"Then reach, Jonah-ya. The worst thing that happens is you fall. But you fall from standing, which is better than spending your whole life on your knees."
"Is this about a person?"
"Maybe."
"A good person?"
"The best person I know."
"Then reach. With both hands. And if they don't catch you, I will."
I hung up and sat in the dark kitchen. The apartment was quiet. Through the wall, the guest room was still. The lamp was in the living room now, which meant Ren was sleeping without it, which meant the living room was where the light lived, which meant the light had migrated from his space to our shared space.
The migration of light. The migration of everything.
Reach, my mother said. With both hands.
The hands were ready. They had been ready for ten years. The rest of me just needed to catch up.
-e
REN
The jealousy arrived without warning, which is how you know it's not jealousy at all. Jealousy you see coming is manageable. You identify it, you name it, you file it. What arrived at the charity dinner was not jealousy. It was revelation. The sudden, blinding illumination of something that has been living in the dark for so long that when the light hits it, you can't look away.
The event was a fundraiser at a venue near the Beltline. The kind of evening where players wore suits and donors wore optimism and the two groups mingled over appetizers in a space designed to make wealth feel philanthropic. I attended because the video staff was invited and because Jonah asked me to come, and my ability to refuse Jonah when he asked me things had been degrading at a rate that precisely tracked my inability to stop noticing his hands, his laugh, the way he made every person in a room feel like the most important person in that room.
Jonah in a suit was a problem I had not prepared for.
He was not the most striking man at the event. Cole had the golden proportions and the camera-ready jaw. Mik Volkov had the dramatic bone structure that made people stare. But Jonah had something that neither of them possessed and thatI was only now, after three weeks of proximity, beginning to identify. He had ease. He moved through the room like the room had been waiting for him, engaging every person he spoke with as if their conversation was the only one that mattered. He listened with his whole body. He asked follow-up questions. He remembered the name of a donor's daughter and the score of a donor's son's basketball game and the fact that the bartender was studying for the LSAT, and each remembered detail was a small gift that cost him nothing and meant everything to the person receiving it.
I stood near the bar with a drink I was not drinking and watched him the way I had been watching him for three weeks, which was to say: with the focused, analytical intensity of a man running game film on a subject he could not stop studying.
A woman was talking to him. Tall. Blonde. Confident in the specific way of a person who knew their value and was comfortable communicating it. She was leaning into Jonah's space with the calibrated tilt of a woman who was interested and was not interested in being subtle about it. Her hand was on his arm. Her laugh was aimed at him like a spotlight.
My chest tightened.
The tightening was immediate. Not a gradual build. A snap. The sudden, involuntary contraction of a muscle I didn't know I had, triggered by the sight of another person's hand on the arm of a man who was, technically, nothing more to me than my brother's best friend and my temporary roommate.
Technically. The word was doing a lot of work. The word was holding up a fiction that my body was in the process of dismantling.
I was jealous. The word landed in my consciousness with the flat, undeniable weight of a diagnosis. I was jealous of a woman touching Jonah Park's arm, and the jealousy was not the benign protectiveness of a friend or the territorial instinctof a roommate. It was possessive. Specific. The jealousy of a person who wanted to be the one doing the touching and was discovering, in real time, that the wanting was not new. The wanting was old. The wanting had been living in the walls of my life for years and had finally decided to step into the room and introduce itself.
I told myself it was protectiveness. Big-brother energy. Except Jonah was two years older than me and did not need a younger brother's protection, and the word "brother" in proximity to what I was feeling was so wildly, categorically wrong that my brain rejected it like a transplant from the wrong blood type.
Cole materialized beside me. He had the older-brother radar for emotional disturbance that came from twenty-four years of watching me navigate the world.
"You good?"
"Fine."
He followed my line of sight to Jonah and the blonde woman. Something flickered across his face, a moment of assessment, and then it passed.
"Jonah's a good guy," he said. "The best I know."
"I know."
"He'd do anything for the people he cares about. Been that way since we were kids. Sometimes I think he forgets that he's allowed to want things for himself."