Page 131 of Gamebreaker

I watched myself move across the screen.

It was from last night. The game Harper had watched from courtside, the one where I'd played my best basketball all season. I could see the exact moment in the fourth quarter when I'd known she was watching. I could see it in the way I moved, the extra snap on every pass, the way I'd pulled up for that step-back three from the wing with full awareness that she was tracking it.

I'd been showing off.

For a woman who freely admitted she understood about forty percent of basketball.

On the screen, yesterday's version of me threaded a no-look pass through two defenders to hit Trish in the corner. Perfect weight. Perfect timing. The crowd erupted, all twenty-three thousand of them, and you could see it in the set of my jaw. The satisfaction. The certainty. The knowledge that I was playing at the highest level I'd ever reached.

I watched all of it and felt numb.

This was what I was protecting. Twelve years of work compressed into footage on a laptop screen. The career, the accomplishments, the identity I'd built so carefully that it had become indistinguishable from the person inside it. Cameron Russo, point guard. Team captain. Two-time champion. Ten-time All-Star.

Not Cam.

Just Russo. Just #4.

To those twenty-three thousand people in the arena, to the 2.4 million who followed me online, to every reporter and sponsor and league executive who'd ever assessed my value, I was a basketball player first. A commodity. A brand. A clean, professional, controversy-free investment in athletic excellence.

But to Harper, standing in my room at six in the morning in Trish's jersey with her curls loose around her face, I wasn't Russo #4.

I was Cam.

And she'd walked out the door because Cam, the real one, the whole one, the one who cooked her mother's sauce when she was sad and ran at midnight and touched her championship rings for luck before interviews, wasn't someone I'd ever let anyone else see.

I closed the laptop.

I sat in the silence of my kitchen for a long time, not thinking about plays or rotations or defensive schemes. I thought about Karlie, who'd asked me for exactly what Harper was asking for and gotten the same answer. Three years of a real, good love that I'd let crumble because I'd been convinced the alternative would cost me more.

Karlie had moved on. She was with someone else now. Someone who wasn't afraid to be seen with her.

Was that what Harper's future looked like? Someone brave enough to claim her? Someone who'd show up in her world, hold her hand at dinner, post about her on Instagram with a caption Harper would inevitably mock for being too sentimental, and then screenshot and keep forever?

Someone else learning that she likes it rough. Someone else learning the sound she makes when she's told she's good.

Someone else coming home to her every night.

The thought made me want to put my fist through a wall.

I opened my phone instead. Opened my Notes app. And because I was a point guard, because my brain defaulted to game planning when it couldn't manage feeling, I started making a list.

WHAT I'M AFRAID OF IF I COME OUT:

Lose endorsements. Reebok, Vitamin Water, the Catch app. Years of contract negotiations reduced to risk assessments about my personal life.

Media circus. Every interview becomes about this instead of basketball. Every question some version of "how does it feel?" when what I want to talk about is floor spacing and defensive rotations.

Become "that gay player" instead of "that great player." Have my career reframed around what I am instead of what I've done.

Fans turn on me. Those thousands of comments from people who think they know me deciding they don't love what they actually find.

Privacy. The last part of my life that's mine.

My family harassed. My mother, who runs a deli in Providence and flies out for one game a season when Marco can cover the counter, getting a camera shoved in her face outside her own shop.

Two seasons left in my career. Spending them in the middle of a story I didn't choose the timing for.

Twelve years of excellence defined by one fact.