Chapter 3 Jonah
JONAH
There are levels of hell that Dante did not anticipate, and one of them is watching the person you love discover a new passion while sitting close enough to smell his shampoo.
Cole pulled strings to get Ren a job as a video analyst with the Reapers.
This was, objectively, a good thing. Ren needed purpose and direction and something to wake up for that wasn't the slow erosion of his self-worth, and video analysis was perfect for him because Ren's hockey brain had always been his best asset.
He saw the game the way a chess player sees a board, three moves ahead, patterns emerging from chaos like constellations from stars.
What was not a good thing was that Ren now worked at my facility. He was in my building. Every day. In the film room that was thirty feet from the locker room, running footage on a laptop with the concentrated focus of a man who had found something worth concentrating on.
I could not escape him. Not at work, where he appeared in hallways and meetings and the training staff break room where he drank too much coffee and argued with the assistant coaches about neutral zone breakouts with an authority that made men twice his age lean in.
Not at home, where he existed in the guest room and the kitchen and the couch, where his presence had expanded to fill every available space like a gas obeying the laws of thermodynamics.
He was everywhere. And everywhere he was, I was paying attention.
In the film room, he was a different person than the one who had arrived at the airport with duffel bags and defeat.
His posture changed. His voice changed. He spoke about hockey with an intelligence that the coaching staff noticed immediately, and the noticing produced a feedback loop of confidence that straightened his spine and sharpened his eyes and made him look, for the first time in months, like a man who knew exactly where he belonged.
I watched him break down an opposing team's power play for Coach Callahan.
His hands moved across the screen like a conductor's, precise and purposeful, and his voice dropped into the low, sure register that it occupied when he was completely in his element.
Callahan was nodding. The assistant coaches were taking notes.
Ren Briggs, who had shown up in Atlanta with two duffel bags and the remains of a dream, was commanding a room full of hockey lifers, and they were listening.
I stood in the hallway outside the film room and thought: he's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and I can never, ever tell anyone that.
The voice in my head that said these things was familiar and unwelcome.
It spoke with the particular clarity of a feeling that had been suppressed for so long that the suppression itself had become a form of expression.
I had spent ten years converting love into friendship, desire into loyalty, wanting into waiting.
The conversion was imperfect. There was always residue.
A charge that didn't dissipate. A frequency that hummed below the surface of every interaction, and the humming was louder now because Ren was thirty feet away instead of three hundred miles.
After practice, Wes Chen stopped me in the hallway. Wes, who communicated primarily through glares and the strategic deployment of sourdough, had apparently developed an interest in my psychological state.
"You're being weird," he said.
"I'm not being weird."
"You've been staring at the film room door for ten minutes."
I had been staring at the film room door. The door was closed. Ren was behind it. I could see his silhouette through the frosted glass, hunched over his laptop, and the shape of him, even blurred and refracted, was enough to make my pulse do things that were medically irresponsible.
"I was thinking about breakout patterns," I said.
"Breakout patterns."
"Yes."
Wes looked at me with the flat, evaluative stare of a man who had spent years reading opponents and was now reading me with the same dispassionate accuracy. "Sure," he said, and walked away, and the single syllable contained a diagnostic that I was not prepared to acknowledge.
Luca appeared at lunch. Luca was never more than ten feet from Wes and had the emotional radar of a golden retriever crossed with a therapist. He sat down across from me with a tray of pasta that had arrived from Hoboken via the United States Postal Service, because Rosa Moretti did not trust the nutritional standards of the American South and had taken matters into her own hands.
"So," Luca said, twirling rigatoni with the practiced ease of a man who had been raised on carbohydrates and saw no reason to stop. "The new video analyst."
"What about him?"
"He's Cole's brother."
"I'm aware."
"And he's living with you."
"Also aware."
"And you look at him like he's the last piece of bread at an Italian dinner and you haven't eaten in three days."
"I do not look at him like that."
"Jonah." Luca set his fork down. This was serious.
Italians did not set forks down unless the conversation had escalated beyond the capacity of multitasking.
"You look at him exactly like that. I am Italian.
I know what bread hunger looks like. It is in our cultural DNA. It's practically a diagnostic tool."
"Luca, I appreciate the concern, but there's nothing going on."
"I didn't say there was something going on.
I said you look at him like there could be, and you're terrified of it, and the terror is making you weird.
Wes noticed, which means it's really bad, because Wes doesn't notice anything that isn't hockey or sourdough or the exact temperature of a bread oven. "
"Wes noticed because Wes was standing in a hallway with nothing better to do."
"Wes was standing in a hallway because I asked him to check on you, because I've been watching you watch the film room door for a week and a half and the trajectory is concerning."
I stared at him. He stared back with the steady, warm, completely non-judgmental gaze of a man who had personally navigated the most unlikely love story in the NHL and was now dispensing romantic wisdom over postal pasta.
"It's complicated," I said.
"Love is always complicated. The simplicity is on the other side."
"Who told you that? Your nonna?"
"My therapist. But Nonna would co-sign."
I changed the subject. Luca let me, which was generous, because Luca was physically incapable of letting things go when he smelled emotional distress and the restraint must have cost him considerable effort.
We finished lunch and I went to afternoon skate and I did not look at the film room door on my way to the ice.
I looked at it on my way back. But only once.
In the locker room, I sat at my stall and taped a stick that didn't need taping because my hands needed something to do.
Across the room, Cole was laughing with Mik about something, the two of them operating in the easy, gravitational closeness that had become their default since the kiss on the ice.
Wes was at his stall, quiet and enormous, his scarred hands wrapping a stick with the mechanical precision of a man who had turned every physical act into a meditation.
Mars Santos, the goalie, was in his corner.
Mars was always in his corner. He was the quietest man on the team, which was saying something given that the team included Mik Volkov and Wes Chen.
But where Mik's silence was brooding and Wes's silence was intimidating, Mars's silence was architectural.
He had built a space around himself that was impermeable.
Not hostile. Just sealed. The goalie in the crease, even off the ice.
He was listening to something on his headphones. I could hear the faint bleed of bossa nova, which was his signature and which drove Jonah crazy and which Mars had never once changed despite approximately four hundred complaints from teammates who did not want to hear Antonio Carlos Jobim at 7 AM.
I liked Mars. Everyone liked Mars, in the theoretical sense that you like a person you respect but don't know. He was an excellent goalie. He was a reliable teammate. He was a complete mystery, and the mystery was not an invitation but a perimeter.
I finished taping my stick. I put it in the rack. I went to the parking lot and sat in my truck and texted Ren.
Thai or Korean tonight?
His response was immediate: Surprise me.
I drove to the Korean place in Doraville that my mom had recommended, the one that made the kimchi jjigae that tasted like her kitchen, and I ordered enough for two and drove home and set the table because Ren Briggs was going to eat dinner at my table and the table was going to be set properly because some acts of service were the only love language available to a man who couldn't say the words.
He came home at 7. He saw the table. He saw the food.
He looked at me with the expression of a man who was being cared for in a way he hadn't been cared for in a very long time, and the expression was gratitude and confusion and something else that I filed in the same place I filed everything about Ren Briggs, which was the bottomless, overstuffed, structurally unsound vault at the center of my chest.
"You set the table," he said.
"It seemed appropriate."
"You never set the table."
"I'm trying new things."
He sat down. We ate. He told me about the power play breakdown and I told him about the afternoon skate and the conversation was easy and warm and exactly like every conversation we'd ever had, except that underneath it, in the space between the words, something was building that had been building for ten years and was running out of room.
After dinner, he washed the dishes. I dried them. Our hands touched twice. Both times were accidents. Both times my heart stopped and restarted like a defibrillator demonstration.
"Hey, Jonah?" he said, handing me the last plate.
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for dinner. And for the table."
"Anytime."
He smiled. The smile. Mine.
I dried the plate and put it in the cabinet and thought about Luca's bread metaphor and Wes's monosyllabic diagnosis and the film room door and the table I had set and the ten years of wanting that were no longer content to be filed and forgotten.
The vault was full. The door was bowing.
Something was going to give. The only question was when.
-e