"Cole?"
"I'm fine. I'm good. I'm just..." He exhaled. Long, shaky, the kind of breath that carries weight on the way out. "I've been carrying that. The fear that he'd be weird about it. That it would change something between us. Jonah is..." He trailed off.
"He is your person."
"Yeah."
"He is a good person to have."
"He's the best." Cole dropped his hands. His eyes were red but dry. "How do you feel?"
I considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. I had just told my head coach and my partner's best friend that I was in a relationship with a man. Two conversations. Two moments of exposure. Two opportunities for the world to confirm my father's lesson.
And the world had not confirmed it. The world had said "I don't care who you love" and "I'm happy for you" and "stop eating cereal for dinner," and the world had gone back to taping hockey sticks and grading papers, and I was still standing, and nothing had collapsed.
"I feel lighter," I said.
It was the truth. Not a metaphor or an approximation. Lighter. As if something with actual mass had been removed from my body. The conversation with Coach. The conversationwith Jonah. Each one a brick taken from the wall, and the wall was not gone, not yet, but it was lower. Low enough to see over. Low enough to breathe.
Cole pushed off the wall and stood in front of me. We were in the corridor of an NHL training facility, twenty feet from a locker room full of professional hockey players, and he put his hand on my face. Just for a second. His palm against my jaw. A touch that was brief and warm and entirely too risky for the location and entirely necessary for the moment.
"Proud of you," he said.
I turned my head and kissed his palm. One second. Then I stepped back and he stepped back and we walked to the locker room and went to our separate stalls and the day continued, and nobody noticed anything, and nothing had changed except everything.
That night, in Cole's apartment, I moved the toothbrush from the cup by the sink to the cabinet next to the toothpaste.
"What are you doing?" Cole asked from the doorway.
"Organizing."
"You're moving in."
"I am organizing a toothbrush."
"That toothbrush is a metaphor and we both know it."
I closed the cabinet. "If it were a metaphor, what would it mean?"
"It would mean you're staying."
"Then perhaps it is a metaphor."
He crossed the bathroom in two steps and kissed me, and the toothbrush stayed in the cabinet, and so did I.
COLE
My mother called on a Tuesday, which was unusual because my mother called on Sundays. Sunday was her day. She called after church and before the pot roast, and we talked about the weather in Duluth and my brother's AHL season and whether I was eating enough protein, and the calls were warm and predictable and never, ever mentioned my father.
Tuesday meant something was different.
"Hi, sweetheart." Her voice had that careful quality that mothers use when they're about to deliver information that requires padding. "How are you?"
"I'm good, Mom. What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. Everything's fine." A pause. The kind of pause that contains an entire weather system. "Your father wants to come to your game this weekend."
I was standing in my kitchen holding a spatula because I had been making an omelet, which I had learned to do from Mik, who had decided that my culinary education was a priority and had been teaching me one dish at a time with the patience of a man defusing a bomb. The spatula stopped moving.