Chapter 5 Jonah
JONAH
Iwas going to keep this to myself forever, and then Luca Moretti sat down across from me at The Crease and dismantled my defenses with the precision of a man who had spent two months learning how to crack open the most emotionally fortified enforcer in the NHL and was now applying the same methodology to me.
Friday night. The team was celebrating a four-game winning streak.
The bar was loud and warm and full of the specific energy that hockey teams produce when they believe they're building something real.
Cole and Mik were in the corner booth, existing in their quiet gravitational orbit.
Wes and Luca were at the bar, Wes nursing a single beer with the concentrated focus of a man who considered social events a form of professional suffering and Luca talking to everyone within acoustic range because Luca's social battery operated on a power source that science had not yet identified.
Mars Santos, the goalie, was also at the bar.
Three stools down from Wes. Water with lime.
Headphones around his neck like a collar, the faint bleed of bossa nova leaking from the speakers.
He was doing what Mars always did in groups: existing with precision in a space that included him by geography and excluded him by choice.
The goalie in the crease. Always apart. Always watching.
Ren was at home. He'd opted out because he felt awkward socializing with men he worked alongside but wasn't technically a teammate of, which was a distinction I had argued was meaningless and which he had maintained with the quiet stubbornness of a man who was still learning where he fit.
"Maybe next time," he'd said, with the smile that was mine, the one I had been cataloging for ten years, and the absence of that smile in the bar was a physical thing, a negative space that I kept turning toward the way you keep reaching for a phantom limb.
I was checking my phone. I was not checking for a text from Ren. I was monitoring the time. I checked it every thirty seconds because the time was information I needed for reasons that I would not have been able to articulate if anyone had asked.
Luca materialized at my elbow with the silent, inevitable approach of a man who could cross a crowded room without displacing a molecule.
"You're moping," he said.
"I'm not moping. I'm drinking."
"You're moping while drinking. There's a diagnostic difference. Moping drinkers check their phones obsessively hoping for a text from a specific person, and you've checked yours nine times since I started counting."
I put my phone face down on the table.
"I saw that," Luca said.
"You see everything. Has anyone told you it's exhausting?"
"Wes tells me daily. I choose to interpret it as a compliment." He sat down across from me and the sitting was deliberate, weighted with intention. His face shifted from sunshine mode to something more serious. "Are you seeing anyone, Jonah?"
The question landed differently than casual. Luca's voice had dropped half an octave and the warmth in it was not the broadcast warmth he gave the room. It was the targeted warmth he gave the people he was trying to help.
"No."
"Hmm." He tilted his head. "You've got that look, though."
"What look?"
"The look of a man who's already taken and hasn't figured it out yet."
I stared at my beer. The condensation was running down the glass in rivulets and I watched them because watching condensation was easier than meeting Luca Moretti's eyes, which were brown and warm and saw too much.
The silence extended. Luca did not fill it. This was his secret weapon, the thing that made him devastating as a confidant: he could be loud enough to fill any room and quiet enough to empty one, and the quiet was where the real work happened.
"It's been ten years," I said.
He didn't ask ten years of what. He just nodded. The nod of a man whose suspicion had been confirmed and whose confirmation was both expected and devastating in its implications.
"Since I was sixteen. Since he was fourteen. Since a dock and a laugh and my entire life rearranging itself around a person who doesn't know."
"Cole's brother."
"Cole's brother."
Luca let out a breath that was slow and long and carried the weight of genuine empathy. "Jonah. That's a very long time to carry something alone."
"I know."
"And he's living in your apartment."
"I know."
"And you bought him a reading lamp because of something he said at Thanksgiving five years ago."
I looked up. "How do you know about the lamp?"
"I didn't until right now. But the expression on your face just confirmed it."
I almost laughed despite myself. Luca was diabolical in the most benevolent way possible, the kind of man who could disarm you with a guess and then hold the information with such care that you were grateful rather than angry.
"Have you told anyone?" he asked. "Before right now?"
"No."
"Not Cole?"
"Especially not Cole."
"Because he's your best friend and Ren is his brother and you think wanting him is a betrayal."
"Because it is a betrayal. The code exists, Luca. You don't fall for your best friend's sibling. It's messy and it's selfish and it puts the friendship at risk, and the friendship is the most important relationship in my life."
"The code," Luca repeated. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and his expression had the specific intensity of a man who was about to say something important and wanted it to land properly.
"The unwritten rule that says you should spend your entire life alone rather than pursue the person you love.
Because of familial proximity. That code? "
"It's not arbitrary."
"It's completely arbitrary. You know what's not arbitrary?
Ten years. A decade of wanting someone is not a crush.
That's not a passing interest you can file under 'things I'll get over.
' That's a structural condition. That's load-bearing.
And the structure is going to collapse if you don't do something, because I've been watching you for two months and the weight is showing. "
"What am I supposed to do? He's straight."
"Is he?"
"He's dated women his entire life."
"Wes dated women his entire life. Then he met me and discovered that his entire life had been operating on incomplete data.
People are not categories, Jonah. People are people.
And sometimes a person who has been looking in one direction for twenty-four years turns around and finds something they didn't know they were missing. "
"And if I tell him and he doesn't feel the same way? I lose him. I lose Cole. I lose the two people who matter most to me."
"And if you don't tell him, you keep them both and lose yourself." Luca's voice was gentle and relentless. "Which loss is worse?"
The question sat between us like a detonator. I did not have an answer. The question was a fuse, lit and burning, and the explosion was coming whether I answered or not.
Luca squeezed my shoulder. The touch was warm and brief and said everything his words hadn't: I see you. I've been where you are. The other side exists.
He returned to Wes, who had apparently reached his social capacity and was signaling departure by standing motionless near the door with his jacket on and his murder face engaged. Some couples communicated through words. Wes and Luca communicated through strategic deployment of the murder face.
I drove home. Ren was on the couch with a book and the reading lamp, which he had carried from the guest room to the living room because the overhead lighting was inadequate. The lamp sat on the end table like a warm, amber accusation.
"Hey," he said. "How was the bar?"
"Loud. How was your night?"
"Quiet. I tried Luca's nonna's pasta recipe."
"You made pasta?"
"He said anyone who lives with an Italian-adjacent person needs basic pasta competency. I don't know what Italian-adjacent means but I'm choosing not to question it."
"It means Luca has adopted you. Resistance is futile."
He smiled and passed me a bowl. The pasta was overcooked and under-seasoned and I ate every bite because Ren Briggs had made it for me and I would have eaten wallpaper paste served with the same intention.
After he went to bed, I called my mother. Eunhee Park answered on the first ring because Korean mothers do not play games with phone calls from their children.
"Jonah-ya. How are you?"
"I'm good, Umma. I'm stuck on something."
"Stuck how?"
"There's something I want and I'm afraid to reach for it."
She was quiet for a moment. My mother was a thoughtful woman who approached her son's problems with the same patient precision she applied to her garden, which was legendary in our Minnesota neighborhood and which produced tomatoes that won regional competitions.
"Stuck usually means you know what you want and you're afraid to reach for it," she said.
"That's exactly what it means."
"Then reach, Jonah-ya. The worst thing that happens is you fall. But you fall from standing, which is better than spending your whole life on your knees."
"Is this about a person?"
"Maybe."
"A good person?"
"The best person I know."
"Then reach. With both hands. And if they don't catch you, I will."
I hung up and sat in the dark kitchen. The apartment was quiet.
Through the wall, the guest room was still.
The lamp was in the living room now, which meant Ren was sleeping without it, which meant the living room was where the light lived, which meant the light had migrated from his space to our shared space.
The migration of light. The migration of everything.
Reach, my mother said. With both hands.
The hands were ready. They had been ready for ten years. The rest of me just needed to catch up.
-e