Chapter 17 Jonah
JONAH
Telling the team was Ren's idea, which was fitting because Ren was the braver of us in the ways that counted.
"Not a speech," he said. "Not an announcement. Not a moment. Just... be."
"Be?"
"At the next team thing, hold my hand. Sit next to me. Don't perform distance. Let them see what they see and respond how they respond."
"That's terrifying."
"It's also exactly what Mik and Cole did. Mik kissed Cole on the ice and let the world figure it out. Wes stood up in the locker room and said a sentence. Neither of them made it a production. They just let the truth be visible and trusted the room."
"Mik kissed Cole on camera in front of eighteen thousand people. That's a production."
"That was an involuntary production. The planned version was much quieter. The point is: the room already knows, Jonah. They've known for weeks. We're the only ones still pretending."
He was right. I knew he was right because Luca had mouthed "careful" at me at a restaurant and Wes had noted that I was "less tense" and Cole, who had survived the initial revelation and was now in active reconciliation mode, had started giving Ren and me a specific look at team events that combined big-brother assessment with grudging, amused acceptance.
The room knew. The room was waiting for us to catch up to what the room already understood.
The opportunity came on a Thursday. Team dinner at a restaurant near the facility, the monthly bonding event that Coach Callahan mandated because he believed, correctly, that teams that ate together played together.
The restaurant was loud and Italian and the kind of place where families brought children and tables were pushed together and the noise level made privacy impossible and intimacy inevitable.
Ren and I arrived together, which was not unusual because we lived together. We sat next to each other, which was not unusual because we were friends. What was unusual, what was new, what was the seismic shift disguised as a tectonic murmur, was that I put my hand on the back of Ren's chair.
Not his shoulder. Not his back. The chair. The wooden rail behind him, where my fingers rested with the casual, proprietary ease of a man who was claiming proximity without making a statement about it.
Ren looked at me. His expression said: that's it?
My expression said: give me a minute.
The dinner progressed. Pasta was consumed in quantities that would have alarmed a nutritionist and delighted Luca, who treated every team meal as a referendum on Italian culinary supremacy.
Cole was across the table, sitting with Mik, and he caught my eye once and the look he gave me was steady and warm and said: I see what you're doing. I support it. Go.
The moment came during dessert. Ren made a joke about the tiramisu being inferior to Luca's grandmother's recipe, and Luca erupted in passionate agreement, and in the chaos of Italian culinary debate, Ren turned to me and laughed, and I did the thing I had been wanting to do in public for three months.
I kissed him.
Not dramatically. Not the cinematic, movie-poster kiss of Mik and Cole on the ice in front of eighteen thousand people.
A brief, casual, unhesitating kiss on the mouth, the kind of kiss that couples exchange a thousand times a day without thinking about it, the kind of kiss that is notable only for its normalcy.
The table had a range of responses that played out in approximately three seconds.
Luca, who had been mid-sentence about the proper ratio of mascarpone to espresso in tiramisu, stopped talking.
This was, in itself, a historic event. Luca Moretti voluntarily ceasing speech was the emotional equivalent of a fire alarm.
His eyes went wide and then his face split into a grin so enormous it was visible from space and he said "FINALLY" with a volume and emphasis that caused two neighboring tables to turn around.
Wes, next to Luca, looked at us with the flat, evaluative stare that he applied to everything and then returned to his bread with a nod that was so minimal it barely qualified as movement but which, in Wes Chen emotional math, was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
Mik, from across the table, made eye contact with me. The nod. The Russian nod. The one that carried the full weight of his own journey from closet to ice to Cole's arms. Welcome, the nod said. To the club. To the light. To the specific, radical freedom of being seen.
Cole, next to Mik, looked at his brother.
Then at me. Then at his brother again. His expression was complicated in the way that family expressions are complicated, containing simultaneous and contradictory emotions that only siblings can produce.
Pride. Protectiveness. Acceptance. The faint, lingering echo of hurt that was fading like a bruise.
"So this is happening at the team dinner," Cole said.
"You told me not to make a speech," Ren said.
"I didn't mean to do it during the tiramisu."
"The tiramisu was a natural opening."
"The tiramisu is sacred, Ren."
Mik put his hand on Cole's arm. The touch said: let them have this.
Cole exhaled. Looked at me. "You good, Park?"
"I'm good."
"You look terrified."
"I am terrified."
"That means you care about it. Terrified is fine. Indifferent is when you worry." He raised his glass. "To Park and Briggs. The other Briggs."
"Hey," Ren said.
"I'm workshopping the nickname. Give me time."
The table clinked glasses. The moment was not a thunderclap.
It was not a roar. It was the quiet, warm sound of metal and glass and human acceptance, the sound of a room full of men who had been through enough together to understand that love, in whatever form it arrived, was not a threat to the team. It was an addition.
A rookie, a kid named Eriksson who had the situational awareness of a golden retriever and the filtration system to match, leaned across the table and said: "So does this affect the hat trick celebration?
Because I had a whole thing planned with the hats and I need to know if the guest list is changing. "
Jonah Park, the man who had hidden a secret for ten years, the man who had loved in silence and feared in silence and carried the weight of both in silence, laughed.
The laugh was loud and sudden and real, and the sound of it in the restaurant was the sound of release.
Not from secrecy. From the particular, suffocating loneliness of believing that the thing you want most is the thing you can never have.
Ren's hand found mine under the table. His fingers laced through mine with the specific, practiced ease of a gesture that had been performed in private a hundred times and was being performed in public for the first time.
The first time of anything is terrifying. The first time of holding your boyfriend's hand in front of thirty professional hockey players while a rookie asks about hat trick logistics is a specific subset of terrifying that no manual covers.
But the hand was warm. And the fingers were right. And the table was full of people who had fought their own fights and found their own loves and were now, in a loud Italian restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia, choosing to welcome one more love story into the roster.
After dinner, in the parking lot, Cole pulled me aside.
"You kissed my brother in front of the whole team."
"I did."
"During the tiramisu."
"The timing was suboptimal. I acknowledge this."
"How do you feel?"
I considered the question. The parking lot was dark and the restaurant light spilled through the windows and Ren was by the truck, talking to Luca, who was almost certainly extracting every detail of our relationship with the forensic enthusiasm of a man who considered other people's love stories a form of personal sustenance.
"I feel like I just played the best game of my life," I said. "And the crowd is still cheering."
Cole was quiet for a moment. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and the hand was heavy and warm and said everything he had been trying to say since the fist bump.
"You deserve this, Park. The crowd, the game, the whole thing. You deserve to be happy in front of people instead of just behind closed doors."
"Thanks, Briggs."
"Don't thank me. Just keep making my brother smile like that and we're even. Twenty years of friendship, balanced against one lifetime of making Ren Briggs look like the happiest person on the planet. Fair trade."
He walked to his car. I walked to my truck.
Ren was leaning against the passenger door, illuminated by the parking lot light, and the sight of him, casual and real and mine, hit me with the same force it had hit me at sixteen, except now the force was not a secret.
The force was public. The force was shared.
The force was acknowledged by thirty men in a restaurant and a brother in a parking lot and a Korean mother in Minnesota who already knew and was probably, at this very moment, texting her friends about it.
"Ready?" Ren said.
"Ready."
I drove us home. His hand was on my thigh. My hand was on his hand. The Atlanta night was warm and the truck was warm and the world was warm.
No more hiding. No more performing. No more saving the ninety percent for the drive home.
The ninety percent was everywhere now. In the restaurant and the parking lot and the truck and the apartment and the couch and the bed and every other space we occupied.
We were visible. We were real. We were the Atlanta Reapers' newest love story, and the story was only getting started.
-e