But his face. When he saw me, his face did something that I will remember for the rest of my life. It opened. Like a door thathad been braced against a storm, and the storm was over, and the light was coming in.
"Mik."
"I am not ready to tell the world," I said. "But I am ready to stop pretending with you. I am tired of the wall. You make me tired of the wall."
He reached for me. His hand found my wrist, the same wrist he'd gripped on the bench in Tampa, and he pulled me gently across the threshold and into his apartment and the door closed behind us and I was inside.
Not just inside his apartment. Inside the life I had been circling for weeks, pressing my face against the glass of it, wanting it so badly that the wanting had become a physical ache.
"I was benched tonight," I said.
"I know. I watched the game."
"I played terribly."
"You did."
"I played terribly because I cannot think about hockey when I am thinking about you, and I am always thinking about you, and this is your fault."
He almost smiled. "I'll take that."
"It was not a compliment."
"I know. I'll still take it."
He pulled me to the couch. Not the bedroom. The couch. He sat and pulled me down next to him and then he did something that undid me more completely than any kiss or touch or whispered word. He put his arms around me and held on. Just held on. His chin on the top of my head, his arms around my shoulders, his heartbeat against my ear. No agenda. No escalation. Just the simple, devastating act of being held by someone who was glad you came back.
I pressed my face into his chest and breathed him in. Cedar and citrus and laundry detergent and skin. The smell of the person who felt most like home.
"I'm sorry I keep running," I said.
"Stop apologizing for being scared. Just stop running."
"I am going to try."
"That's enough. That's all I need."
We stayed on the couch. We did not move to the bedroom. We did not need to. What was happening was more intimate than anything a bedroom could offer. Two men holding each other at 2 AM, one of them finally still, the other finally not alone.
At some point Cole said, "Mik?"
"Yes?"
"The Russian thing you said. That you wouldn't translate. Are you ever going to tell me what it means?"
I pressed my mouth against his collarbone, where the scar lived, and felt his pulse under my lips.
"Ty moyo vsyo," I said. "It means: you are my everything."
The sound Cole made was not a word. It was something underneath words, from somewhere beneath language, a sound that I felt in his chest before I heard it with my ears. His arms tightened around me and he buried his face in my hair, and when he spoke, his voice was wrecked.
"I'm not crying because I'm sad."
"I know."
"I'm crying because I've been waiting for someone to say that to me my whole life, and I didn't think it would be in Russian."
I held him tighter. He held me tighter. And outside, the Atlanta night did what Atlanta nights do. It kept going. The city hummed and breathed and lived, and two men on a couch in Virginia-Highland were part of it now. Not separate. Not hiding. Not invisible.