And now Ren was coming to Atlanta and sleeping in my guest room and I was standing in my apartment at 10 PM on a Tuesday looking at a lamp I had bought because of a sentence he said at Thanksgiving and thinking: this is going to destroy me.
But I said I'd do it. And I was Jonah Park. I kept my word. That was the brand.
Friday came fast. I drove to the airport in my truck, which I had cleaned for the first time in three months, which was not suspicious behavior for a man picking up a friend. I parked in the cell phone lot and waited and told myself I was calm.
I was not calm. My heart was doing something that the medical community would describe as "concerning" and my hands were gripping the steering wheel with a force that would have been more appropriate for a playoff game than an airport pickup.
His text came at 4:17: Landed. Baggage carousel 3.
I drove to arrivals. I parked. I got out. I leaned against the truck like a person who leaned against trucks regularly and was not currently experiencing a cardiovascular event.
He came through the sliding doors with a duffel bag over one shoulder and a backpack on the other and a face that hit me like the first time and every time and all the times in between.
Ren Briggs at twenty-four was not the same as Ren Briggs at fourteen. He was leaner. Harder. The softness of adolescence had been replaced by the particular sharpness that comes frombeing ground down by something. His jaw was more defined. His eyes were darker. He looked like a man who had been told he wasn't good enough and had internalized it so thoroughly that it had become part of his architecture.
But the smile was the same. When he saw me, his face did the thing it had always done, the shift from guarded to open, from closed to bright, the specific smile that he gave to no one else in the world, and I know this because I had watched him smile at other people for ten years and none of those smiles were this one.
This one was mine. It had always been mine. He just didn't know it.
"Jonah." He dropped his duffel and hugged me, and the contact was a full-body event that I processed with the composure of a man holding a live grenade. His arms around my neck. His chest against mine. The smell of him, which was airplane and deodorant and something underneath that was just Ren, and which I had cataloged so thoroughly that I could have identified him blindfolded in a room of a thousand people.
"Hey, man." My voice was steady. I was proud of this. "Welcome to Atlanta."
"Thanks for picking me up. Cole said you volunteered."
"My schedule was open." My schedule was not open. I had rearranged a PT session, a film review, and a dinner with Luca and Wes to be here. Nobody needed to know that.
We loaded his bags into the truck. Two duffel bags and a backpack. That was everything Ren Briggs owned that he'd cared enough to bring to his new life. The spareness of it ached.
In the truck, he was quiet for the first ten minutes. Watching Atlanta go by through the window, the skyline growing as we drove north, the afternoon light doing its golden-hour thing across the city.
"How bad is it?" I asked.
"How bad is what?"
"The AHL thing. Cole said you're going through it."
"Cole talks too much."
"Cole has always talked too much. That doesn't answer my question."
He was quiet for another minute. Then: "It's bad, Jonah. It's really bad. I'm twenty-four and I don't have a career and I don't have a plan and I'm living in my brother's best friend's guest room, which is a level of pathetic that I didn't know I was capable of."
"You're not pathetic."
"I'm definitionally pathetic."
"You're transitioning. There's a difference."
"Between pathetic and transitioning?"
"Between being down and being done. You're down. You're not done."
He looked at me. The smile was gone, replaced by something more complicated. Gratitude mixed with skepticism mixed with the particular vulnerability of a man who wanted to believe what he was hearing and didn't trust himself to.
"You always do that," he said.
"Do what?"