I texted Sofia: He bakes bread.
Her response was immediate: What kind?
Sourdough. From scratch. With homemade butter.
A pause. Then: Luca. You need to marry this man immediately.
I laughed alone in my car in a parking garage in Reynoldstown, Georgia, and the sound bounced off the concrete and came back to me, and I started the engine and drove home and did not stop smiling for the entire twenty-minute drive.
The warm thing. The cold thing.
Maybe that wasn't the right framework. Maybe the truth was simpler than temperature. Maybe some people just fit, the way bread and butter fit, the way a key fits a lock, the way a man who talks too much fits a man who doesn't talk enough, each one filling the space the other leaves.
Maybe the fit was the whole story.
Or maybe I was romanticizing a bread delivery and needed to get a grip.
Sofia would say both. Sofia would be right.
-e
WES
At 2:17 AM on a Saturday, I typed the following into Google: can you be straight and attracted to one man.
The search results were extensive and unhelpful. They included articles about the Kinsey scale, Reddit threads with thousands of comments, a quiz titled "Am I Bisexual?" that was sponsored by a dating app, and a Wikipedia entry on sexual fluidity that was so dense with academic language that it made my head hurt worse than the ribs.
I read all of it. Every article, every thread, every paragraph of the Wikipedia entry. I read them the way I studied hockey film, with methodical intensity and the hope that data would produce clarity. Data usually produced clarity. Data was how I understood the world. Inputs, outputs, patterns, conclusions. This was how my brain worked and it had served me well for twenty-eight years.
The data did not produce clarity. The data produced more questions, which produced more searches, which produced more data, which produced the specific kind of 3 AM spiral where you start by Googling a simple question and end up forty-seven browser tabs deep in a topic you hadn't known existed twohours ago, with your eyes burning and your heart rate elevated and your understanding of yourself fundamentally altered.
Here is what I learned:
Sexuality is not binary. This was presented as a well-established scientific consensus, which surprised me, because I had spent my entire adult life operating under the assumption that it was. The literature was full of terms I had never encountered and frameworks I had never considered, and I read about them with the clinical focus of a man researching a medical condition, because that was what this felt like. A condition. A symptom. A deviation from the norm that required diagnosis.
Except the literature said it wasn't a condition. It was just a thing that happened. Some people were attracted to one gender their entire lives and then found themselves attracted to someone else entirely, and the attraction was not pathological or confused but was simply the brain responding to a specific person in a specific way that didn't align with the categories built to contain it.
Specific people. One specific person. A person with gold-flecked eyes and a laugh that filled rooms and hands that were quick and precise and had touched my ankle three weeks ago in a way that my nervous system still had not stopped replaying.
I closed the laptop. I sat in the dark.
The apartment was quiet. The bread starter in the refrigerator was quiet. The sticky note on the nightstand, which I had stopped pretending wasn't there, was quiet. Everything was quiet except the inside of my head, which was doing something that felt less like thinking and more like structural failure.
I did not sleep.
In the morning, I went to the facility and did my rehab and ate my lunch and sat in the film room and performed normalcy with the dedication of a man who had been performing normalcyhis entire life and had gotten very good at it. Nobody noticed anything different. Nobody saw the 3 AM Google search or the forty-seven browser tabs or the fact that my understanding of myself had shifted on its axis overnight like a skate blade hitting a rut.
Except I needed to talk to someone. This was a new sensation. I did not talk to people about personal things. I talked to the bread starter and the ceiling and occasionally the Ghost of Wes Past, who lived in the penalty box of my memory and had nothing useful to contribute. But the weight of what I was carrying had exceeded the capacity of my internal infrastructure, and the structure was going to fail unless I found a way to redistribute the load.
I thought about who I could talk to. The list was short. The list was, in fact, one name long, and the name belonged to a man who had navigated this exact territory and emerged on the other side with a Russian boyfriend and a Sports Illustrated cover and the specific kind of hard-won peace that only comes from telling the truth about yourself.
I found Cole Briggs in the weight room after practice. He was doing curls with the casual intensity of a man for whom the weight room was a social venue as much as a training facility. Mik Volkov was on the bench press nearby, spotting a rookie, and the two of them exchanged a look when I walked in that communicated entire sentences without words. Married people did that. People who had been through something together did that. Cole and Mik did that.
"Briggs," I said. "Can I talk to you?"
Cole set down his weights. "Sure. Here or somewhere else?"
"Somewhere else."