Chapter 24 Jamie
JAMIE
The weeks after the first kiss are a language course.
I am learning a new vocabulary. Not the vocabulary of the search bar (that vocabulary is settled, named, no longer frightening).
A different vocabulary. The vocabulary of proximity.
Of touch. Of the thousand micro-decisions that constitute being close to another person: where to put my hand (his shoulder, his back, the warm space between his shoulder blades), how long to hold (until his breathing changes, which means he's relaxed into it, which means the holding is doing what holding is supposed to do), when to lean in (when his glasses are off, always when his glasses are off, because the glasses-off is the person and the person is who I'm learning).
Declan's apartment becomes our place. Not mine. Not his. The third space, the space between us that used to be six inches and is now zero, the space that is a couch and a kitchen and the amber light and the books.
I learn to cook. This is an overstatement. I learn to make scrambled eggs, which Declan eats with the generosity of a man who was raised by a woman whose jollof rice could end wars and who has therefore developed the diplomatic capacity to consume terrible food without visible suffering.
"These are good," he says, eating eggs that are, objectively, not good.
The eggs are overcooked and underseasoned and Declan eats them because I made them, and the eating is a kindness that I file alongside the biscotti and the bread and the tea in the category of things people do for you that are about love and not about quality.
He teaches me jollof rice. The teaching takes three hours because the rice requires patience and attention and a willingness to stand at a stove and wait, and waiting is not a skill I have developed in nineteen years of hockey, which is a sport that rewards speed over patience.
The rice burns twice. The third attempt is edible.
The fourth attempt is good. Declan tastes it and says "my mother would approve, with caveats," which is the highest compliment available in the Osei culinary framework.
We watch film on his couch. Not game film.
Movies. He introduces me to things I've never seen (a documentary about a Japanese chef who has been making sushi for sixty years, a film about a journalist who uncovers a corruption scandal, a nature documentary about penguins that Luca apparently also loves, which confirms my theory that Luca and Declan would be friends if they ever occupied the same social space).
I lean against him while we watch. My head on his shoulder.
His arm around me. The domesticity of the position is so foreign and so perfect that my eyes sting the first time it happens, and the stinging is not sadness.
The stinging is the realization that this is what I was looking for when I couldn't find the words.
This. The warmth of another person. The specific, chosen, deliberate warmth of a person who wants to be here.
The physical relationship develops at my pace, which is the pace of a body that is nineteen years behind on a curriculum that most people begin in adolescence and that I am beginning now, with urgency and caution in equal measure.
The kissing becomes confident. The first kiss was off-center and gentle and miraculous.
The twentieth kiss is aimed and purposeful and carries intention that the first kiss did not, the intention of a man who has learned what his mouth can do when it's applied to another man's mouth and who is interested in the full syllabus.
The touching expands. His hands on my back become my hands on his chest become our hands on each other with the reciprocal curiosity of two people who are mapping new territory and who are, I discover, complementary cartographers.
Declan maps with patience. I map with intensity.
The combination produces a geography that belongs to neither of us and to both of us.
The evening it happens is a Saturday. The game was an afternoon matinee (a 3-1 win, I had a goal and felt good, the kind of good that carries over into the evening and makes the body feel capable and confident and ready).
I drove to his apartment with the focused awareness of a man who has decided that tonight is the night and who is terrified and certain in equal measure.
"Hey," he says when he opens the door.
"Hey."
"Good game."
"Thanks. I'm not here to talk about hockey."
He smiles. The smile is the Declan smile, the one that's warm and knowing and that says: I see you. I see what you're carrying. I see what you want. And I'm here for it.
We start on the couch. The kissing is familiar now, the angles and the pressure and the specific way his hand goes to the back of my neck and my hand goes to his jaw.
But tonight the kissing has a direction.
The kissing is going somewhere. I can feel it in the increased urgency of his mouth and in the response of my body, which is operating at a frequency that I have never experienced in the presence of another person and that is, I understand now, the frequency that was absent at prom and absent with every girl I ever tried to want and absent in every context except this one: here, with him, in the amber light.
"Jamie," he says against my mouth. "We don't have to."
"I want to."
"Tell me what you want. Use words. The words are important."
The words. The words are important. The words have been the thing all along: the search bar words, the Becca words, the Cole words, the name that I found in Philadelphia and carried in my chest and that I am now, for the first time, converting into action.
The words are the bridge between the naming and the being.
The words are how the body gets permission.
"I want you to take me to your room," I say. "I want to feel you. I want to learn what this is. I've never done this and I want to do it with you."
The words come out clear and steady and I am surprised by the steadiness because my heart is hammering.
But the steadiness is there because the words are true, and true words, I am discovering, have their own structural integrity.
They don't need the checkpoint. They don't need the filter. They stand on their own.
He takes my hand. He leads me down the short hallway to his bedroom.
The room is small and warm and full of books (even the bedroom has books, stacked on the nightstand, piled on the floor) and the lamp on the nightstand is amber-toned, warm, and the light it casts across the bed and the walls and his face is the same light as the rest of the apartment, which is to say: the light of a place where someone lives and is not hiding.
"We go at your pace," he says.
"My pace is here. My pace is now. My pace is you."
He kisses me. This kiss is different from the couch kisses. This kiss has the weight of the room behind it, the bed, the decision, the fact that I am about to do something I have never done and that the doing is the most honest thing my body has ever attempted.
He undresses me slowly. The shirt first. His hands at the hem, lifting, and the air on my skin is cool and his eyes on my skin are warm and the combination of cool and warm is a sensation I want to remember for the rest of my life.
He looks at me. Not with appraisal. With attention.
The same attention he brought to the hallway and the press box and the coffee shop. Total, focused, specific.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I'm not scared."
"I know. Tell me what you are."
"I'm everything. I'm everything at once."
He kisses my shoulder. My neck. The space below my ear where the pulse is fastest. Each kiss is placed with the precision of a man who understands that the first time a body is touched this way, every touch is a word in a new language, and the words need to be chosen carefully because the body will remember them forever.
I touch him. My hands on his chest, learning the planes of him. The flat muscle over his ribs. The warmth of his skin under my palms. The way his breath catches when my fingers trace down his stomach, a catch that tells me I am not the only one who is everything at once.
What follows is slow and careful and guided by his patience and my hunger and the intersection of the two, which produces a rhythm that is ours: unhurried but intense, gentle but specific, the physical expression of two people who have spent weeks building to this moment through hallways and press conferences and coffees and doorways and who are now, finally, here.
He asks before everything. Can I touch here. Is this okay. Do you want me to. The asking is not clinical. The asking is the consent made musical, each question a note in a progression that builds, and my answers are notes too: yes, there, don't stop, more, please, more.
I am explicit about what I want. For the first time in my life.
The vocabulary that I didn't have in the search bar, that I was afraid of in the hotel room, that I tested with Becca and Cole and Mik, that vocabulary is now deployed in a bedroom in East Atlanta with full-body commitment.
I say what I want. I say it clearly. I say it with the directness of a man who has spent nineteen years not saying it and who has discovered that saying it is not exposure. Saying it is freedom.
The moment is not about the physical act.
The physical act is the container. What fills the container is everything else: the trust, the vulnerability, the absolute, undefended, wall-down presence of two people who have chosen each other and who are, in this bed, in this light, with these words, proving it.
Afterward, we lie in the amber light. His hand is on my chest. My head is on his shoulder. The room is quiet except for our breathing, which has synchronized without either of us deciding to synchronize it.
"I didn't know it could feel like this," I say.
"Like what?"
"Like being allowed."
The sentence is the truest sentence I have ever spoken.
Not "like pleasure" or "like excitement" or any of the words that the articles in Philadelphia used to describe the physical.
Like being allowed. The permission to be in my body.
The permission to want. The permission to be a person who wants a specific person and who is wanted back and who does not have to hide the wanting or perform its absence.
Declan pulls me closer. His arms around me. The holding is the thing. The holding has always been the thing.
"You're allowed," he says. "You've always been allowed. You just didn't know it yet."
I close my eyes. The amber light is warm on my face. His heartbeat is under my ear. The apartment smells like books and jollof rice and him.
The walls are down. All of them. The monosyllables and the floor-watching and the checkpoint and the cursor and the search bar and the carrying and the alone.
All of it, down. And behind the walls is this: a room with books and a man without glasses and a body that has, for the first time, told the truth in every language it knows.
The truth is: I am here. I am his. I am mine.
The truth is enough.