Chapter 10
JONAH
The morning after the first time, I went to practice with a secret glowing inside my chest like a reactor core.
He was drinking coffee from the travel mug I kept in the truck. My mug. In his hands. The domesticity of the detail was so intimate that it made my knuckles white on the steering wheel.
"You're gripping the wheel like it insulted your mother," he said.
"I'm driving."
"You're strangling a steering wheel. There's a difference. Relax."
"I am relaxed."
"You are vibrating. I can feel it through the seat."
He was not wrong. My body was operating at a frequency that was incompatible with casual behavior.
I was a man who had just had the most significant sexual experience of his life with a person who was sitting three feet away from him smelling like my shampoo because he had used my shampoo this morning, which was a detail that should not have been erotic and was devastatingly so.
We pulled into the facility parking lot. I turned off the engine. The truck went quiet.
"Okay," Ren said. "Rules."
"Rules."
"At the facility, we are Jonah and Ren. Friends. Roommates. Colleagues. Nothing in your behavior or mine suggests anything beyond professional warmth."
"Professional warmth."
"No lingering looks. No accidental touches. No standing too close in the hallway. No texting anything that can't be read aloud by Coach Callahan at a team meeting."
"That eliminates approximately ninety percent of what I want to text you."
"Save the ninety percent for the drive home."
"That's a lot of texting energy to sit on for eight hours."
"Consider it training. You're an athlete. Delayed gratification is literally your profession."
I looked at him. He looked at me. The parking lot was empty except for Gerald's truck and Mars Santos's black sedan, because goalies and security guards were the only people who existed at this hour.
"One kiss," I said. "Before we go in. Then I'll be professional."
"One."
I leaned across the console and kissed him.
The kiss was supposed to be brief. The kiss was not brief.
The kiss was thorough and warm and tasted like the coffee from my mug and the particular, private taste of Ren that I had discovered last night and was now addicted to with the speed and totality of a first-time user encountering a substance designed specifically for his biochemistry.
He pulled back. "Professional."
"Professional."
"Starting now."
"Starting now."
We got out of the truck. We walked to the facility entrance with the careful, calibrated distance of two men who were not together. The distance was approximately four feet, which was reasonable for colleagues and excruciating for lovers.
Inside, the locker room was beginning to fill. The morning energy of a hockey team: tape ripping, music playing, the constant low-grade banter that served as social lubrication for thirty men who spent more time together than most married couples.
Cole was at his stall. He looked up when I walked in and grinned and said "Park, you look like you slept well," which was both accurate and the most unintentionally loaded statement of my life.
I had slept well. I had slept incredibly well, for approximately three hours, after spending the preceding four hours doing things that would end our friendship if Cole ever found out about them.
"Good mattress," I said.
"You've had that mattress for two years."
"Maybe it's finally breaking in."
Jonah Park, professional liar. The role I was born to play.
Practice was surreal. I was on the ice, doing the things I always did, running the drills, taking the face-offs, executing the breakouts, and the whole time my body was carrying a second layer of information that the first layer was trying to suppress.
Every muscle remembered Ren's hands. Every nerve ending retained the map of where he had touched me.
I was a palimpsest, a surface covered in new writing that the old writing was bleeding through.
Ren was in the press box. I could see him through the glass, a small figure at a laptop, headphones on, taking notes.
He was doing his job. I was doing mine. The two jobs existed on separate planes and the planes were not supposed to intersect and the fact that they were intersecting in my nervous system was a problem that no amount of skating was going to solve.
During a breakout drill, Cole fed me a pass and I fumbled it.
The puck went off my stick and into the corner and Cole skated up to me with the expression of a man who had just witnessed a miracle, because Jonah Park did not fumble breakout passes.
Jonah Park was the most reliable breakout center in the Eastern Conference. Jonah Park's hands did not betray him.
"You okay?" Cole said.
"Fine. Stick malfunction."
"Your stick is brand new."
"Exactly. Breaking it in."
"You're breaking in your stick and your mattress on the same day?"
"It's a renewal period."
Cole looked at me for a beat longer than casual. The perceptive gaze of a best friend who has spent twenty years calibrating his read on my behavior and has noticed that the calibration is off. I held the look. My face was neutral. My pulse was not.
"Get it together, Park," he said, grinning, and skated away.
I got it together. I ran the next drill clean. I took the face-offs. I played the practice the way I played every practice, with the reliable, invisible competence that was my brand.
But underneath the competence, in the layer that only I could access, a man in a press box was taking notes, and the notes were about hockey but the man was about everything else, and the dissonance between the professional and the personal was the most exhilarating, terrifying, unsustainable thing I had ever experienced.
After practice, Luca cornered me near the stick rack. Luca's ability to detect romantic disturbance was supernatural. If there had been a draft for emotional intelligence, Luca Moretti would have gone first overall.
"You're different today," he said.
"I'm the same."
"You're the same but different. You're radiating something. Wes noticed and Wes doesn't notice things that aren't bread."
"Wes noticed what?"
"He said, and I quote, 'Park is less tense.' Which for Wes is the equivalent of a three-page emotional assessment."
"I stretched this morning. Flexibility work."
"Flexibility work." Luca repeated the words with the tone of a man who was not buying what was being sold but was willing to extend credit until the next payment was due. "Sure, Jonah. Flexibility work."
He walked away. I stood at the stick rack and breathed.
The drive home was silent for the first five minutes. Then Ren said: "How was it?"
"Excruciating."
"Specifically?"
"I fumbled a breakout pass because your hands were on my body twelve hours ago and my muscle memory got confused about which physical activity it was supposed to be performing."
"That's flattering."
"That's dangerous. Cole noticed. Luca noticed. Wes apparently noticed, and Wes is a man whose observational skills are primarily dedicated to the rising behavior of sourdough starter."
"So the entire team noticed."
"The entire team noticed that I was slightly off, which in hockey terms is the equivalent of a press conference. Cole asked if I was okay. Luca asked if I was different. If we do this for more than a week, someone is going to connect the dots."
Ren was quiet. The truck moved through Atlanta traffic.
"Then we tell Cole sooner rather than later," he said.
"I know."
"Because the alternative is you fumbling passes until Coach benches you, and I don't want to be the reason your plus-minus suffers."
"My plus-minus is fine."
"Your plus-minus was minus-one today."
"How do you know my plus-minus?"
"I'm the video analyst, Jonah. I know everything about everyone's performance. And yours today was seven percent below your season average, which is a statistically significant deviation that I am choosing to attribute to flexibility work."
I looked at him. He looked at me. The traffic light was red.
"Tonight," I said. "On the couch. The ninety percent."
"The ninety percent."
"And then we figure out the timeline for Cole."
"Deal."
The light turned green. I drove us home. The apartment was warm and the couch was waiting and the secret was glowing in my chest like a star, beautiful and dangerous and impossible to hide for much longer.
Ren put his hand on my thigh during the last five minutes of the drive. Just his hand. Resting. The weight of it was warm and steady and said everything his words hadn't: I'm here. This is real. We'll figure it out.
I put my hand over his. The steering wheel could manage itself for a moment.
We drove home. The secret drove with us. And the secret was getting too big for the truck, too big for the apartment, too big for two men and a couch and a reading lamp.
Something was going to have to give.
But not tonight. Tonight was for the couch and the ninety percent and the specific, private joy of being known by someone who had waited ten years to know you.
Tonight was ours. Tomorrow could wait.
-e