Chapter 22 #2
“Then it’s a date,” he said.
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak without my voice doing something embarrassing.
“So.” He straightened up, rubbing his hands together. “What’s the plan? You mentioned cooking, which I’m assuming means—”
“Thai food ordered from that place you like near the bar. It’ll be here in about fifteen minutes.”
“And in the meantime?”
“I thought we could . . .” I gestured toward the living room. “Sit and talk? I have beers if you want one.”
“A beer sounds great.”
I grabbed two bottles from the fridge, popped the caps, and handed him one. Our fingers brushed during the exchange—intentional this time, or at least not actively avoided—and the brief contact sent a spark up my arm.
Jacks leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine, not a hungry thing, a gentle contact that said more words than we’d spoken thus far.
When he pulled back, my eyes were closed, and I almost forgot to open them again.
When I did, he was staring, his grin now pensive but pleased, his eyes wells of hope I wanted to drown in.
We migrated to the living room.
I sat on one end of the couch; Jacks sat on the other, a full cushion of space between us. That was ridiculous, given what we’d done on this exact couch yesterday, but somehow the formal structure of a “date” had reset things, made every gesture feel loaded with significance.
“This is weird, right?” I said. “And it’s weird that it’s weird. Yesterday we were—” I gestured between us. “And now we’re sitting three feet apart like strangers at a bus stop.”
Jacks laughed, that full-body laugh that creased the corners of his eyes. “A little weird, yeah, but I’m getting used to your weirdness.”
I snorted. Jacks could make me laugh in the middle of a fight on the ice.
“It’s the date thing, I think,” I said. “Calling it a date made it formal, and formal makes me nervous.”
“You captain a professional hockey team in front of twenty thousand people and God knows how many more on TV. That doesn’t make you nervous, but a date does?”
“That’s different. Hockey I understand. This”— I waved my hand between us again—“I have no playbook for.”
“Well.” He shifted closer, closing the gap by half a cushion. “How about we throw out the playbook? No scripts. No expectations. Just us.”
“Just us.” The words made my heart unfurl in ways I didn’t think I’d ever felt before. It was as though some foreign being had inhabited my chest and lit a fire. I had no idea who—or what—he was, but I was glad he’d moved in.
“Yeah, like the Taco Bus. No agenda, no plan, merely two people eating good food and talking.”
“I remember.” I remembered everything about the Taco Bus. Every word. Every laugh. Every second. “Okay. No playbook.”
“No playbook.” We clinked bottles as though we’d achieved Middle East peace.
The tension broke like a wave.
I felt my shoulders drop.
Jacks must have felt it, too, because he smiled and settled deeper into the couch, his posture relaxing.
“So,” he said. “Tell me about the road trip. The stuff you didn’t put in texts.”
“Like what?”
“Like . . .” He thought for a moment. “Was there a moment where you knew that you were going to do what you did yesterday?”
The question was careful but direct. Classic Jacks.
I took a long pull of my beer, considering.
“Erik’s speech,” I said finally. “At dinner, after he told the team about his proposal. Someone asked him how he knew Linnea was the one, and he said . . .” I trailed off, the memory still sharp and vivid.
“He said she made him forget everyone and everything else, just by walking into a room. That she was home, not a place or a person. She was his home.”
Jacks was watching me, his beer forgotten in his hand.
“And I was sitting there listening to him describe that feeling, that certainty, and something clicked, like a lock turning.” I stared at the bottle in my hands and began picking at the label with my fingernails, unable to look at him.
“Because I knew that feeling. I’d been feeling it for weeks and calling it something else.
Friendship or admiration or, fuck, whatever.
I don’t know. Hearing Erik say it out loud, hearing him describe exactly what I felt every time you walked into a room . . .”
I forced myself to look up.
Jacks’s eyes were bright, his expression caught between tenderness and something fragile.
“Oh, shit. I’m not saying . . . I didn’t mean . . . I’m not trying to propose or anything crazy.”
Jacks burst out laughing. There was humor but something else, too, something tentative and curious I couldn’t name.
“Good, ’cause I need a proper courting before I put on a dress for any man.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. The image of football player Jacks in a wedding gown popped into my head, and my laughter only grew. When we both settled again, my mind wouldn’t let my mouth stop moving.
“I think that’s when I knew,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do about it then. I was terrified. But I knew I couldn’t pretend anymore, not to myself.”
Jacks was quiet for a moment. “What happened next? After Erik’s speech?”
“I went outside and stood in the cold for a while. Tyler followed me out.” I smiled. “He didn’t push. He said, ‘Whenever you’re ready, I’m here.’ I think he knows or suspects, at least.”
“Tyler sounds like a good friend.”
“The best.” I picked at the label on my beer.
“I almost told him in Calgary. I was so close, but I wasn’t ready.
I needed to figure out what I was feeling before I could explain it to someone else.
And shit, what would I even tell him? What do I call this?
What am I now? I don’t even know the words for whatever I feel anymore. ”
“Terms are words. They’re easy. Understanding the feelings are a lot more complicated. Have you figured out what you’re feeling?”
The question was gentle and patient. There was no pressure, only curiosity and an empathetic gaze. He’d walked this road. He knew my struggles, my doubts and fears. He knew what speaking those words, whatever they were, would mean.
He knew how they changed everything.
“Some of it,” I admitted. “I know I like you. That part’s not confusing. It never was. The rest—what it means, what I call myself, how it fits with everything I thought I knew about who I am or who I want to become—that’s still a mess.”
“And that’s okay. There’s no schedule you have to follow. Take things when you’re ready.”
“Is it? Is it really okay? Because I feel like you deserve someone who has their shit together, someone who knows who they are and what they want and isn’t going to have a panic attack every time someone calls this a date.”
“Skyler.” His voice was firm but kind. He scooted closer and took one of my hands in both of his, wrapping it in the best possible warmth.
“You kissed me yesterday, voluntarily and without being asked. You were trembling like a leaf, which, by the way, was the most endearing thing I’ve ever experienced, and you’re figuring things out, and that’s okay.
Not everyone gets a neat little origin story. ”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Get a neat little origin story . . . for figuring out you were gay.”
He huffed a laugh. “God, no. I was a messy seventeen-year-old, starting linebacker, and Florida football royalty. I spent two years convincing myself I was only ‘supportive of my gay friends’ before I finally admitted I was one of them.”
I almost choked on my beer. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. I once told my best friend that I thought Ryan Reynolds was ‘objectively good-looking’ and then spent three weeks panicking about it.”
“Ryan Reynolds is objectively good-looking.”
“See? That’s what I said, but straight guys don’t spend forty-five minutes analyzing Ryan Reynolds’s jawline while pretending to do homework.”
I was laughing again, the kind that loosened everything and made the world feel manageable again. Jacks was laughing, too, and the sounds mingling in my apartment felt like the most natural, most beautiful thing in the world.
That’s when the doorbell rang.