Avenue, I told Colin my hat suited him and nudged him with my elbow, swiping the cigarette from his fingers and taking a couple of more puffs.

Smoke curled around us as we walked down Bedford Avenue. The tequila in my blood triggered a sense of déjà vu, reminding me of running into Nathan months earlier on this same block. His casual “Yeah, man” had been a shield, reducing me to just another guy—but revealed I had moved on from him.

With Colin now walking ahead, I wondered if I’d ever achieve that same freedom. He was that impossible video game level I could never beat but couldn’t skip without forfeiting the game. Unlike Nathan, whose approval I never needed, Colin kept me orbiting in an invisible loop, craving his attention despite knowing he’d never offer what I needed: certainty, consistency, a future.

Yet tonight, that didn’t matter. His rare, undivided attention felt like being singled out from countless admirers—a privilege granted so sparingly it became intoxicating when bestowed.

“So about the bar,” I said. “It can get pretty packed. But the drinks are good.”

“I’m excited,” he said. “I’ve never been.”

“I think you’ll like it,” I said. “I met an artist there once—Aquarius moon like me, super spiritual. Her name’s Calli. She lives around here and paints these wild abstract pieces, like nothing I’ve seen. I swear, looking at them is like seeing God.”

I passed the cigarette back to Colin.

“So, Calli and I start talking about art. She asks to read my work. Then, out of nowhere, she pulls out a bag of weed from her bag. ‘I want you to have this,’ she says. So, obviously, I take it home with me. But it doesn’t get me high. I think maybe it’s the alcohol or my tolerance, but the next day, it happens again.”

“What was it?”

“CBD flower.”

“We should’ve smoked some of it,” said Colin, sounding like a habitual smoker. He didn’t actually smoke weed at all—he avoided weed because it made him self-conscious and riddled him with anxiety.

“I thought you didn’t smoke weed,” I said.

“I don’t!” he said. “But you said it doesn’t get you high.”

“It doesn’t,” I assured him. “Just relaxes you a little.”

“That sounds really nice.” Colin’s mouth became a chimney as he exhaled, the smoke curling upward like a quiet invitation. “You’ll have to save me some.”

There was a casual distance between us now, but something about the way Colin moved, the way his shoulders squared as he looked ahead, made it feel like the past was just beneath the surface.

“I will.”

The tequila’s warmth faded as cold air bit at my skin. Our footsteps sounded against the pavement as I wondered why I kept allowing myself to be pulled into these nights. The city hummed around us, but my mind lingered on my birthday—how he’d claimed me so effortlessly in front of everyone. Like my hat now on his head, I’d been something to casually appropriate, wear briefly, then discard.

Then Colin reached for my hand, his fingers slipping between mine with easy certainty—like a middle school crush claiming me publicly. His grip was firm, almost paternal, guiding rather than connecting. We held hands as if it were the most natural thing, as if we’d been doing it all along.

And then, the snowfall I longed for all season, had expected on a night like this, began—not here in Brooklyn, but on Church Street in Middletown, where Wesleyan’s campus sat nestled along the Connecticut River. His touch transported me to 2012—a December night when we shared a cigarette in someone’s backyard on the edge of campus, debating whether to go to a party or return to our dorm rooms.

“Let’s go to mine,” he’d said.

We forged a path past the Science Center. The ground was slick with ice, demanding careful steps. Colin paused to extinguish his cigarette, grinding it into frozen ground with his unlaced boots. The sizzle cut through the silence as fire met snow. We were freezing and unsteady, but we had each other.

We waddled like drunk penguins through thickening snow, each step more difficult than the last. Colin took my hand, and suddenly we were more than friends. We walked in silence, hearing only snow crunching beneath our feet—that muffled squeak. It was the sound of soft. In his room, we undressed and fell into bed, our body heat seeming enough to warm us not just for the night but forever.

Even here, in Brooklyn, I could feel it, that same heat, like it had followed us all the way from Connecticut. It was as though a single moment had stretched across time, pulling us both closer to something we hadn’t yet understood, but couldn’t deny.

“We’re here,” I said, our hands disentangling as I opened the door to the bar.

---

The DJ dropped a bass-heavy track that reshuffled my ribcage. Under flashing neon lights, I spotted Colin grinding against someone in a mesh top. I sipped my drink, scanning the crowd as smoke machines hissed clouds over the packed floor.

We danced for a minute. Then he leaned in and kissed me—like someone who hadn’t kissed a person they loved in a very long time. I kissed him back.

“I’m gonna hit the bathroom,” I shouted over the noise.

He grinned, eyes narrowing playfully. “I’ll come with you.”

In the bathroom, I made for the toilet while Colin fixed his hair in the tiny sink. When he noticed me watching, he walked over and lowered himself onto the floor, his movements graceful despite the grime.

Kneeling before me, his gaze locked onto my dick as if it were a forgotten treasure he’d rediscovered. He was the jeweler; I was his obsession.

This must have been what my mother feared when she urged me to “be clean” after I came out—me in a dank restroom, exchanging DNA with my lover.

Someone knocked; Colin didn’t flinch, determined to finish what he’d started.

He concentrated as I dissociated.

The last time Colin went down on me, we were both juniors in college. I wanted it more than anything. But grenades of intrusive thoughts exploded within me, catapulting me out of my body along with all the emotional debris I’d collected since childhood.

Why are you here? Why are you doing this? I wanted to ask him, but fear held me back, as it always did when it mattered most, keeping me from uncovering the truth. Any normal person would have asked—but I wasn’t normal. And nothing about my relationship with Colin seemed normal. Acknowledging that would have shattered the fragile illusion that allowed us to share this moment.

I inhaled deeply and grabbed the back of his head, trying to ground myself in the present with each thrust, my dick probing his throat like an endoscope.

“Did you miss my cock?” I asked.

What I really wanted to ask was if he missed me.

I knew Colin wouldn’t be able to resist answering the question the way I’d framed it—focusing on what he wanted in the moment would be irresistible to him. But I also hoped that by saying it, I could anchor the memory for him. In case he woke up the next morning in bed with his boyfriend, hungover with regret, ready to erase it from his mind.

“Mhm,” he mumbled, his mouth too full to form a proper response.

My mother taught me that speaking with your mouth full was bad manners.

I always made an exception for Colin.

And despite our diverging paths after college—despite the fact that I wasn’t the one he was going home to at the end of the night—he always seemed willing to make an exception for me too.

---

We slipped out and ducked into a dive bar a few blocks away, where the lighting was dim and the music low enough to talk. We kissed between two barstools, our heads tilting in sync like metronomes.

A woman sitting at the edge of the bar smiled at us. “You two are cute. How long have you been together?”

Colin lifted his hand from my hip, and I felt the fabric of my shirt against my skin where his hand had been. The absence of his touch felt like a physical reminder of his absence in my life—his commitment to me, never fully there, taking form in the space he left behind.

“No,” he said, glancing at me, then back at her. “We’re—”

“Just really good friends,” I said, finishing his thought.

The woman’s eyes flickered with confusion, but she raised her glass. “Well, cheers to you both.”

“That’ll be fourteen bucks,” the bartender cut in.

Colin slid over a twenty.

“Keep the change,” I said.

Colin froze, eyes widening for a beat before he burst into laughter. He shook his head, clearly stunned that I’d done that with his money.

As we walked toward the jukebox, Colin’s laughter still lingering in the air, he turned to me, eyes gleaming with mischief. “What should we play?”

---

In the smoking section outside the bar, Colin flicked ash from his cigarette, his vintage jacket pulled tight against the cold. The air was thick with questions I couldn’t quite ask. Not yet.

He moved through the world like it owed him something—but I wasn’t sure he believed it would deliver. He wasn’t careless, exactly. He was calculating. Measured. Every word between us felt like a game, a subtle contest of who would blink first. The conversation at the bar had been a wrestling match—one of us had to come out on top. But beneath the posturing, something else was crystallizing. A kind of restless fragility, like if he let someone see too much, the whole act might crack. I found myself wondering, despite all his swagger, if he was even sure what was real anymore. Had he buried his feelings so deep that even he had lost track?

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortable with the silence between us, but drawn in by it too. I watched as he crushed his cigarette underfoot, his face expressionless, yet his eyes—those eyes—held something I couldn’t quite place.

“Another drink?” he asked, his voice smooth, but it wasn’t an invitation. It was a diversion.

I gave a tight nod, a slight challenge in my smile. “Sure. But this round’s on me.”

His eyes flickered with something—surprise, maybe—but he masked it quickly. I could see it, though. The shift, however brief. It was my move now, and for the first time tonight, it felt like I had the upper hand. He took a step back, his jaw tightening, but I could tell the gesture wasn’t about control anymore—it was about the crack in his carefully constructed facade. I wondered how much longer he could keep it together.

---

We walked back to my apartment for a nightcap, our shoulders occasionally brushing. The tequila from earlier still warmed my blood. Colin kept checking his phone, the screen illuminating his face in brief flashes of blue light.

When we reached my building, I fumbled with the keys, suddenly nervous. We entered and moved in our familiar rhythm—flirtation, hands roaming, belts unbuckling. I tugged at his shirt. He let me.

When I stood, undressing as I walked to my bedroom, I didn’t look back—I didn’t need to. I assumed he would follow.

Then I heard it—the soft tap of his thumbs against his phone, the rustling of fabric.

I stepped back into the living room, heart pounding. Colin sat on the couch, fully clothed, bathed in the screen’s glow. He didn’t look up.

“Colin?”

He startled, locking his phone. “I should go.”

I blinked. I was in my underwear. Exposed.

“You’re leaving?” My voice was small.

He grabbed his jacket. “Yeah… I’m tired. I should probably head home.”

A pulse of frustration shot through me, sudden and humiliating. I wasn’t angry, not exactly—what I felt was something quieter, something like recognition. I had been here before, in another house, on another night, reaching for Colin and finding only distance.

Shame spread through me like a fever. I nodded stiffly. “Thanks for coming out.”

He hesitated at the door, as if considering something, then gave me a tight, almost apologetic smile before stepping into the night.

I barely had time to pull on sweatpants and sink into the couch before my phone buzzed with a message from Colin.

“I love you”

The words knocked the air from my lungs. I stared at the screen, waiting for clarity that didn’t come.

I typed without thinking, hesitated, and sent it anyway:

“I love you too”

I wasn’t sure if I meant it in the way he did—if he meant it at all. But I needed him to know I felt something.

The typing bubbles appeared, then disappeared. Then—nothing.

I sat there for what felt like a long time, my phone heavy in my palm, the apartment feeling colder than before. For the first time, it also felt cramped—like the walls had inched closer, the furniture pressing in. Had I gone overboard? Had I tried to fill something inside of me by crowding my apartment with stuff? I shouldn’t have been surprised by Colin’s behavior. But I was.

I wanted something real. Something as solid as the hardwood beneath my feet. Instead, I was left with a desire that felt as fleeting as a text message, as weightless as air, that lived only in the gap between what was said and what was truly meant.

---

Confusion cuddled up with me all night. I didn’t get much sleep. Instead, I guessed what it was about me he didn’t like. Maybe he thought I was too poor—someone who could never go on trips to Hawaii or Japan with him, the kind of trips boyfriends take when they’re ready to be seen as a unit. Maybe he thought I was too small, too soft, didn’t have the frame of someone who took care of his body, whose arms were thick with muscle, whose back was something you could sketch. Maybe it was my nose, the pores too visible; maybe it was my flat feet, or the thinning hair at the crown of my head. I wondered what he told himself when he needed to walk back whatever he was starting to feel for me—because I knew he felt something. I saw it in the way he looked at me. The way he touched me…

---

The next morning, his departure replayed endlessly—me standing in underwear, waiting for something that never came. “I love you” hung on my screen like a cruel joke.

Around noon, Colin texted: “Why are we like this?”

I stared at his words, wondering what I was supposed to say. I didn’t know, but I tried anyway. “We haven’t hung out in a long time,” I replied.

Our response to the woman at the bar when she asked us how long we had been together echoed somewhere in the back of my mind: We’re just really good friends.

But I wanted to tell him something more—something that was real, that came from the place inside of me that still burned for him. I wanted to tell him that he was the most beautiful person I knew, that I still felt as I did when we first met, that I loved him more than just a friend. I wanted to know if he felt it too.

Another message from Colin: “Watching Housewives and crying”

What was I supposed to say, don’t cry? Part of me felt like he deserved to.

I wanted him to answer his initial question, to explain to me why we were like this, and while he was at it, to tell me what he meant by “I love you”, to be real with me, for once.

Maybe he’s not saying it, but I know he feels it. He’s waiting for the right moment to tell me how he feels. I’m ready when he is. And when he does, we’ll be unstoppable.

Instead, he told me he lost his cashmere scarf. “Did I leave it at yours?”

I searched my apartment but came up empty. That’s when I realized my hat was missing too—he’d lost them both.

I spent a good portion of the rest of my day parsing Colin’s tears. What was the nature of his crying? Was it the deep, raw sobbing that leaves your eyes red and swollen, or the gentler tears that slip out after a particularly moving television moment? Was he crying out of guilt? Regret? Some unspoken emotional complexity I could only guess at?

His relationship with Diego was open, but that didn’t mean it was simple. There were intricate, unspoken boundaries—a delicate choreography of intimacy and distance. Colin didn’t strike me as someone who wanted to complicate things by hooking up with someone from his past. History was dangerous. Baggage was messy. Strangers were safer, cleaner—no emotional undertow, no risk of old feelings resurging like unexpected waves.

I suspected Colin and Diego had crafted their relationship like a carefully designed architectural model: each encounter, each interaction precisely calculated. Maybe they both had their managed side excursions, hookups that were more strategic moves than genuine connections. Maintaining the integrity of their core relationship was the priority. And where did that leave me? Not a partner, not even a player—just a piece to be moved across their relationship’s chessboard, then quietly set aside when no longer needed.

He had to have been aware of what he was doing. Every action was deliberate: reaching for my hand, kissing me on the dance floor, going down on me at the bar. Yet when I finally surrendered, when I tried to close the distance between us, he pulled away. It was a familiar dance—he was only comfortable blurring lines when he was the one pushing them.

I was beginning to understand that with Colin, I was never truly a participant. I was a projection, a temporary surface onto which he could cast whatever version of intimacy he needed in that moment. When I tried to transform that projection into something more substantial, more real, he retreated.

What haunted me wasn’t just Colin’s behavior, but my willingness to accept it—to convince myself I somehow deserved this strange half-connection. If I wasn’t a real person to him, just a character in his story that could be written off when convenient, then of course he would treat me this way. The alternative—acknowledging that there was a full, complex human being on the receiving end of his casual cruelty—would require him to face himself in ways I suspected he couldn’t bear. So he kept me at a careful distance, reducing me to a problem to manage, a loose end to occasionally tend to with texts and touches that meant everything to me and possibly nothing to him.

Maybe this was why I kept coming back. In some twisted way, his dismissal of my humanity confirmed my deepest fears about my own worth—fears that had taken root long before Colin appeared in my life. Each time I accepted less than I deserved, I was performing a script written years ago, one where love was conditional, where I had to earn even the smallest scraps of affection. I had become complicit in my own erasure, validating the idea that I was something that could be picked up and set down at will.

I was a puppet, not a partner. Lost like that Yankees cap, tossed aside like his forgotten scarf. And that night was irrefutable proof—a display of connection without any genuine emotional investment. I recognized, even then, that my pursuit of Colin was a carefully constructed performance of unworthiness—a childhood script I had memorized long before understanding its origins. Each time he pulled away and I stayed, I was proving my own disposability, testing how little love I could survive on.

---

Colin never found his scarf, or my hat. I never found out what he meant when he said “I love you.” Deep down, I knew I never would. The words, like everything else, felt lost in the space between us.

Maybe this was all our relationship would ever be—a string of moments slipping through my fingers, intangible like smoke. Something true because I was holding onto it, like a nun clutching her rosary, praying for a miracle, desperate to believe in something that couldn’t be seen.

Colin’s “Happy birthday!” text came as expected. A smile tugged at my mouth, though I couldn’t decide if it was from the words or just seeing his name again.

“Thank you,” I typed.

Then came his follow-up: “Dinner?”

I paused. Since January, we’d been circling each other carefully—testing boundaries, never naming what we were. I said yes.

We met at an Italian place on the edge of Williamsburg. Colin arrived nine minutes late carrying something in his hand. I was surprised to see that I wasn’t the only one who had come with a present.

Our waitress, a willowy figure with pearl earrings, drifted over. After learning she was a dancer “in between projects,” we ordered gnocchi, cacio e pepe, and salads to split.

Despite it being peak tomato season, I was most excited for the gnocchi with brown butter and sage. We took turns, one for him, one for me, until just a single piece remained.

“I’d love to make a film one day,” Colin said when I asked what he really wanted to do.

“Do it,” I said, more as a dare than encouragement.

I ate the last gnocchi without thinking.

“Hey!” Colin’s voice cut through my haze.

“What?” I wiped sauce from my mouth.

“You ate the last one! I thought we were sharing.”

“Sorry,” I smiled. “They’re big… but not that big.”

He laughed, and I remembered him comparing some hookup’s penis to mine at a party. “His dick is huge—bigger than yours,” he’d said before gliding away to refill his drink.

Now he stared across the table with that penetrating gaze he used when trying to read my thoughts. I’d spent years avoiding eye contact, afraid people would see through my coffee-tinted eyes to the truth: that I was just a nobody from a poor Dominican village where houses were made of wooden slats and tin roofs. And I was raised in a town in New England only people from Boston knew as the last stop on the purple line, the commuter rail I took to and from prep school, where all those Dominicans live. That summer in New York, I hadn’t yet known that I was a writer. I was still questioning my place in the city despite living in the publishing capital of the world, convinced I had nothing to say despite having everything to say. But Colin did this often—stare—as if he trusted those two orbs of collagen below my brows more than the words from any mouth.

He checked his phone, and I swirled my drink as the realization that I had eaten the most pasta settled in. Scenes of my mother commenting on my weight as a child flooded my mind.

In any other instance, I wouldn’t have cared so much. After all, we were splitting the bill, and he ate more tomatoes than I did. But because it was Colin, I did care, more than I probably should have. I was red-cheeked, being perceived as a fatass. But then I remembered that he likely didn’t care as much as he was letting on, that this is what I did—make things up—and that he was likely just teasing me, as he often did. Dinner was just another game we were playing.

My foot grazed the bag with his gift. I’d spent hours searching for the perfect present—first considering jewelry he’d wear daily, something to make him think of me. But Colin wasn’t my boyfriend. I’d settled on a first-edition Franny and Zooey, remembering how he’d lent me the copy he used to write his film thesis screenplay at Wesleyan. Maybe he’d remember that connection between us.

Colin handed me my earring—left behind during an overnight stay when Diego was out of town—then gave me a small gift bag he’d brought along. I rummaged through tissue paper to find a white Supreme T-shirt with a photo of a woman’s dolled-up hand printed on the front. Her fingers, with nails the length of crayons, suggestively held a pair of stemmed cherries. I couldn’t help but assume the shirt had been his at one point and that he just didn’t want it anymore. I shouldn’t show up empty-handed, I imagined him thinking. He probably got it on set during one of his shoots.

I gave him his gift, watching his face intently as he peeled back the wrapping paper.

“It’s a first-edition,” I said, unable to hide my pride.

His expression flickered between gratitude and something closer to discomfort—as if I’d revealed too much of myself in the gesture.

“Wow, I—I love it. Thank you.”

The book felt like a much more thoughtful birthday present than the Supreme T-shirt he’d given me—expensive as it was, though by this point, I was convinced he hadn’t bought it himself. When I mentioned that he had lent me his copy in college, his face went blank.

“I did? I don’t remember that.”

The words hung between us as my pride curdled into embarrassment. What had felt like a shared memory was apparently mine alone.

He pushed his chair back and stood up, and I shot up from mine. In an instant, I understood he was coming in for a hug. He walked over, arms wide enough to let mine slip through. Then my cheek pressed his neck, and I caught a whiff of the musky, subtly floral fragrance he used to wear in college. The one that smelled like sex. Animalic was the word I was searching for, but I couldn’t be sure. I could’ve willed the scent to be there, just as I had willed him back into my life when I started writing short stories about him.

---

Our conversation continued in a different form when we arrived at his place—a two-bedroom that had originally been Diego’s before Colin moved in. He played his favorite song at the moment—a Caroline Polachek track—for me and told me about his recent trip to Spain, where his friend had hooked up with seven men over the course of a single day.

I was sitting on a dining chair when he straddled me. My hand slid up his shirt, feeling sweat beading on his back. I wanted to absorb him completely, to taste him, to fill in the line drawing I’d created in my mind.

He suddenly moved to the bedroom, throwing himself onto the bed with practiced casualness. He stretched deliberately, revealing his underwear and the rose tattoo on his forearm—dark ink against pale skin, a decision made by someone who never considered consequences beyond aesthetics.

That tattoo embodied our difference. I’d once sketched a design for myself but never followed through. My father’s warning—“No son of mine will mark his body like that”—still echoed, along with the immigrant fear that tattoos could mean lost opportunities, deportation, undoing everything my parents had sacrificed. For Colin, a tattoo was self-expression; for me, it represented risks I couldn’t afford to take.

I crossed the room to join him on the bed, stepping over the threshold of our friendship into territory that felt forbidden. I was just about ready to colonize him, right there on their Casper mattress.

Just as soon as I joined him in bed, he was on top of me again. We kissed each other into another dimension before he began unbuttoning my shirt, a vintage Galliano I bought with the money I made from freelancing after a layoff years ago. And now I was the one who was sweating, and he was kissing me on the chest, then my stomach, jerking my jeans down my legs to get them out of the way like we got the salads out of the way at dinner.

Kiss by kiss, his lips made their way down my torso, which was dense with hair like an Appalachian trail. He pulled my briefs down my legs. And when I flung them to the floor with my foot, he began doing to me what I had wanted him to do all night. I cupped his head with my hand and combed his hair through my fingers.

“Your dick is perfect,” he said.

I could’ve blushed, but I was too preoccupied with thoughts of eating him out. I missed his dick like one misses the cold of winter on a severely hot summer day, but he wasn’t hard. I was.

“I missed you,” I responded.

Idiot.

He didn’t say anything back, just licked the pearls of semen off the tip of my cock and kissed me on the mouth so I could taste them, too. My hand grazed his dick and I noticed he still hadn’t been able to get an erection, but I wanted to return the favor somehow. So I flipped him over and spread him open. Moses parting the Red Sea.

“Sorry, I’m not clean,” he blurted, turning his body slightly.

I had been admiring his hole, which glistened with sweat and was the color of strawberry ice cream, ready to dig in when he broke the devastating news. So much for reciprocity. All I wanted was for him to let me taste a part of him he seemed to reserve exclusively for Diego. Was that so much to ask? I was almost certain he was lying. He wouldn’t have let me stick my hand down his pants earlier if he hadn’t been clean. We’ve gone too far, I thought. Did we break a rule? But if we had, he would never admit it, to me or to himself. He was reluctant to admit anything to me ever.

“I don’t care,” I said.

And it was true. He could go two days without showering, and I would still devour him whole like one eats an ortolan. Only I wouldn’t have to cover my head with a napkin.

“I do,” he said, sobering us both up, the reality of what we had done seeping into our awareness.

And that was enough for me: “I do.”

At least he cared about something. Maybe I didn’t know what he wanted from me. Hell, I didn’t even know what I wanted from him. All I knew was that I preferred confusion over nothing at all, that whatever it was we shared—a bond, connection, attachment—was not to be taken for granted. Just like that Seven of Cups I’d pulled before he arrived at my apartment after New Year’s—I was choosing the illusion over clarity, content to grasp at something shimmering and uncertain rather than face the void.

---

It was about seven in the morning when we woke up next to each other. We must have put our underwear back on before going to sleep. We didn’t kiss or speak. Colin simply got up and went to the bathroom. The shower started running. He didn’t invite me to join him.

But instead of putting my clothes on and getting the fuck out of there like I had the last time I was in this position, I wandered into the living room and sat on the couch. I even played with his dog—the Boston Terrier he’d driven upstate to pick up with Diego, a weekend trip that, according to Instagram, had sealed some new phase in their relationship. The dog must’ve been let out of his crate before Colin jumped in the shower, trotting over to me like we’d known each other longer than we had.

He’d told me he was getting a dog not long after our night out in January, and it felt like a gut punch. “I’m getting a dog!” sounded more like, “I’m not leaving Diego.”

Not anytime soon, at least. And not for me.

I was still in my underwear when he emerged from his shower. He slipped into black briefs and joined me in the living room, settling on the floor across from me, pulling out his phone to answer texts I assumed were from Diego.

I was recording a video of the dog zooming past when I found myself angling the camera to include Colin in the frame. I didn’t stop recording. Despite him wearing only briefs, I didn’t feel like a creep—I felt at home. They looked so perfect together on the floor, and I savored the fantasy that he was my boyfriend and their dog was ours.

I took the hint eventually. When I went back to the bedroom to find my shirt and pants, he appeared in the entryway just as I was slipping my feet into my shoes, the dog all leashed up at his side. Somehow, he was already dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie while I was still in my going-out clothes from the night before.

All three of us descended the stairs together.

“Let’s get a drink later,” he said.

I agreed, surprised he was asking me out again.

I felt good on my way home, and that mood carried me through most of the day—until I realized we were never getting that drink. No text. No time. No place. Nothing.

It’s not that he isn’t texting me back, I thought, he’s probably just busy. It’s definitely not a sign that he doesn’t care. He’s thinking about me. I’ll just wait a bit longer. He’ll come around.

But, I knew. I knew that I was too blind with love, if one could even call it that, to see the pattern, too naïve to break free from whatever illusion I’d constructed between us. The reality was that Colin was never going to leave his boyfriend, and even if he did, it wasn’t a guarantee that he’d want to be with me. However, this was a reality I wasn’t ready to accept.

I should have known better. But I never did, not with him, not with anyone. I should’ve recognized the signs, like with Malcolm, who once told me “we should talk,” which I let myself believe meant something it didn’t. I had waited for an apology from Malcolm, for reassurance that what we had mattered, only to sit across from him on a baseball field at McCarren Park while he explained, with the patience of someone who had already moved on, that he needed to focus on his work.

It had taken me too long to understand that the people I wanted never seemed to want me back.

The weight of this realization began to settle in, and in an attempt to stop the spiral, I did what I always did when I needed to take control—when I needed to avoid disappointment: I made a plan.

I wasn’t going to wait around. If Colin wouldn’t act, I would.

Nothing really changes, no matter the year, no matter the city. I had spent college convincing myself that once I left Wesleyan, once I was in New York, once I was someone else, things would be different. That I would be different. But here I was, years later, still orbiting Colin, still trying to make myself essential to someone who had already decided I wasn’t.

Maybe I couldn’t change the past, but I could design the future—at least for one night. A plan, a moment, a memory I could make real.

So when I learned the Red Sox were coming to town to play the Yankees, it felt only fitting to invite Colin to the game. He could be the J.Lo to my Ben Affleck, or the other way around, if stereotypes are your thing, if you mistook Puerto Ricans and Dominicans as the same. We could lean into each other, get caught on the jumbotron, rewrite a love story in extra innings.

Just days after our dinner, and several months after Colin’s birthday party in Tribeca, I was smoking a joint on my balcony, scrolling through Twitter, when I saw a post about the Red Sox playing the Yankees with a Ticketmaster link attached. I sent the link, practically without thinking, to Colin, with nothing else but these two words:

Let’s go

Colin took all day to respond:

Down

Our plan confirmed, I clicked through to the Ticketmaster website and studied Yankee Stadium’s seating chart with the intensity of an umpire scanning for errors.

I picked Seats 11 and 12 in Row 6 of Section 327 because they offered a near-perfect view of the visiting team’s dugout and sat close enough to the edge to trick my eyes into thinking we were closer to the field than my budget allowed. I also wanted us to sit among the Red Sox fans, as if to atone for the sin of becoming New Yorkers despite being from the suburbs of Boston.

The total for the two tickets was $168.52—a bargain or a rip-off depending on your attachment to baseball, the state of your bank account, and how desperately you needed to see someone you once loved again. I didn’t have $168.52 to spend on tickets to a baseball game. I had bills to pay. I had credit card and student loan debts to settle. An endless stream of drinks, meals, and outings with friends I had to account for. Friends who, even as they neared their thirties, were living in the world’s priciest city, often buoyed entirely by allowances and trust funds. But this game was created by God so that I could see Colin again, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

That night, after cooking myself a humble meal of rice and beans, which I ate while watching—for the third time—the last season of Game of Thrones, I tried not to overthink the fact that it took until dinnertime for Colin to send his one-word reply. Instead, I focused on what I could wear to impress him. Despite the way he left my apartment that night after the bar, I couldn’t help but want to see him again, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted from him, let alone why. It was an elusive structure of feeling that both sickened and inspired me, pushed me to return to the novel I’d told all my friends I was writing, which I suspected was an attempt to escape, or maybe just to make sense of everything.

Writing had always been my way of pulling threads from the past, piecing together fragments of identity even when I wasn’t sure I wanted the answers. I had moved from observer to analyst—first in my working-class home, then at Andover and Wesleyan where I filled margins with notes on Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie, locating myself in their explorations of class and belonging. It wasn’t until I discovered autofiction in Brooklyn that I understood my own emotions could be the foundation of my stories—that writing wasn’t about inventing meaning but rediscovering it. Perhaps that explained my fixation on Colin; I kept writing around him, through him, convinced that somewhere in the gravitational field of our relationship, I might finally discover the existence of life on a planet long thought to not have had any.

---

By late September, Colin and I converged on Yankee Stadium from separate directions. I found myself wondering if we’d ridden the same train up to the Bronx—he perhaps rode in a forward car, I toward the back—passing the same clusters of Yankees fans making their pilgrimage from station to stadium, hearing the same Hennessy-drinking man’s music pumping from his parked SUV.

Outside the stadium, we navigated the crowd toward Gate 4. Something about this particular mass of humanity unsettled me—the frantic movement making subway commuters look leisurely, a chaotic game of human pinball. We reached the gate just before a busload of fans arrived behind us, a small miracle that eased my mounting anxiety.

Security checked Colin’s Prada crossbody, confirmed it wasn’t carrying a firearm, and let us through. As we climbed the escalators and stairs to our section, I struggled to come up with exciting things to say to Colin. I had built this night up so much in my mind that now that we were here, I found myself tongue-tied, reduced to commenting on the stadium architecture and pointing out jersey numbers. All my imagined witty banter and meaningful exchanges evaporated in the reality of his presence beside me, his shoulder occasionally brushing mine as we navigated the crowded concourse. The carefully constructed fantasy of our reunion was already colliding with the awkward reality of two people who hadn’t quite figured out what they were to each other.

“Should we get drinks before we sit?” I asked, a bar a few feet away from where we stood.

We got in line and waited for it to be our turn to order.

“What do you want?” Colin plucked the American Express from its dedicated slot in his wallet and tapped it on the counter.

“Hmmm,” I said, pausing for a moment to consider my options. None of the beers sounded very appealing. Not yet, at least. “A margarita?”

“Two margaritas, please,” Colin said, sliding his card to Aracelys, the Dominican bartender whose features mirrored my own family’s so closely she could have been my cousin.

While waiting for our drinks, Colin pulled out his phone to order from a vendor through UberEats—supposedly faster than standing in line. And it was. By the time Aracelys slid our margaritas across the bar, our food was ready. We collected a massive order of chicken tenders and fries before making our way to the carefully chosen seats I’d selected.

We settled with our drinks and an absurdly large white-and-blue striped bucket of chicken and fries—its excess perfectly matched to the stadium’s towering architecture. We ate with abandon, an indulgence that would seem ridiculous anywhere else.

“This is the biggest bucket of chicken I’ve ever seen,” I told Colin.

The woman next to me chuckled as I lifted the bucket to eye level with both hands, showcasing the absurd proportions of our feast. The gesture felt performative, reminding me of my theater days. I told Colin about playing a pirate named Caesar in a student production of Hot Grog at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival after my senior year of high school—how the director had renamed the character ‘Cesar’ to match my appearance. Whether from conceit or survival instinct, I’d cultivated a specific charm over the years, blending former private school theater nerd with someone who had a model’s physique. This carefully crafted persona had secured me nearly everything I’d wanted: the perfect job, the perfect apartment. Everything except the perfect boyfriend.

And now the Red Sox were in town, with Colin beside me. Though I recognized no one on the team I’d grown up watching with family, the sight of those uniforms worked a strange alchemy. It transported me into memories of Boston—that “City on the Hill” with its meandering roads resembling a child’s traffic rug, a place without blocks, allergic to right angles and people of color. Despite never caring for the city I’d visited on weekends as a teenager, I found myself thinking about it more often than I’d admit.

While neither Colin nor I hailed from Boston proper, we were both products of private schools in its metropolitan sphere, albeit with vastly different upbringings. Colin had attended Milton Academy—something that occasionally embarrassed him, not because of its wealth and privilege, but because its blue and orange colors lacked the prestige of the classic navy and white worn at Andover and Yale. It was exactly this kind of shallow concern that defined certain aspects of Colin’s character. The contrast between us was stark. There was me, a first-generation immigrant from a predominantly Hispanic city near the New Hampshire border, and then there was Colin, a white American from one of the wealthiest cities in greater Boston. Yet we shared the distinction of being beneficiaries of a system designed to exclude people like me, the rootless members of American society—immigrants who built this very stadium, like Aracelys who served our drinks and could have passed for my cousin.

Colin represented everything my working-class immigrant experience had taught me to both desire and distrust—a version of belonging that seemed perpetually out of reach, a narrative of success and ease that I could admire but never fully inhabit. In his casual affluence and calculated charm, I saw the American dream I had been promised but never truly given.

Colin asked about the ticket price, and when I told him, he reached for his wallet, offering to pay me back. I waved him off. I wanted this gesture to speak for itself—that I would spend whatever it took to spend time with him, that his presence alone was worth every dollar and more.

Despite his independence, Colin was always seeking someone to provide the stability his privileged upbringing hadn’t. By buying these expensive tickets, I was signaling I could be that anchor despite lacking Diego’s wealth.

But the gap between us was unbridgeable. Colin had been conditioned by a lifetime of private schools and chosen-first certainty—even his birth was scheduled between his mother’s pilates and hair appointment, comfort his birthright. I knew that no matter how desperately I tried to prove my worth, he would never allow himself to truly need me.

My calendar was littered with elaborate scenarios designed just to occupy his space. The rare moments when his attention fully landed on me had an atmospheric quality—like finding breathable air after too long underwater. His presence altered my chemistry, intensified everything, while drawing me deeper into an asymmetrical equation I could never balance.

The possibility of Colin was always more intoxicating than Colin himself—a horizon I could approach but never touch, a mirage that kept me moving forward even when the landscape seemed unchanging. My hope wasn’t about capturing him, but about maintaining the beautiful tension of potential, that electricity of “what if” that makes survival feel like an adventure.

Certain truths about Colin were undeniable. The hours spent staring at my ceiling, tracing invisible patterns in the dark, wondering what to do about Colin, had to count for something. But in the months following that January night, a different question began to surface. Perhaps I needed to accept the actual shape of him, not the outline I’d sketched in my mind—regardless of whatever arrangement he had with Diego, regardless of the occasional windows he seemed to open in my direction.

The game had slowed to a crawl, the outfield lights casting an artificial glow over the field. Colin checked his phone and sighed. “Diego’s at some party in Williamsburg. You wanna come after this?”

I had always said yes before. I had always let him pull me deeper into his gravitational pull, somehow certain that proximity equated to permanence. But this time, I lingered on the question. I watched the batter adjust his stance, the pitcher taking his time with the windup.

“No,” I said finally.

Colin didn’t even look up. “All good,” he said, thumbs moving over the screen.

I studied his profile, a wave of clarity washing over me. The casualness of his response revealed everything—not in what was said, but in what wasn’t. How many careful architectures had I constructed around his indifference? How many times had I rearranged my world to fit into the margins of his? I could feel something vital collapsing inside me. I looked away, suddenly unable to bear the weight of my own transparency.

He turned the camera on himself, angling it slightly before leaning toward me. “Get in,” he said.

I hesitated, but not long enough for him to notice. I shifted in my seat, positioning myself next to him as he snapped the photo. The screen flashed white, then cleared to show the image: the two of us under the bright stadium lights, his cheek tilted toward mine like we had been in conversation, like this night meant something to both of us.

Colin added a caption, a few emojis, tagged the stadium, then posted it to his Instagram story without a second thought.

“That’s a good one,” he said.

In the photo, anyone would see two friends. I saw only the negative space—what wasn’t there. The truth settled with the weight of marble: I wasn’t just losing him—I had never had him.

Colin scrolled on, oblivious to my collapse. The carefully constructed balloon of my hopes hung in tatters around me. What had I been waiting for? His validation? To see myself reflected in his eyes? I’d traded fragments of myself for currency that held no value.

The drink offered hollow comfort as I sank into my seat. A blonde ponytail swung rhythmically in front of me—something to fixate on while I processed my realization. This is how white supremacy works, I thought bitterly, stuffing fries into my mouth. They dangle the ideal just out of reach, making you believe you can catch it if you try hard enough, if you change enough. Then it flicks away, leaving you foolish for ever believing you had a chance.

I considered sharing my joke with Colin. He always got a kick out of my social commentary, but tonight, I didn’t have the energy for any of it. Instead, I yearned to catch a foul ball, or at least witness one crashing down into our section at any given moment, like in that episode of Sex and the City when Carrie’s sitting in the stands at Yankee Stadium with her girlfriends, and a baseball serendipitously lands right next to her. Carrie Bradshaw, the embodiment of an ideal I had long strived for, who modeled a life in New York that I had always aspired to replicate—no matter the cost, no matter how much it hurt to pretend.

I sat there in the half-light of the stadium, the crowd’s roar an echo in my head, the bitter taste of the night mingling with my drink. I had been holding on to something that was never mine to carry, and now the weight of it felt lighter.

But there was something else too. A movement of the tectonic plates of my perception that I couldn’t quite put into words yet—a feeling that maybe this pain was a small price to pay for the release I’d been waiting for.

I shifted in my seat, glancing at Colin, who was lost in his phone. The crack of a bat against the ball echoed through the stadium, and suddenly my mind was elsewhere. My brother—as good at baseball as the players we were watching now. My father used to talk about him as though he had already made it to the big league.

Colin continued scrolling, oblivious to my silence, oblivious to the memories now flooding through me. The time I nearly died as a kid, when a coconut almost cracked my head open during a visit to my grandparents’ compound in the Dominican Republic. I could still hear the snap of the stem breaking—a sound not unlike the baseball bat connecting with the ball moments ago. The dense thud of the coconut against the blackest patch of dirt, soil so poor, dry, and alkaline that only the drought-tolerant yucca could thrive in it.

That same yucca grew in sprawling fields at my grandparents’ compound in La Reina, its sharp, sword-shaped leaves grazing the prepubescent patches of hair on my legs as I played tag with my brother and cousins on Sunday afternoons. The dulce de cereza, a marmalade of red and orange cherries from the trees in the yard, I would eat by the spoonful. The old hammock my great-grandmother Carmencita in Licey would swing me in, under the shade of a Spanish lime tree, the one I used to watch other kids climb because my parents wouldn’t let me.

I could share these stories with Colin. I could bridge the gap between us with words about my past, my family, the Island. But something held me back—some instinct that these memories were too precious to offer to someone who might not recognize their value.

And for the first time since I was a kid visiting family in the Dominican Republic, I felt the rumblings of a particular kind of freedom—not dissimilar to the waywardness of running barefoot down the callejón during those summers on the Island, of choosing not to let my fear of ringworm my mother warned would infect me if I wasn’t careful dictate how I experienced the world.

Maybe happiness wasn’t meant to be found in another person. Maybe it was in the stories we carried with us, in the words we chose to keep sacred rather than spend like loose change.

Colin looked up from his phone finally, but only to look down again, into the massive bucket of chicken tenders and fries we’d been sharing all night.

I grabbed the last chicken tender and stuffed half of it in my mouth, thinking to ask Colin if he wanted to split it but choosing not to, the weight of everything we had left unsaid over the years hanging in the air, my memories pulsing behind my lips, but never crossing them.

---

Colin and I decided to leave the game at the top of the ninth, when it was clear the Yankees were going to beat the Red Sox. As we climbed the steps to the landing, I told him I had to use the restroom. “You don’t have to wait for me,” I said. The line was long and the crowd would only get more unwieldy as the game came to an end.

Some part of me expected him to say, “It’s okay, I’ll wait,” to insist on waiting despite the crowds, to prove I was more than just a warm body beside him in the stands, more than just convenience. But he only shrugged. “Cool,” he said. “I’ll head out then.”

I had broken our pattern. And though I knew I would see him again, something fundamental had shifted, like tectonic plates beneath the surface of what we were to each other.

When I emerged from the stadium twenty minutes later, I knew he wouldn’t be there. I had set us both free with those casual words. And yet, scanning the thinning crowd dispersing into the Bronx night, I felt that familiar hollowness expand beneath my ribs—the particular ache of having your lowest expectations confirmed while your highest hopes dissolve into the city air.