The Day Diego Waited for Me After Training

Diego has skin the color of August earth, that warm brown that seems to hold on to the sun even in the cold months. When he runs across the court, his feet hardly seem to touch the floor: sixteen years old and already built like someone who has spent more time training than sleeping. Broad shoulders, a back marked in a V, arms that bulge out of his uniform with that geometry only muscle trained from childhood can give. He plays left wing and always knows where the ball is before it gets there. The whole team knows it. So do I.

But I look at him for different reasons.

I don’t say it out loud. I don’t even think it through very often, because when I do, I get a kind of vertigo I’d rather not explore too much. What I know is that there are certain moments — when he crosses the locker room with a towel slung around his neck, when he laughs under his breath at something a teammate has said — when I have to look away on purpose. Because if I don’t, it shows.

We’ve been playing on the same handball team for three years, in a small provincial club. Three years in the same gym with the same damp floor and that constant smell of sneaker rubber and dried sweat. Three years watching him out of the corner of my eye, gauging distances, learning how to hide it.

Diego has a girlfriend, or something like one. He talks about girls with the others the way everyone does: naturally, without a second thought. He lives in that world of absolute certainty where no one hesitates or fears that someone might discover them doing something they shouldn’t. A world I don’t have access to.

I’m the one who hangs back half a step in sprints. The one who looks at himself just enough in the locker-room mirrors. The one who has learned to hide so well that sometimes he wonders whether he’s already lost it completely, whatever it is he’s trying to conceal.

What I do know, however, is that Diego watches me too. Or I think he does. Or that’s what I tell myself so I don’t go crazy.

***

That Tuesday I arrived late to the locker room. The coach had kept me back to go over a defensive play that still wasn’t quite working for me, and when I finally pushed through the door, the steam from the showers was still hanging in the air, warm, mixed with that specific smell of cheap soap and deodorant spray that I now associate with the end of every session.

The sound of water hitting tile echoed all around. I went in, dropped my bag on the bench, and started undoing my laces without hurrying. The locker room was almost empty. Two teammates remained at the back, with their backs turned, absorbed in a conversation about something that had nothing to do with me.

Then Diego came out of the showers.

Dark hair plastered to his forehead. Water running down his chest, slowly tracing the line of his abs before disappearing into the towel tied low, very low, around his hips. He moved to his locker without looking my way. He bent to find something inside. The towel slipped a little lower.

I looked away.

Too late.

When I looked back, he’d already put on his underwear — black, tight, some sports brand — but there was something in the way they fit him that made it hard not to notice certain details. I held my gaze there half a second too long. A second long enough for what was about to happen.

Diego turned his head.

He looked straight at me. Without warning. With that same precision he has on the court, as if he always knows exactly where to look. His dark eyes found mine and said nothing, but they didn’t look away immediately either.

I did look away. Too fast. Too urgently.

I bent down to rummage through my bag for something I didn’t need to find. I felt the heat rising from my neck to my ears, that kind of burn that has nothing to do with training fatigue or the gym’s temperature. It was something else. It was always there.

When I dared lift my eyes again, Diego was already dressed in his tracksuit. He slammed his locker shut. He left without saying a word.

The two teammates at the back didn’t say anything either. They kept talking. No one had seen anything. Or no one mentioned it. I was left alone in the locker room, and it took me ten minutes to do something as simple as change clothes.

***

The parking lot was almost empty when I left. The gym lights cast long shadows across the wet asphalt. The air smelled of damp earth and the pine trees that lined the building at the back, toward the path nobody usually took after practice.

I started walking toward the bus stop with my head down and my earbuds half-ready to go in. I hadn’t made it ten meters when I heard his voice.

—Hey.

I turned.

Diego was leaning against the metal fence, hands in the pockets of his tracksuit, looking toward the path that disappeared between the trees. He didn’t seem to be waiting for anyone in particular. Or at least that’s what he wanted to seem.

—Come here a second? —he said, nodding toward the woods—. Just for a moment.

I didn’t know how to say no. I never know how to say no when it’s him.

We walked along the path without speaking. Wet leaves crunched under our sneakers. The air smelled of resin and nighttime cold, that clean cold that comes after dusk. I walked half a step behind him, staring at the ground more than necessary, with the locker room still floating somewhere in my head, impossible to leave alone.

He stopped in a small clearing, out of sight of the parking lot. Between the pines, barely any light reached us from the street. Just a dim glow that lit him only halfway.

He slipped a hand into his pocket. Took out a pack of cigarettes.

That surprised me. It didn’t fit the image I had of him: the obsession with performance, the protein shakes after games, the way he was always first to warm up.

—Smoke? —he asked.

I shook my head.

—No.

He smiled faintly. Not a full smile, just the start of one.

—Me neither, really.

He put a cigarette between his lips and lit it. The click of the lighter echoed in the forest silence. He inhaled slowly, eyes half-lidded, and let the smoke rise upward in a white column that dissolved among the branches.

—Want to try?

He looked straight at me.

I swallowed.

—I’ve never smoked.

—There’s a first time for everything.

He stepped closer. Offered me the cigarette. I took it. Our fingers brushed for an instant, barely a tenth of a second. A warm current climbed up my arm from that point of contact, irrational and concrete all at once.

I brought the cigarette to my lips and inhaled without really knowing what I was doing. I coughed right away. Diego laughed — a low laugh, more breath than voice, not mocking.

—Slowly —he said.

He came closer. He laid his hand over mine with a softness I hadn’t expected from him, guiding the motion.

—Like that.

I inhaled again, slower this time. The smoke came out more controlled and hung between us before dispersing into the darkness of the woods.

He didn’t pull his hand away.

Then he took the cigarette from my fingers and drew on it again, but this time he didn’t look away from me. He exhaled slowly, and he did it toward me, not upward. The smoke advanced in a low, direct cloud, and I breathed it in without being able to stop myself.

I stood still.

He did it again. Closer this time. The warmth of his breath reached me before the smoke did.

—Breathe —he said. Low voice. Almost a whisper.

I obeyed.

The cigarette began to pass back and forth between us in a rhythm neither of us had agreed on but both of us kept following. I inhaled and exhaled toward him. He inhaled and exhaled toward me. The forest was completely still around us. The nighttime cold had stopped bothering me.

Sometimes he brought the cigarette to my lips without quite handing it over. He pulled it back at the last second, as if measuring something I still couldn’t see. As if he were calculating the smallest distance either of us could tolerate without having to say anything out loud. As if that minimum distance were the game, and not what was waiting on the other side of it.

During one of those approaches, he took a deep drag and instead of sending the smoke out into the air, he moved toward me. Very slowly. He didn’t actually touch me. But he was so close I could feel the heat of his mouth on my lips, that border of warmth that exists just before contact. And then he exhaled, directly, and the smoke went in without my being able to do anything but take it.

My heart was pounding in my throat.

—See? —he murmured.

He did it again. And again. Each time with less space between us. Each time slower, the smoke serving as an excuse to close the distance we both pretended not to fully recognize.

The cigarette was burning down between his fingers.

At one point he took my hand and placed the cigarette back between my fingers. His fingers closing over mine. Guiding me again.

—Now you.

I inhaled. When I let the smoke out, I did it toward him, the way I’d learned over the last few minutes. Diego didn’t move away. He breathed slowly, eyes locked on mine, gathering in the air I’d just exhaled.

We were so close I could see every detail of his face: the curve of his lips, the line of his jaw, the moisture at the corner of his mouth. That dark gleam his eyes get when he’s truly paying attention to something. When he wants something.

The cigarette was almost finished. Diego stubbed it out against the sole of his sneaker and put it back in the pack. He didn’t step away. Our hands stayed close, almost touching, neither of us taking the initiative to move them.

—Tomorrow, do you want to come back here after training? —he said. Not quite a question.

I said it before I thought about it.

—Yes.

—Perfect.

There was a silence of a couple of seconds. Then he leaned slightly toward me, not toward my lips but to the side. A kiss on the cheek that brushed the corner of my mouth. The warmth of his mouth lasted less than a second.

When he pulled away, he looked down at me for a moment and then raised his eyes. He smiled differently: calmer, like someone who has just confirmed something he already knew.

—Looks like I’m not the only one —he said quietly.

He didn’t need to point to anything specific. I already knew.

He walked off down the path with his hands in his pockets, unhurried. His footsteps faded among the wet leaves until the forest fell silent again.

I stayed in the clearing, the cold finding me again now that there was nothing left to keep it away.

***

I didn’t sleep well that night.

I lay staring at my bedroom ceiling, going over every second: the locker room, the clearing among the trees, the cigarette passing from hand to hand, the distance growing smaller without either of us saying so out loud. The warmth of his breath on my lips without his ever having touched me. That last look that said everything without saying anything.

And that question spinning around with no answer yet.

Was Diego not as straight as I’d believed all these years?

Or maybe the right question was another one. Maybe what I should have been asking was whether I’d spent three years glancing at him out of the corner of my eye without understanding that he was watching me too when he thought no one could see him. That maybe both of us had been playing the same game from different angles, without either of us daring to name it.

I didn’t know for sure yet.

But the next day there was training.

And after training there was a path that led to a clearing among the pines.

And Diego was going to be waiting.