Chapter 6 Ren
REN
The jealousy arrived without warning, which is how you know it's not jealousy at all.
Jealousy you see coming is manageable. You identify it, you name it, you file it.
What arrived at the charity dinner was not jealousy.
It was revelation. The sudden, blinding illumination of something that has been living in the dark for so long that when the light hits it, you can't look away.
The event was a fundraiser at a venue near the Beltline.
The kind of evening where players wore suits and donors wore optimism and the two groups mingled over appetizers in a space designed to make wealth feel philanthropic.
I attended because the video staff was invited and because Jonah asked me to come, and my ability to refuse Jonah when he asked me things had been degrading at a rate that precisely tracked my inability to stop noticing his hands, his laugh, the way he made every person in a room feel like the most important person in that room.
Jonah in a suit was a problem I had not prepared for.
He was not the most striking man at the event.
Cole had the golden proportions and the camera-ready jaw.
Mik Volkov had the dramatic bone structure that made people stare.
But Jonah had something that neither of them possessed and that I was only now, after three weeks of proximity, beginning to identify.
He had ease. He moved through the room like the room had been waiting for him, engaging every person he spoke with as if their conversation was the only one that mattered.
He listened with his whole body. He asked follow-up questions.
He remembered the name of a donor's daughter and the score of a donor's son's basketball game and the fact that the bartender was studying for the LSAT, and each remembered detail was a small gift that cost him nothing and meant everything to the person receiving it.
I stood near the bar with a drink I was not drinking and watched him the way I had been watching him for three weeks, which was to say: with the focused, analytical intensity of a man running game film on a subject he could not stop studying.
A woman was talking to him. Tall. Blonde.
Confident in the specific way of a person who knew their value and was comfortable communicating it.
She was leaning into Jonah's space with the calibrated tilt of a woman who was interested and was not interested in being subtle about it.
Her hand was on his arm. Her laugh was aimed at him like a spotlight.
My chest tightened.
The tightening was immediate. Not a gradual build. A snap. The sudden, involuntary contraction of a muscle I didn't know I had, triggered by the sight of another person's hand on the arm of a man who was, technically, nothing more to me than my brother's best friend and my temporary roommate.
Technically. The word was doing a lot of work. The word was holding up a fiction that my body was in the process of dismantling.
I was jealous. The word landed in my consciousness with the flat, undeniable weight of a diagnosis.
I was jealous of a woman touching Jonah Park's arm, and the jealousy was not the benign protectiveness of a friend or the territorial instinct of a roommate.
It was possessive. Specific. The jealousy of a person who wanted to be the one doing the touching and was discovering, in real time, that the wanting was not new.
The wanting was old. The wanting had been living in the walls of my life for years and had finally decided to step into the room and introduce itself.
I told myself it was protectiveness. Big-brother energy.
Except Jonah was two years older than me and did not need a younger brother's protection, and the word "brother" in proximity to what I was feeling was so wildly, categorically wrong that my brain rejected it like a transplant from the wrong blood type.
Cole materialized beside me. He had the older-brother radar for emotional disturbance that came from twenty-four years of watching me navigate the world.
"You good?"
"Fine."
He followed my line of sight to Jonah and the blonde woman. Something flickered across his face, a moment of assessment, and then it passed.
"Jonah's a good guy," he said. "The best I know."
"I know."
"He'd do anything for the people he cares about. Been that way since we were kids. Sometimes I think he forgets that he's allowed to want things for himself."
This was the most perceptive observation Cole had ever made about Jonah in my hearing, and it struck with the force of a truth I had known intuitively but had never heard articulated.
Jonah forgot to want for himself. He was so busy being the support system, the emotional center, the man who set tables and stocked refrigerators and bought reading lamps, that his own wants got filed under "not urgent" and stayed there indefinitely.
"Yeah," I said. "He does forget."
Cole clapped my shoulder and went back to Mik, and I stood at the bar and watched Jonah excuse himself from the blonde woman with a smile that was warm and polite and professional and contained absolutely none of the electricity that his smile contained when he looked at me.
Or maybe I was projecting. Maybe the electricity was a fiction I was building because fiction was easier than fact, and the fact was that Ren Briggs, who had dated women exclusively for his entire adult life, was standing at a bar in a suit watching his brother's best friend talk to a beautiful woman and feeling something that could not be explained by any framework he currently possessed.
That night, in the guest room, I opened my laptop and typed into Google: "can you be attracted to your friend."
The results were extensive and resonant.
Articles about emotional intimacy that evolves into physical attraction.
Reddit threads with thousands of responses from people describing trajectories that matched mine with unsettling precision.
A quiz titled "Is It Just Friendship?" that I took and scored "very likely more than friends" on and then deleted from my browser history with the panicked efficiency of a man destroying evidence.
I took the quiz again. Same score. Deleted it again.
I opened a new tab. Typed: "how do you know if you're attracted to a man."
The results were different. Deeper. More frightening, not because the content was shocking but because the content was familiar.
Story after story of people who had spent years in relationships with one gender and then encountered a specific person of another gender and had their entire operating system crash and rebuild around the encounter.
Not a general shift in orientation. A specific person.
One face. One voice. One particular way of existing in the world that made every previous relationship feel like a rough draft of something that had just been published.
I closed the laptop. Stared at the wall. The wall offered no insight.
The next morning, at the kitchen counter, shoulder to shoulder with Jonah, coffee between us, the light coming through the window making the apartment glow with the particular Atlanta morning warmth that I had come to associate with the beginning of every day of this new life.
I looked at him. Not at his coffee or his phone or the space around him.
At him. His profile. The line of his jaw.
The way his hair fell across his forehead when he hadn't styled it yet.
The warmth of his skin visible at the open collar of his t-shirt.
The way his hands wrapped around his mug with a gentleness that contradicted the strength in them.
I looked at him and I thought the thought that had been assembling itself for a decade, brick by brick, in the architecture of my subconscious, and that had finally, in this kitchen, in this light, with this man three feet away, completed construction and risen into full, undeniable, terrifying visibility.
What if every relationship that didn't work out happened because I was looking in the wrong direction?
What if the direction was three feet to my right, where a man with warm brown eyes and a terrible guitar and a reading lamp purchased on the basis of a Thanksgiving sentence was drinking coffee and being oblivious to the fact that he was the answer to every question I had ever asked about why nothing else had ever worked?
The thought was a grenade with the pin pulled. I held it. I didn't throw it. The timer was running and the detonation was coming whether I threw it or not, and the only choice was where to stand when it went off.
I stood at the counter. Jonah drank his coffee. The morning continued.
But the pin was out. And the morning light was making everything visible. And the man beside me smelled like home.
One more day, I told myself. One more day of holding the grenade.
But the hand was getting tired. And the heart was getting loud. And the dock, which I had not thought about in years, was suddenly as clear in my memory as if I were standing on it right now, fourteen years old, looking at a sixteen-year-old boy who was looking at me in a way I didn't understand.
I understood now.
God help me, I understood.
-e