Chapter 9 Jonah
JONAH
Hiding from the team was easy. Hockey locker rooms were designed for selective blindness.
Thirty men in various states of undress, navigating the intimacies of shared space with the unspoken agreement that certain things were not observed, not commented on, not interrogated.
The bruise on someone's neck. The text that made someone smile.
The way two people's energy changed when they entered the same room.
Hockey players were professionals at not seeing.
Hiding from Cole was agony.
We had lunch the Tuesday after the couch.
The same sandwich place near the facility.
The same table. Cole was doing his thing, talking with his mouth full, gesturing with his hands, being golden and oblivious and my best friend in the world, and I was sitting across from him with the taste of his brother still on my lips and a secret in my chest that was getting heavier by the hour.
"Mik and I are thinking about getting a place together," Cole said, between bites of a club sandwich.
"Like, officially. Keys, furniture, the whole thing.
It feels right, you know? Like, being honest about who you are with someone is the best feeling in the world.
You don't realize how much energy you spend performing until you stop. "
The irony was not subtle. It was a sledgehammer to the solar plexus, delivered by a man who had no idea he was holding one.
"That's great, man," I said. My voice was normal. My face was normal. The internal infrastructure supporting the normalcy was in critical condition.
"You should find someone, Park. You deserve it. You're the best person I know and you're spending every night on your couch watching hockey film. That's not a life."
"I like my couch."
"Your couch is not a romantic partner."
"My couch has never disappointed me."
"Your couch has never made you breakfast."
I thought about Ren making pasta from Luca's grandmother's recipe.
The way he'd stood at the stove with his phone propped against the backsplash showing the recipe and his brow furrowed in concentration and flour somehow in his hair despite the fact that pasta did not require flour at that stage of the process.
The way he'd served me a bowl and watched my face while I ate it and the way his entire body relaxed when I said "incredible" even though the pasta was objectively terrible.
"You can tell me anything, right?" Cole said. The question was casual. The eye contact was not.
"Yeah. I know."
I did not tell him. I sat across from my best friend and I performed normalcy and the performance was flawless because I had been performing it for ten years and practice, as they say, makes perfect.
Except perfect, in this context, was another word for dishonest, and the dishonesty was becoming harder to maintain because the thing I was hiding was no longer a silent, unilateral feeling.
It was a relationship. It had another person in it.
And that person was sleeping fifteen feet from my bedroom and kissing me in the kitchen and changing the chemical composition of every room he entered.
At home, the relationship was expanding at a rate that defied the "slow" agreement we had made.
Ren discovered my guitar. This was inevitable because the guitar lived in the corner of the living room and Ren lived in the living room and the intersection was mathematically certain.
"You play?" he asked, picking it up with the casual confidence of a man who had no idea what he was holding.
"Badly."
"How badly?"
"I know four chords and I use three of them. The fourth is aspirational."
"Play something."
"No."
"Play something or I'll tell Luca you cried during the second period of that Hurricanes game."
"That was allergies."
"Play something."
I played something. It was a simplified version of a song I'd been teaching myself from a YouTube tutorial, and the simplification involved omitting approximately sixty percent of the notes and replacing them with hopeful approximations.
My singing was worse than my playing, which was worse than my confidence in either, and the entire performance was the musical equivalent of a first draft that should have been edited before being submitted.
Ren lay on the couch and listened with his eyes closed. He did not critique. He did not laugh. He lay there and he listened and at some point his breathing changed and I realized he had fallen asleep, and the realization hit me with a tenderness so acute it was almost painful.
He fell asleep to my terrible guitar playing.
Not despite the terribleness. Because of it.
Because the sound of me doing something badly in a quiet room was, for Ren Briggs, the sound of safety.
The sound of a person who was not performing, not competing, not trying to meet a standard.
Just being. Imperfectly and without apology.
I played until my fingers hurt and then I set the guitar down and watched him sleep and committed every detail to permanent memory.
The way his lips parted slightly. The way his left hand curled against his chest. The way the reading lamp on the end table cast amber light across his face and made the dark of his hair glow at the edges.
I loved him so much it was geological. It was tectonic. It was the slow, patient, enormous force that moves continents, and it had been moving for ten years, and the continent had finally arrived at the place it was supposed to be.
The second intimate scene happened that night. Not on the couch. In his room. The guest room, which was still technically his room, though the boundaries between his space and mine had dissolved to the point of meaninglessness.
He woke from his nap and found me in the kitchen and kissed me and the kiss was different from the previous kisses, more confident, more sure.
The four days of escalation had built a momentum that was no longer content with restraint.
His hands went under my shirt and up my back and the contact was electric and I made a sound against his mouth that was not dignified and did not care.
"Your room," he said.
"Your room is closer."
"Then my room."
His room. His bed. The guest bed with the sheets I had washed and the lamp I had bought and the space I had prepared without knowing I was preparing it for this.
For him on his back and me above him and the slow, thorough, world-ending discovery of what it felt like to have Ren Briggs underneath me with no barriers left.
This time was different from the first. The first time was discovery. This was confirmation. The first time we were learning. This time we knew.
He was more confident. The analytical brain that read hockey formations was reading me now, tracking responses, adjusting in real time.
His hand found the place on my hip that made me shudder and he applied pressure and I came apart and the coming apart was not quiet because I had stopped trying to be quiet and the stopping was a liberation I hadn't known I needed.
I reciprocated. Moved down his body with a deliberateness that made him grip the sheets and say things that were not words.
When I took him in my mouth, the sound he made was the most honest sound I had ever heard from Ren Briggs, a man who armored himself in sarcasm and analysis and was now making sounds that were pre-verbal and unedited and real.
We finished together. Side by side, facing each other, hands entwined, foreheads touching. The synchronization was not planned. It was the body's answer to ten years of waiting: we arrive at the same time because we have always been moving at the same pace. We just didn't know it.
Afterward, in the dark, in the narrow guest bed that was not designed for two grown men but which accommodated them because love is more flexible than furniture.
"Hey, Jonah?" His voice in the dark. Soft. Certain.
"Yeah?"
"I'm not going back to the guest room mentality. I'm not going to pretend in the morning that this is casual or temporary or something we need to evaluate."
"Okay."
"This is real. You are real. What I feel is real. And I don't need a label for it to know that it's the most important thing in my life."
"You don't need a label."
"I know. You're the one who taught me that. Not with words. With the lamp and the beer and the pad see ew and the ten years of waiting. You taught me that love doesn't need a category. It just needs a person."
I pulled him closer. He fit against me with the precision of something designed for the space, and the space was my arms, and my arms had been the right shape for him since we were children and I hadn't known why.
"I love you," I said. The words came out easily. They had been in my mouth for a decade, practiced silently, and the speaking of them was not difficult. It was relief. It was the last brick being removed from a wall that had been decommissioned.
"I love you too," he said. "I don't know when it started. Maybe the dock. Maybe the airport. Maybe the pasta. But it's here and it's not leaving."
We fell asleep tangled together in the guest room bed, and the guest room was no longer the guest room. It was just the room. Ours. The first room of the rest of our lives.
In the morning, his toothbrush would move to my bathroom. His book would appear on my nightstand. The lamp would follow, migrating from the end table to the bedroom, tracking the trajectory of a man who had arrived as a guest and was staying as everything.
The migration had begun. And I was going to let it happen because the only thing more terrifying than letting someone in was keeping them out, and I had spent ten years on the wrong side of that equation.
The reading light glowed. The man breathed. The continent settled.
Home.
-e