Chapter 7 Jonah
JONAH
Ren's feet were touching mine.
This was the culmination of a weeks-long territorial negotiation conducted entirely through cushion geography.
Every evening on the couch, the distance between us had closed by some fractional increment.
His end. My end. The vast middle that had started as neutral territory and had been gradually, silently annexed by the gravitational drift of two bodies pretending they weren't aware of each other's exact coordinates.
Tonight, the middle was gone. His socked feet pressed against mine and the contact was not accidental. It was a decision made at the level of the body, where decisions are honest because the body doesn't know how to lie.
I was not breathing. This is an exaggeration but only slightly.
My breathing had become shallow and controlled in the way that breathing becomes when you are acutely aware that the person you have loved for ten years is touching you and the touch is deliberate and the deliberateness changes everything.
Ren turned to say something. A complaint about the movie's physics, probably. He had a running commentary on action films that was more entertaining than the films themselves, his analytical brain treating plot holes the way it treated defensive breakdowns, with precision and mild contempt.
He turned and his face was close. The couch was a conspiracy. The cushions, the angle, the lighting, all of it had arranged itself to produce this moment of proximity. His face was six inches from mine, then four, then three.
His eyes dropped to my mouth.
Not quickly. Not the darting, embarrassed glance of someone who looked without meaning to. This was slow. Conscious. A deliberate, unhurried survey of my mouth that lasted approximately two seconds and communicated more than any sentence he had ever spoken to me.
He looked at my mouth and the locked drawer in his chest opened and I could see the contents because he was not hiding them anymore.
"Ren." My voice was quiet. Barely above the television volume. A warning, an offer, a last chance for both of us to choose the safe path.
He didn't choose the safe path.
He kissed me.
The kiss was uncertain. Searching. The kiss of a man who was doing something for the first time and was operating on instinct rather than experience.
His mouth was soft and warm and his hand came up to my jaw, tentative, fingers barely touching, the pressure so light it was almost a question. Can I? Is this? Are we?
I kissed him back. And the answer to every question was yes, and the yes was ten years old, and the force of it was so enormous that I had to physically, forcibly restrain myself from pulling him against me and pouring every suppressed moment into a single point of contact.
The dam had broken. The water was coming.
The only thing between total collapse and controlled release was the last remaining thread of my self-discipline.
I pulled back. It took everything I had. Every muscle in my body was voting to stay and my brain was the lone dissenter.
"Ren, we can't."
"Why?" His voice was rough. Different. A voice I had never heard from him before, lower and less controlled, and the sound of it in the dim living room was doing things to my nervous system that my nervous system had been waiting ten years to feel.
"Because Cole is my best friend and you're his brother and you're not.
.." I stopped. The word "straight" was on my tongue but the man who had just kissed me did not look straight.
He looked like a person who had found something he'd been looking for without knowing he was looking, and the finding had rearranged his face into an expression I had never seen. Open. Fierce. Certain.
"Not what? Not gay?" He dropped his hand from my jaw.
His eyes were bright, burning. "I don't know what I am, Jonah.
I don't have a label for it. I don't have a framework.
I've dated women my entire life and none of it worked and I spent the last three weeks trying to figure out why, and the answer is standing in front of me.
The answer has been standing in front of me for ten years and I was looking in the wrong direction. "
"Three weeks?"
"Longer. Maybe always. Maybe since the dock."
The dock. The lake house. Minnesota. The summer that ended my childhood and began my sentence.
"You remember the dock?" My voice was not steady anymore.
"I remember everything about the dock. I remember the way you looked at me that summer.
I was fourteen and I didn't understand it.
I understood that something was different about the way you looked at me compared to the way everyone else did, but I didn't have the context to interpret it. I do now."
My heart was operating at a frequency that would have concerned any medical professional within monitoring distance.
He had noticed. On the dock, when I was sixteen and newly, catastrophically in love and trying to hide it, he had noticed something.
Not the specific feeling. The difference.
The quality of attention that separated the way I looked at him from the way the rest of the world did.
And he had filed it in his analytical brain, where it had sat for a decade, unexamined, waiting for the right lens.
The right lens was his mouth on mine on a couch in Atlanta, and the focus was devastating.
"I've wanted to do that since I was sixteen," I said.
His eyes widened. "Sixteen?"
"Yeah."
"Jonah. That's ten years."
"I'm aware of the math."
"You've wanted to kiss me for ten years."
"I've wanted to do considerably more than kiss you for ten years, but the kissing seemed like a reasonable starting point."
He stared at me. I stared back. The movie was still playing. The explosions were happening without us. The world was continuing its rotation around a sun that didn't know or care that two men on a couch in Georgia were in the process of rewriting the terms of their existence.
"That's a very long time to want something," he said. His voice was soft now. The fierceness had been replaced by something more tender, the awe of a person realizing they have been wanted by someone who never asked for anything in return.
"You have no idea."
He kissed me again. This time I did not pull back.
This time I let the dam break, and my hands went to his waist and his hands went into my hair and we kissed on the couch with the thorough, desperate, joyful intensity of two people who had been waiting their entire lives for permission and had just granted it to themselves.
His mouth opened under mine and the taste of him was beer and something sweeter, something underneath the beer that was just Ren, a specific flavor that I would spend the rest of my life associating with this moment.
The sound he made when I pulled him closer, a small, surprised intake of breath, as if the contact had dislodged something in his chest that he hadn't known was loose, was the best sound I had ever heard in my life.
Better than a hat trick horn. Better than a sold-out arena.
Better than my mother's voice on the phone saying "I love you, Jonah-ya. "
We kissed until the air ran out and then we pulled apart, forehead to forehead, breathing each other's exhales. The space between our mouths was millimeters. The space between our bodies was nothing.
"I'm shaking," he said.
I looked at my hands. They were trembling against his waist. The tremor was not fear. It was the physical aftershock of a system that had been under compression for a decade and had just been released.
"I've been shaking since I was sixteen," I said. "You just couldn't see it."
He laughed. A small, broken, amazed sound.
The laugh of a man who had just discovered that the world was not the shape he'd thought it was and the new shape was better.
Then he kissed me again, and the movie played on unwatched, and the couch absorbed the weight of two men who had found each other in the last place either of them had expected and were not, under any circumstances, letting go.
We didn't go further than kissing. Not tonight.
Tonight was for the mouths and the hands and the forehead against forehead and the slow, astonishing discovery that the thing you've wanted for ten years feels even better than you imagined, which should be impossible because you've had ten years to imagine it and the imagination had plenty of time to optimize.
At midnight, we separated. He went to the guest room. I went to my bedroom. The hallway between us had never felt so long or so thin.
I lay in bed and pressed my fingers to my lips and they were swollen and warm and tasted like Ren and I thought: this is the beginning.
And then I thought: this is going to destroy us or save us and there is no in between.
And then I thought: since the dock. He said since the dock. He noticed. He always noticed. He just didn't know what he was noticing.
The shaking stopped. My hands went still against the sheets. For the first time in ten years, the wanting was not a weight I was carrying alone. It was a bridge between two people, and both of them were standing on it, and the bridge held.
The bridge held.
-e