"So the entire team noticed."
"The entire team noticed that I was slightly off, which in hockey terms is the equivalent of a press conference. Cole asked if I was okay. Luca asked if I was different. If we do this for more than a week, someone is going to connect the dots."
Ren was quiet. The truck moved through Atlanta traffic.
"Then we tell Cole sooner rather than later," he said.
"I know."
"Because the alternative is you fumbling passes until Coach benches you, and I don't want to be the reason your plus-minus suffers."
"My plus-minus is fine."
"Your plus-minus was minus-one today."
"How do you know my plus-minus?"
"I'm the video analyst, Jonah. I know everything about everyone's performance. And yours today was seven percent below your season average, which is a statistically significant deviation that I am choosing to attribute to flexibility work."
I looked at him. He looked at me. The traffic light was red.
"Tonight," I said. "On the couch. The ninety percent."
"The ninety percent."
"And then we figure out the timeline for Cole."
"Deal."
The light turned green. I drove us home. The apartment was warm and the couch was waiting and the secret was glowing in my chest like a star, beautiful and dangerous and impossible to hide for much longer.
Ren put his hand on my thigh during the last five minutes of the drive. Just his hand. Resting. The weight of it was warm and steady and said everything his words hadn't: I'm here. This is real. We'll figure it out.
I put my hand over his. The steering wheel could manage itself for a moment.
We drove home. The secret drove with us. And the secret was getting too big for the truck, too big for the apartment, too big for two men and a couch and a reading lamp.
Something was going to have to give.
But not tonight. Tonight was for the couch and the ninety percent and the specific, private joy of being known by someone who had waited ten years to know you.
Tonight was ours. Tomorrow could wait.
-e
REN
The road trip was a test that neither of us studied for.
Three games in five days: Tampa, Miami, Carolina. The Reapers traveled by charter flight, which meant thirty hockey players, a coaching staff, medical team, and support personnel stuffed into an aircraft for two hours with the specific, concentrated energy of men who were about to compete and needed to manage the adrenaline.
I traveled with the team now. Video analysts were part of the road staff, which meant I had a seat on the plane and a room at the hotel and a credential that got me into the press box and a proximity to Jonah Park that was, under road trip conditions, approximately ten times more dangerous than our already dangerous domestic arrangement.
At home, we had walls. Separate rooms, even if the separation was becoming increasingly fictional. Doors that closed. A kitchen counter to stand behind when someone dropped by unannounced. On the road, we had hotel hallways and team buses and the constant, unavoidable surveillance of twenty-eight men who lived in each other's pockets for five days straight.
The hotel rooms were assigned by the travel coordinator. Players roomed in pairs. Staff had singles. I had a single on the fourteenth floor. Jonah's room was on the twelfth, shared with a rookie defenseman named Eriksson who went to bed at 9 PM and slept like the dead, which was a detail Jonah relayed to me via text with the specific, understated significance of a man providing tactical intelligence.
Tampa. First night. The team went out after the game, a win that put everyone in high spirits. We gathered at a restaurant near the waterfront, long tables pushed together, the noise level escalating with every round. I sat across from Jonah and three seats down, which was close enough to see him and far enough to maintain plausibility.