"You said no follow-ups."
"That's not a follow-up. That's a clarification."
"It's a follow-up with a different name."
He held up his hands. "Okay. No follow-ups." He was quiet again. Then: "Do you want my opinion?"
"Not really."
"I'm giving it anyway. Whatever happened, you can't force someone to be ready for something they're not ready for. You can show up. You can be patient. You can make it clear that you're not going anywhere. But you can't build someone else's courage for them. That's a solo project."
This was annoyingly wise. I hated when Jonah was wise. It disrupted the narrative that he was just a hockey player who did crossword puzzles and ate Oreos.
"When did you get smart?" I said.
"I've always been smart. You just don't notice because you're too busy being loud."
I almost laughed. Almost. What came out instead was something closer to an exhale that had too much feeling in itto be a regular breath. Jonah put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed once, and the simple warmth of the gesture nearly undid me.
"He'll come around," Jonah said. "If whatever happened was real, he'll come around. People always do."
"And if he doesn't?"
"Then he's an idiot, and I say that with full respect to his defensive positioning."
I went home that night and did what I always did when my brain was eating itself. I laced up my running shoes and I ran.
The Beltline at dusk was beautiful in a way that Atlanta rarely gets credit for. The old railroad corridor turned into this winding path through the city, past murals and restaurants and apartment buildings, with the skyline rising up in the distance like a promise. I ran south from Piedmont Park, past Ponce City Market where people were having dinner on the patio like everything was normal, past Krog Street where the tunnel was painted with colors so bright they looked like they were shouting.
I ran until my lungs burned and my legs ached and my brain finally, mercifully, went quiet.
And in the quiet, I found the truth.
I wasn't angry at Mik. I wasn't even frustrated. I was scared. Scared because what I felt for Mikhail Volkov was not a crush or an attraction or a passing interest. It was the real thing. The kind of feeling that rearranges your priorities and rewrites your future and makes everything before it look like a rough draft.
I wanted his laugh. His rare, almost invisible laugh that sounded like a secret being shared. I wanted his brain, the way it processed the world in patterns and precise observations that revealed more than he intended. I wanted his hands, which were scarred and precise and capable of holding a hockey stick and holding my wrist with the same deliberate care. I wantedhis voice in the dark, telling me about his sister, offering me something he didn't give to anyone else.
I wanted all of him. The granite and the gentleness. The fortress and what was hiding inside it.
And the terrifying part was that wanting all of someone means accepting that they might never let you have it.
I stopped running at the Eastside Trail overlook. The city was spread out below me, lights coming on as the dusk deepened. I was sweaty and winded and standing still for the first time in three days. My phone was in my pocket. I pulled it out and opened the thread with Mik.
I typed one message. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that too.
Finally I wrote something that was not clever or strategic or calculated. Something that was just true.
I'm not going to pretend that didn't happen. But I'll wait until you're ready to stop pretending too.
I sent it and put my phone away and walked home in the dark.
He didn't respond that night.
He didn't respond the next morning.
But when I walked into the locker room before practice, Mik was in his stall reading Dostoevsky, and as I passed, he looked up. Just for a second. The briefest glance. And the expression on his face was not cold or closed or indifferent.
It was afraid.