Hat Trick (The Power Play #3)

Chapter 1 Jonah

JONAH

The problem with being everyone's best friend is that nobody thinks of you as anything else.

Cole has Mik. Wes has Luca. The locker room has become a catalogue of love stories and I am happy for all of them, genuinely, pathologically happy, because being happy for other people is what I do.

It's my brand. Jonah Park, professional cheerleader, emotional support teammate, the guy who always has the right joke at the right moment and who goes home alone to an apartment that is aggressively decorated and full of plants because plants are the acceptable bachelor substitute for the companionship he is apparently incapable of finding.

I am not incapable of finding it. I am incapable of wanting it from anyone other than one specific person, and that specific person is the one person on the planet I can never have.

Because he's straight. And he's my best friend's younger brother.

And I have been in love with him since I was sixteen years old and he was fourteen and he looked at me across a backyard in Minnesota with a smile that rearranged the furniture in my chest and I have never, in ten years, recovered.

His name is Ren Briggs. And he was moving to Atlanta.

Cole told me on a Tuesday. We were at lunch, some sandwich place near the facility, and Cole was doing his thing where he talked with his mouth full and gestured with his hands and somehow made it charming instead of disgusting, which was a Cole-specific skill.

"So Ren needs a place to crash for a while," he said, between bites of a turkey club. "He's coming down from Rochester. The AHL thing didn't work out."

I knew about the AHL thing. Everyone who knew the Briggs family knew about the AHL thing.

Ren had been a good hockey player. Not great.

Not NHL-caliber. Good in the way that gets you close enough to see what great looks like and just far enough away that the gap becomes its own kind of torture.

He'd spent two seasons in the AHL, playing solid minutes, never quite breaking through, and six months ago the team had let him go.

Contract not renewed. The polite version of "you're not what we need. "

Cole hadn't talked about it much. The Briggs family didn't talk about failure.

Their father, Jim Briggs, who had played eight seasons in the NHL and had raised his sons on a diet of hockey and expectations, did not have a vocabulary for it.

Cole had met his father's standards. Ren had not.

And the distance between those two outcomes had shaped everything about both of them.

"He can stay with me," I said, because my mouth operated independently of my survival instincts.

"Yeah? You sure? I'd offer but Mik is basically at my place full-time now and it's a one-bedroom."

"It's no problem. I've got the guest room."

"Thanks, Park. He's... going through it, you know? He could use a friend."

A friend. Right. That's what I would be. Ren Briggs's friend. His brother's best friend who also happened to be a person who had been silently, comprehensively, devastatingly in love with him for a decade. A friend. Easy. Simple. Totally fine.

"When does he get in?" I asked.

"Friday. I'd pick him up but we've got that afternoon skate."

"I'll get him. Give me his flight info."

Cole clapped me on the shoulder with the casual physical affection of a man who had never once considered that touching me might mean something, and I absorbed the contact and filed it under "things that are fine" and we finished our sandwiches and talked about the upcoming road trip.

I drove home that night and sat in my apartment and looked at the guest room.

The bed was made because I always kept it made, which was a habit I had developed specifically because a small, delusional part of my brain had always believed that Ren Briggs would eventually end up sleeping in it.

The sheets were clean. The pillows were fluffed.

There was a lamp on the nightstand that I had bought because Ren had once mentioned, five years ago at a family Thanksgiving, that he couldn't sleep without a reading light.

I had bought a lamp because of a sentence a nineteen-year-old said at Thanksgiving.

This was the depth of my problem.

I should explain the Briggs brothers, because understanding them requires understanding the family they came from.

Jim Briggs was a third-line grinder who played eight NHL seasons with three different teams and never scored more than twelve goals in a year.

He was not great but he was present, and his presence cast a shadow that his sons spent their lives standing in.

Cole, the firstborn, was the natural heir.

Bigger, faster, more talented, with Jim's work ethic and their mother's charisma.

Cole was made for the NHL the way some people are made for the stage, and Jim saw it early and invested accordingly.

Ren was the second son. Smaller. Quieter.

Sharper in ways that didn't translate to the stat sheet.

He had Jim's hockey brain but not Jim's body, and the distance between the two meant that Ren was always chasing a version of success that was calibrated to his brother's specifications.

He played well. He tried harder than anyone I'd ever seen on the ice.

And it was never enough, because "enough" was defined by Cole's shadow, and Cole's shadow was enormous.

I met them both when I was eight. Youth hockey in Minnesota. Cole and I were on the same team. Ren was two years younger, always watching from the stands with his mom, always waiting for his turn. We became inseparable, Cole and I. Best friends. Brothers in everything but blood.

And then I turned sixteen.

Sixteen is the year that everything shifts.

The year your body and your brain get into a fight about who's in charge and neither of them wins.

I was sixteen and Ren was fourteen and it was summer and we were all at the Briggs' lake house, the one Jim had bought with his hockey money, and Ren was standing on the dock.

He'd grown that year. Stretched and sharpened, the baby face giving way to something more angular, more specific.

He was wearing a faded t-shirt and shorts and his hair was wet from the lake and he was laughing at something Cole had said, and the laugh caught the afternoon light and something inside me detonated.

Not gradually. Not with warning. A single, catastrophic, irreversible detonation. One moment I was Jonah Park, Cole's best friend, and the next I was a person who had been reconfigured around a fourteen-year-old boy's laugh and would spend the rest of his life trying to pretend he hadn't been.

I told no one. Not then. Not ever. I folded the feeling into the smallest possible shape and stored it in the deepest possible place and I built my life around the absence of it.

I dated other people. I had relationships.

Good ones, mostly. Kind women and a couple of men who deserved better than a boyfriend whose heart was permanently occupied territory.

And now Ren was coming to Atlanta and sleeping in my guest room and I was standing in my apartment at 10 PM on a Tuesday looking at a lamp I had bought because of a sentence he said at Thanksgiving and thinking: this is going to destroy me.

But I said I'd do it. And I was Jonah Park. I kept my word. That was the brand.

Friday came fast. I drove to the airport in my truck, which I had cleaned for the first time in three months, which was not suspicious behavior for a man picking up a friend. I parked in the cell phone lot and waited and told myself I was calm.

I was not calm. My heart was doing something that the medical community would describe as "concerning" and my hands were gripping the steering wheel with a force that would have been more appropriate for a playoff game than an airport pickup.

His text came at 4:17: Landed. Baggage carousel 3.

I drove to arrivals. I parked. I got out. I leaned against the truck like a person who leaned against trucks regularly and was not currently experiencing a cardiovascular event.

He came through the sliding doors with a duffel bag over one shoulder and a backpack on the other and a face that hit me like the first time and every time and all the times in between.

Ren Briggs at twenty-four was not the same as Ren Briggs at fourteen.

He was leaner. Harder. The softness of adolescence had been replaced by the particular sharpness that comes from being ground down by something.

His jaw was more defined. His eyes were darker.

He looked like a man who had been told he wasn't good enough and had internalized it so thoroughly that it had become part of his architecture.

But the smile was the same. When he saw me, his face did the thing it had always done, the shift from guarded to open, from closed to bright, the specific smile that he gave to no one else in the world, and I know this because I had watched him smile at other people for ten years and none of those smiles were this one.

This one was mine. It had always been mine. He just didn't know it.

"Jonah." He dropped his duffel and hugged me, and the contact was a full-body event that I processed with the composure of a man holding a live grenade.

His arms around my neck. His chest against mine.

The smell of him, which was airplane and deodorant and something underneath that was just Ren, and which I had cataloged so thoroughly that I could have identified him blindfolded in a room of a thousand people.

"Hey, man." My voice was steady. I was proud of this. "Welcome to Atlanta."

"Thanks for picking me up. Cole said you volunteered."

"My schedule was open." My schedule was not open. I had rearranged a PT session, a film review, and a dinner with Luca and Wes to be here. Nobody needed to know that.

We loaded his bags into the truck. Two duffel bags and a backpack. That was everything Ren Briggs owned that he'd cared enough to bring to his new life. The spareness of it ached.

In the truck, he was quiet for the first ten minutes. Watching Atlanta go by through the window, the skyline growing as we drove north, the afternoon light doing its golden-hour thing across the city.

"How bad is it?" I asked.

"How bad is what?"

"The AHL thing. Cole said you're going through it."

"Cole talks too much."

"Cole has always talked too much. That doesn't answer my question."

He was quiet for another minute. Then: "It's bad, Jonah. It's really bad. I'm twenty-four and I don't have a career and I don't have a plan and I'm living in my brother's best friend's guest room, which is a level of pathetic that I didn't know I was capable of."

"You're not pathetic."

"I'm definitionally pathetic."

"You're transitioning. There's a difference."

"Between pathetic and transitioning?"

"Between being down and being done. You're down. You're not done."

He looked at me. The smile was gone, replaced by something more complicated. Gratitude mixed with skepticism mixed with the particular vulnerability of a man who wanted to believe what he was hearing and didn't trust himself to.

"You always do that," he said.

"Do what?"

"Say the thing I need to hear. You've always done that. Since we were kids."

"It's a gift."

"It's annoying."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

He laughed. The sound filled the truck cabin and I absorbed it the way you absorb a drug, through every available surface, into every available receptor.

Ren Briggs's laugh in my truck on a Friday afternoon in Atlanta, and the wanting was so enormous and so old and so perfectly contained that it didn't even feel like pain anymore.

It felt like weather. A permanent atmospheric condition that I had learned to live inside.

We got to my apartment. I showed him the guest room. He dropped his bags on the bed and looked around and noticed the lamp.

"Reading lamp," he said. "Nice."

"Yeah." My voice did not crack. My face did not change. "I figured you might need one."

"How'd you know I need a reading lamp?"

"Lucky guess."

He smiled at me. The smile. The one that was mine. And I stood in the doorway of the guest room and thought about the ten years that had led to this moment and the approximately one thousand ways this was going to go wrong.

"Hey, Jonah?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks. For all of this. I know it's a lot, having someone crash in your space."

"It's not a lot. It's nothing."

It was everything. He was everything. He had been everything since I was sixteen years old and he was standing on a dock and the lake was behind him and the world rearranged itself around his laugh.

But that was my business. Not his.

"Get settled," I said. "I'll order Thai."

"You remember my order?"

Of course I remembered his order. I remembered every order he had ever placed in every restaurant we had ever been to.

I remembered the way he ate pad see ew, starting from the edges and working toward the center.

I remembered that he didn't like bean sprouts but was too polite to pick them out in front of people, so he moved them to the side of his plate in a small, neat pile.

I remembered everything.

"Pad see ew, no bean sprouts," I said.

He blinked. "Yeah. That's exactly right."

"I pay attention."

"You really do."

I went to the kitchen and ordered the food and stood at the counter and pressed my palms flat against the granite and breathed.

He was here. In my apartment. In my guest room. Sleeping in a bed I had made for him, reading by a lamp I had bought for him, eating food I had ordered for him.

Ten years of wanting, and the wanting was now sleeping twenty feet from my bedroom.

This was either going to be the best thing that ever happened to me or the worst, and the distance between the two was exactly the width of a hallway and the depth of a decade.

Here we go.

-e