Jake doesn’t leave the room like he usually does, keeps the conversation short, his end mostly ‘uh huh’ and ‘same as usual’. He doesn’t look happy during the call. Not unhappy necessarily, but not happy. “Love you too,” he says, to whoever it is — father, mother, one of his sisters — easy, like it’s something he says all the time, something expected, and David looks down at his hands, feeling like he’s eavesdropping on something private, even though Jake knows he’s listening.

*

David sleeps better that night, but it’s not because he feels any more settled. Less, in fact. He wakes up the next morning feeling overtired, tries his best not to snap at Jake when he takes too long to get ready for camp. They’re precariously close to late when they walk in the doors, go to their separate locker rooms, and David feels like Caldwell’s looking at him, judging him for it.

“Okay,” Caldwell says, right on the hour. Two of David’s teammates aren’t there yet, but Caldwell won’t wait for anyone.

David feels disconnected from training that day, lucky that autopilot seems to be enough. Disconnected on the drive back, Jake managing conversation all by himself.

Or maybe disconnected isn’t right. Preoccupied, unable to get out of his own head. And guilty, he thinks. It isn’t a feeling he has a lot of experience with, and he doesn’t like it. He feels guilty when he cheats on his nutrition plan, or cuts short an exercise routine, but he doesn’t do either very often.

It isn’t fair, David knows, to withhold something Jake wants because David doesn’t understand it. For David, the idea of telling either of his parents, telling anyone —

It’s different for Jake. For one, his family already knows he’s not straight, and by all accounts it doesn’t bother them. At the very least, if it does bother them, they haven’t let Jake know that. They support him. Clearly love him, and he loves them back.

‘I feel like I’m lying to them’, he said, and it’s become clear to David that Jake isn’t a liar. And not in the way that David doesn’t make a habit of lying because he’s bad at it, and it’s easier to be silent and just let people assume what they want to assume, more that he lives...truthfully, David supposes. That what David initially thought was a friendly facade is exactly who Jake is. Shallow, but David doesn’t mean it in a bad way, really. Maybe simple is the better word.

David always seems to be the one making things complicated for him.