"You're quiet," he said.
"I'm always quiet when you bake. It's like watching a meditation."
"You're a different kind of quiet. This is the quiet from the alley. The one that means something is wrong and you're deciding whether to tell me."
I looked at him. He was looking at the dough, not at me, which I understood was intentional. Wes offered space for difficult conversations by not making eye contact, because eye contact added pressure, and pressure was the enemy of honesty. He had learned this somewhere. Maybe from himself. Maybe from the penalty box, where you sat alone and stared at the ice and processed things without anyone watching.
"The secrecy is hard for me," I said.
His hands slowed on the dough but did not stop. "I know."
"I don't need you to come out. I don't need you to tell the team or your parents or anyone. I need you to know that it's hard for me, and that the hardness isn't about you. It's about history."
"Ryan."
"Ryan. And the way hiding feels, regardless of the reason. The way it makes you smaller. The way every public interaction becomes a performance and every private moment becomes the only real thing, and you start to feel like the real thing is the one that has to be hidden."
He stopped kneading. Turned to face me. His hands were covered in flour and his expression was open in the way it only was in this kitchen, the guard down, the fortress unmanned.
"I am not hiding you because I'm ashamed," he said. "I need you to know that."
"I do know that."
"I'm hiding because I'm still..." He searched for the word. Wes did this when the vocabulary of emotion exceeded his practiced range, pausing while his brain located the right term in a lexicon he was still building. "Assembling. I'm still assembling the picture of who I am. And until the picture is complete, or at least recognizable, I don't know how to show it to people."
"You're showing it to me."
"You're different."
"Why?"
"Because you saw the pieces before I knew there was a picture. You saw the bread and the shaking and the silence and you didn't try to assemble it for me. You just sat there and let me figure it out. Nobody has ever done that."
The words landed in my chest with the specific weight of a truth that I needed to hear. Not because I doubted his feelings. Because I needed to be reminded that what was happening between us was not a repetition of what had happened withRyan. Ryan had hidden me because I was inconvenient. Wes was taking time because he was building something real, and real things take time, and time is not the same as shame.
"I can be patient," I said.
"You've been patient."
"I can be more patient. But I need you to do something for me."
"What?"
"When the shadow crosses my face, when the secrecy scrapes against the old stuff, don't pretend you don't see it. See it. Acknowledge it. You don't have to fix it. You just have to see it. Because the worst part of being hidden is feeling invisible, and you are the one person who makes me feel the opposite of invisible."
He crossed the kitchen. Flour on his hands, on his shirt, dusting his forearms like snow. He stood in front of me, between my knees where I sat on the counter, and he put his flour-covered hands on my face. Both hands. Palms on my jaw. Fingers in my hair. Leaving white handprints on my skin.
"I see you," he said. "I see the shadow. I see the history. I see the thing you're carrying and I'm sorry that my process is adding weight to it. I am going to get there. I don't know when. But I am going to get there because you are worth getting there for."
The flour on my face was cool and soft and absurd and I wanted to laugh and cry simultaneously, which was a combination I associated exclusively with Wes Chen, who was the only person in my life who could make me feel both things at once.
"You have flour on my face," I said.
"I know."
"Like, a lot of flour."
"I'm aware."