Chapter 7 Wes
WES
The search results were extensive and unhelpful.
They included articles about the Kinsey scale, Reddit threads with thousands of comments, a quiz titled "Am I Bisexual?
" that was sponsored by a dating app, and a Wikipedia entry on sexual fluidity that was so dense with academic language that it made my head hurt worse than the ribs.
I read all of it. Every article, every thread, every paragraph of the Wikipedia entry.
I read them the way I studied hockey film, with methodical intensity and the hope that data would produce clarity.
Data usually produced clarity. Data was how I understood the world.
Inputs, outputs, patterns, conclusions. This was how my brain worked and it had served me well for twenty-eight years.
Here is what I learned:
Sexuality is not binary. This was presented as a well-established scientific consensus, which surprised me, because I had spent my entire adult life operating under the assumption that it was.
The literature was full of terms I had never encountered and frameworks I had never considered, and I read about them with the clinical focus of a man researching a medical condition, because that was what this felt like.
A condition. A symptom. A deviation from the norm that required diagnosis.
Except the literature said it wasn't a condition.
It was just a thing that happened. Some people were attracted to one gender their entire lives and then found themselves attracted to someone else entirely, and the attraction was not pathological or confused but was simply the brain responding to a specific person in a specific way that didn't align with the categories built to contain it.
Specific people. One specific person. A person with gold-flecked eyes and a laugh that filled rooms and hands that were quick and precise and had touched my ankle three weeks ago in a way that my nervous system still had not stopped replaying.
I closed the laptop. I sat in the dark.
The apartment was quiet. The bread starter in the refrigerator was quiet.
The sticky note on the nightstand, which I had stopped pretending wasn't there, was quiet.
Everything was quiet except the inside of my head, which was doing something that felt less like thinking and more like structural failure.
I did not sleep.
In the morning, I went to the facility and did my rehab and ate my lunch and sat in the film room and performed normalcy with the dedication of a man who had been performing normalcy his entire life and had gotten very good at it.
Nobody noticed anything different. Nobody saw the 3 AM Google search or the forty-seven browser tabs or the fact that my understanding of myself had shifted on its axis overnight like a skate blade hitting a rut.
Except I needed to talk to someone. This was a new sensation.
I did not talk to people about personal things.
I talked to the bread starter and the ceiling and occasionally the Ghost of Wes Past, who lived in the penalty box of my memory and had nothing useful to contribute.
But the weight of what I was carrying had exceeded the capacity of my internal infrastructure, and the structure was going to fail unless I found a way to redistribute the load.
I thought about who I could talk to. The list was short.
The list was, in fact, one name long, and the name belonged to a man who had navigated this exact territory and emerged on the other side with a Russian boyfriend and a Sports Illustrated cover and the specific kind of hard-won peace that only comes from telling the truth about yourself.
I found Cole Briggs in the weight room after practice.
He was doing curls with the casual intensity of a man for whom the weight room was a social venue as much as a training facility.
Mik Volkov was on the bench press nearby, spotting a rookie, and the two of them exchanged a look when I walked in that communicated entire sentences without words.
Married people did that. People who had been through something together did that. Cole and Mik did that.
"Briggs," I said. "Can I talk to you?"
Cole set down his weights. "Sure. Here or somewhere else?"
"Somewhere else."
We went to the empty film room. Cole sat in the front row and I sat in the back row because the distance between us felt necessary, and then I realized the distance was ridiculous because the room was thirty feet long and I was about to have the most personal conversation of my life by shouting across it.
I moved to the row behind Cole. Not next to him. Behind him. So I could talk to the back of his head, which was easier than talking to his face.
"I need to ask you something," I said. "Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically," Cole repeated. His voice was neutral in the way that a man's voice is neutral when he knows exactly what's coming and is giving you the courtesy of pretending he doesn't.
"If a person had spent their entire life being attracted to one gender. Women. Only women. And then a specific person of a different gender entered their life and the person began experiencing responses that were inconsistent with their established pattern. What would that mean?"
Cole was quiet for a moment. "It would mean the pattern was broader than they thought."
"Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically. Sure."
"And these responses. If they were localized. To one specific person. Not a general shift in orientation but a specific reaction to a specific individual. Would that be... normal?"
"Define normal."
"Within the range of expected human experience."
"Yeah, man. That's within the range." Cole turned around in his seat and looked at me directly, and the neutrality was gone, replaced by something warm and direct and entirely too perceptive. "Wes. You don't have to call it hypothetical."
"I'm not ready to call it anything else."
"That's fine. You don't have to label it.
You don't have to figure it out today or tomorrow or ever, if that's what works for you.
But I'm going to say something, and you can do whatever you want with it.
" He leaned forward, elbows on the seat back.
"Labels are useful until they're not. They give you a shorthand for communicating something about yourself, and that's valuable.
But they're not mandatory. You don't have to be straight or gay or bi or any other word to know what you feel.
You just have to be honest about what you feel.
The label can come later. Or not. The feeling is the thing that matters. "
"What if the feeling is terrifying?"
"Then you're doing it right. Anything worth feeling is terrifying. The stuff that isn't terrifying is the stuff that doesn't matter."
I sat with this. The film room was dark and cool and smelled like electronics and the faint residue of dry-erase markers.
On the blank projector screen, nothing was being shown, which felt appropriate because the picture in my head was equally blank.
Not empty. Just unresolved. Like a developing photograph that hadn't been exposed long enough to reveal its image.
"Can I ask you something else?" I said.
"Shoot."
"When you realized you were attracted to men. Not when you came out. Before that. When it was just you and the knowledge. How did you know it was real and not just... a thing?"
Cole considered this. "I didn't. Not at first. The first time I noticed a guy, really noticed him, I spent about three months convincing myself it was admiration.
Athletic respect. The normal evaluation that athletes do when they look at other athletes.
And then one day I was in the shower thinking about this guy and I realized that what I was feeling was not athletic respect.
Not even close." He smiled, self-deprecating.
"The body knows before the brain does. The brain is the last one to the party.
It shows up after the body and the gut and the heart have already made the decision, and it tries to talk everyone out of it, and eventually it realizes it's outvoted and sits down. "
"The body knows before the brain."
"Every time."
I thought about my body. About the full-body stillness when Luca touched my ankle.
The held breath when he dressed me. The way my pulse elevated when he walked into a room, a response so subtle and so consistent that I had been attributing it to caffeine intake for three weeks.
The fact that I had pressed my own thumb to my ankle in the dark and felt nothing, and when he touched the same spot, I felt everything.
The body knew. The body had been screaming for weeks. The brain was the last one to the party, and it was standing in the corner with its arms crossed, refusing to sit down.
"Briggs."
"Yeah."
"The hypothetical person in this scenario. If they were to act on these feelings. What would be the most important thing?"
"Honesty. With yourself first, then with the other person.
Don't pretend it's something it isn't. Don't diminish it because the packaging is different from what you expected.
And don't make the other person carry your confusion.
If you're figuring it out, say so. Let them decide if they want to be part of the figuring. "
"That's a lot of words from a man who communicates primarily through hockey metaphors."
"I have depth, Chen. Surprising, I know."
I almost laughed. Not quite. But the pressure in my chest loosened by a fraction, the way a valve releases steam before the whole system blows, and the relief of it was physical.
"Thank you," I said.
"Anytime. And Wes?"
"Yeah?"
"For what it's worth, you're not alone in this. Whatever this turns out to be. You've got people."
I nodded. I stood up. I walked to the door of the film room and stopped with my hand on the handle.
"Briggs."
"Still here."
"The hypothetical person. The one they're having these feelings about."
"Yeah?"
"He makes really good biscotti."
Cole was quiet for exactly one second. Then he grinned, and the grin was the grin of a man who had been where I was standing and knew the territory and was glad, genuinely glad, that someone else was finding the courage to step into it.
"Must be some biscotti," he said.
"You have no idea."
I left the film room and walked to the parking lot and sat in my truck and looked at my hands on the steering wheel.
Scarred, swollen, the hands of a man who had spent his career turning his body into a weapon.
These hands baked bread. These hands shook in the dark.
These hands had been steady when Luca touched them, which was a fact that could no longer be filed under neurological events or static shocks or any other category of denial.
The body knows before the brain. The brain is the last one to the party.
My brain was at the party now. It was standing in the corner with its arms crossed. But it was there. It had showed up. And showing up, as I was learning, was the first step toward sitting down.
I drove home. I did not bake. I did not Google. I sat on my couch in my dark apartment and I thought about Luca Moretti with full, conscious, undefended honesty for the first time.
His laugh. His hands. The gold in his eyes.
The way he called me sunshine and meant the opposite and the opposite was somehow better.
The way he made a room warmer just by being in it.
The biscotti and the tea and the sticky note and the collarbone and the tattoo I had seen for three seconds and wanted to see for longer.
I let myself want it. Just for a minute. Sitting alone in the dark, with no audience and no consequence, I let myself want Luca Moretti the way you want something you've been starving for without knowing you were hungry.
The wanting was terrifying.
Which meant, according to Cole Briggs, that I was doing it right.
-e