Hiding from Cole was agony.
We had lunch the Tuesday after the couch. The same sandwich place near the facility. The same table. Cole was doing his thing, talking with his mouth full, gesturing with his hands, being golden and oblivious and my best friend in the world, and I was sitting across from him with the taste of his brother still on my lips and a secret in my chest that was getting heavier by the hour.
"Mik and I are thinking about getting a place together," Cole said, between bites of a club sandwich. "Like, officially. Keys, furniture, the whole thing. It feels right, you know? Like, being honest about who you are with someone is the best feeling in theworld. You don't realize how much energy you spend performing until you stop."
The irony was not subtle. It was a sledgehammer to the solar plexus, delivered by a man who had no idea he was holding one.
"That's great, man," I said. My voice was normal. My face was normal. The internal infrastructure supporting the normalcy was in critical condition.
"You should find someone, Park. You deserve it. You're the best person I know and you're spending every night on your couch watching hockey film. That's not a life."
"I like my couch."
"Your couch is not a romantic partner."
"My couch has never disappointed me."
"Your couch has never made you breakfast."
I thought about Ren making pasta from Luca's grandmother's recipe. The way he'd stood at the stove with his phone propped against the backsplash showing the recipe and his brow furrowed in concentration and flour somehow in his hair despite the fact that pasta did not require flour at that stage of the process. The way he'd served me a bowl and watched my face while I ate it and the way his entire body relaxed when I said "incredible" even though the pasta was objectively terrible.
"You can tell me anything, right?" Cole said. The question was casual. The eye contact was not.
"Yeah. I know."
I did not tell him. I sat across from my best friend and I performed normalcy and the performance was flawless because I had been performing it for ten years and practice, as they say, makes perfect. Except perfect, in this context, was another word for dishonest, and the dishonesty was becoming harder to maintain because the thing I was hiding was no longer a silent, unilateral feeling. It was a relationship. It had another person in it. And that person was sleeping fifteen feet from my bedroomand kissing me in the kitchen and changing the chemical composition of every room he entered.
At home, the relationship was expanding at a rate that defied the "slow" agreement we had made.
Ren discovered my guitar. This was inevitable because the guitar lived in the corner of the living room and Ren lived in the living room and the intersection was mathematically certain.
"You play?" he asked, picking it up with the casual confidence of a man who had no idea what he was holding.
"Badly."
"How badly?"
"I know four chords and I use three of them. The fourth is aspirational."
"Play something."
"No."
"Play something or I'll tell Luca you cried during the second period of that Hurricanes game."
"That was allergies."
"Play something."
I played something. It was a simplified version of a song I'd been teaching myself from a YouTube tutorial, and the simplification involved omitting approximately sixty percent of the notes and replacing them with hopeful approximations. My singing was worse than my playing, which was worse than my confidence in either, and the entire performance was the musical equivalent of a first draft that should have been edited before being submitted.
Ren lay on the couch and listened with his eyes closed. He did not critique. He did not laugh. He lay there and he listened and at some point his breathing changed and I realized he had fallen asleep, and the realization hit me with a tenderness so acute it was almost painful.
He fell asleep to my terrible guitar playing. Not despite the terribleness. Because of it. Because the sound of me doing something badly in a quiet room was, for Ren Briggs, the sound of safety. The sound of a person who was not performing, not competing, not trying to meet a standard. Just being. Imperfectly and without apology.
I played until my fingers hurt and then I set the guitar down and watched him sleep and committed every detail to permanent memory. The way his lips parted slightly. The way his left hand curled against his chest. The way the reading lamp on the end table cast amber light across his face and made the dark of his hair glow at the edges.
I loved him so much it was geological. It was tectonic. It was the slow, patient, enormous force that moves continents, and it had been moving for ten years, and the continent had finally arrived at the place it was supposed to be.