JONAH
The problem with being everyone's best friend is that nobody thinks of you as anything else.
I'm Jonah Park. Twenty-six. Center for the Atlanta Reapers. I am, by all available metrics, a likable person. I have been called "fun" and "easygoing" and "the glue" and "the guy who makes the room better," all of which are compliments that I accept graciously and that make me want to scream into a pillow at 2 AM because not one of them is the word I actually want to hear, which is "wanted."
Cole has Mik. Wes has Luca. The locker room has become a catalogue of love stories and I am happy for all of them, genuinely, pathologically happy, because being happy for other people is what I do. It's my brand. Jonah Park, professional cheerleader, emotional support teammate, the guy who always has the right joke at the right moment and who goes home alone to an apartment that is aggressively decorated and full of plants because plants are the acceptable bachelor substitute for the companionship he is apparently incapable of finding.
I am not incapable of finding it. I am incapable of wanting it from anyone other than one specific person, and that specific person is the one person on the planet I can never have. Becausehe's straight. And he's my best friend's younger brother. And I have been in love with him since I was sixteen years old and he was fourteen and he looked at me across a backyard in Minnesota with a smile that rearranged the furniture in my chest and I have never, in ten years, recovered.
His name is Ren Briggs. And he was moving to Atlanta.
Cole told me on a Tuesday. We were at lunch, some sandwich place near the facility, and Cole was doing his thing where he talked with his mouth full and gestured with his hands and somehow made it charming instead of disgusting, which was a Cole-specific skill.
"So Ren needs a place to crash for a while," he said, between bites of a turkey club. "He's coming down from Rochester. The AHL thing didn't work out."
I knew about the AHL thing. Everyone who knew the Briggs family knew about the AHL thing. Ren had been a good hockey player. Not great. Not NHL-caliber. Good in the way that gets you close enough to see what great looks like and just far enough away that the gap becomes its own kind of torture. He'd spent two seasons in the AHL, playing solid minutes, never quite breaking through, and six months ago the team had let him go. Contract not renewed. The polite version of "you're not what we need."
Cole hadn't talked about it much. The Briggs family didn't talk about failure. Their father, Jim Briggs, who had played eight seasons in the NHL and had raised his sons on a diet of hockey and expectations, did not have a vocabulary for it. Cole had met his father's standards. Ren had not. And the distance between those two outcomes had shaped everything about both of them.
"He can stay with me," I said, because my mouth operated independently of my survival instincts.
"Yeah? You sure? I'd offer but Mik is basically at my place full-time now and it's a one-bedroom."
"It's no problem. I've got the guest room."
"Thanks, Park. He's... going through it, you know? He could use a friend."
A friend. Right. That's what I would be. Ren Briggs's friend. His brother's best friend who also happened to be a person who had been silently, comprehensively, devastatingly in love with him for a decade. A friend. Easy. Simple. Totally fine.
"When does he get in?" I asked.
"Friday. I'd pick him up but we've got that afternoon skate."
"I'll get him. Give me his flight info."
Cole clapped me on the shoulder with the casual physical affection of a man who had never once considered that touching me might mean something, and I absorbed the contact and filed it under "things that are fine" and we finished our sandwiches and talked about the upcoming road trip.
I drove home that night and sat in my apartment and looked at the guest room. The bed was made because I always kept it made, which was a habit I had developed specifically because a small, delusional part of my brain had always believed that Ren Briggs would eventually end up sleeping in it. The sheets were clean. The pillows were fluffed. There was a lamp on the nightstand that I had bought because Ren had once mentioned, five years ago at a family Thanksgiving, that he couldn't sleep without a reading light.
I had bought a lamp because of a sentence a nineteen-year-old said at Thanksgiving.
This was the depth of my problem.
I should explain the Briggs brothers, because understanding them requires understanding the family they came from. Jim Briggs was a third-line grinder who played eight NHL seasons with three different teams and never scored more than twelve goals in a year. He was not great but he was present, and his presence cast a shadow that his sons spent their lives standingin. Cole, the firstborn, was the natural heir. Bigger, faster, more talented, with Jim's work ethic and their mother's charisma. Cole was made for the NHL the way some people are made for the stage, and Jim saw it early and invested accordingly.
Ren was the second son. Smaller. Quieter. Sharper in ways that didn't translate to the stat sheet. He had Jim's hockey brain but not Jim's body, and the distance between the two meant that Ren was always chasing a version of success that was calibrated to his brother's specifications. He played well. He tried harder than anyone I'd ever seen on the ice. And it was never enough, because "enough" was defined by Cole's shadow, and Cole's shadow was enormous.
I met them both when I was eight. Youth hockey in Minnesota. Cole and I were on the same team. Ren was two years younger, always watching from the stands with his mom, always waiting for his turn. We became inseparable, Cole and I. Best friends. Brothers in everything but blood.
And then I turned sixteen.
Sixteen is the year that everything shifts. The year your body and your brain get into a fight about who's in charge and neither of them wins. I was sixteen and Ren was fourteen and it was summer and we were all at the Briggs' lake house, the one Jim had bought with his hockey money, and Ren was standing on the dock.
He'd grown that year. Stretched and sharpened, the baby face giving way to something more angular, more specific. He was wearing a faded t-shirt and shorts and his hair was wet from the lake and he was laughing at something Cole had said, and the laugh caught the afternoon light and something inside me detonated.
Not gradually. Not with warning. A single, catastrophic, irreversible detonation. One moment I was Jonah Park, Cole's best friend, and the next I was a person who had beenreconfigured around a fourteen-year-old boy's laugh and would spend the rest of his life trying to pretend he hadn't been.
I told no one. Not then. Not ever. I folded the feeling into the smallest possible shape and stored it in the deepest possible place and I built my life around the absence of it. I dated other people. I had relationships. Good ones, mostly. Kind women and a couple of men who deserved better than a boyfriend whose heart was permanently occupied territory.