Page 153 of Gamebreaker

One week.

Wednesday. Pre-practice. Seattle had won their semifinal the night before in five games, so now we knew who we were playing. I asked everyone to gather in the locker room before we went out to the floor.

Twenty faces looked back at me in a loose semicircle. People who knew each other's bodies and games and bad days and championship highs with an intimacy that had nothing to do with romance. Some of them I'd played beside for years. Destiny. Morgan. Trish, leaning against the lockers in the back, arms folded, already knowing.

I'd given a hundred speeches in this room. Halftime adjustments. Elimination games. Every moment I'd needed people to believe in a hard truth.

My hands had never shaken like this.

"I need to tell you all who I am before I lose my nerve." My voice came out level, and I was grateful for that. "I'm coming out publicly. Monday morning, before Game 1. I'm gay. Most of you probably knew or suspected, but I wanted you to hear it from me first. And I wanted to warn you about the circus that's coming."

Silence.

Three full seconds of it. I felt every one of them.

Then, Destiny stood up.

She was twenty-six, our starting small forward, and she looked at me with a mix of fond exasperation and plain affection.

"Cap. Half of us knew you were at the end of your rope. I don't think you could've kept it quiet much longer anyway."

Morgan, from the middle of the group, nodded hard. "Yeah, we kind of figured when you started looking at that girl like..." She stopped herself.

I went still. "Looking at who?"

The room developed a sudden, collective interest in the ceiling. Trish was studying the floor and failing not to smile.

"Harper," Alex said. She was one of our forwards, and she'd clearly decided the room had danced around it long enough. "The one who looks at you like you're the only person in the arena. You two have been making the rest of us deeply uncomfortable for weeks."

I stared at them. "You all knew about me and Harper?"

"Cam." Destiny's voice went gentle. "We're not blind. The tension between you two could've powered the arena lights." She paused. "Are you finally going to do anything about it?"

"I..." I stopped, looking at all of them, waiting. "I don't know if she'll still want me. I think I waited too long."

Morgan, who was twenty-four and had opinions about everyone, said, "Then you better go big."

And then they talked. Several of them. Players who were already out, players who weren't, players who'd watched me carry this for years and had waited, patiently, for me to put it down. They told their own stories, briefly and honestly. The fears that had turned out not as big as they'd thought. The fears that had turned out exactly as big. What it felt like not to manage a secret every single day.

Underneath all of it, the message was simple. They had my back. Whatever came, from the media or the sponsors or the internet, inside this room, I was just Cam.

I'd been just Cam to these people for years.

I'd just been too afraid to notice.

That night, I sat at my kitchen counter with my phone open to my notes and tried to put words to a truth I'd been living without words for twelve years.

I wrote twenty versions.

I deleted all of them.

Some were too long, paragraphs of context and careful framing that said everything except the one sentence that mattered. Some were too short. One was so stripped down it read like a legal disclosure. One was so raw I deleted it within seconds, because it felt like handing strangers an open wound and asking them to put salt on it.

I sat there until past midnight.

Then, I stopped trying to write the perfect version and wrote the true one.

I've spent 12 years being Cameron Russo, Team Captain, #4. Point guard. Two-time champion. But I've never been fully myself. I'm gay. I've always been gay. And I'm tired of hiding that part of who I am.