"This week."
"Together."
"Together. Side by side. At his apartment. After a game, when the endorphins are high."
"You've been planning this."
"I've been planning this since the hotel bathroom in Tampa. The planning is the only thing that's kept me sane."
He exhaled. Long. Controlled. The breath of a man who was choosing courage over comfort and could feel the cost of the choice in his lungs.
"Okay," he said. "This week."
"This week."
"I love you, Ren."
The words arrived with a weight that was familiar and new simultaneously. He had said them before. In bed. In the dark. In the whispered aftermath of physical intimacy. But he had not said them like this. Sitting upright on the couch. In the light. With the full conscious intention of a man making a declaration rather than an observation.
"I love you too," I said. "I think I've loved you since the dock, and the thinking has become knowing, and the knowing has become the thing I organize my life around. You are not a phase, Jonah. You are not an experiment. You are the direction I was always supposed to be looking, and I'm done apologizing for not finding it sooner."
He kissed me. The kiss was not desperate or urgent. It was slow and certain and tasted like a decision. His hands on my face. My hands on his. The couch holding us the way it had held every version of us: the friends, the roommates, the lovers, the men who were about to walk into the hardest conversation of their lives and were choosing to walk together.
"Whatever happens with Cole," I said against his mouth, "we handle it. Together. He gets angry, we absorb it together. He needs time, we give it together. He comes around, we celebrate together. No outcome of this conversation changes the fact that I am yours and you are mine and the couch is ours and the lamp is staying."
"The lamp is definitely staying."
"The lamp is non-negotiable."
"I bought that lamp because you mentioned reading lights at Thanksgiving five years ago."
"I know."
"You know?"
"I figured it out three weeks ago. The same night I figured out that no one buys a reading lamp because of a passing comment unless the comment came from a person whose comfort they've been thinking about for much longer than five years."
He pressed his forehead to mine. We breathed each other's air. The apartment was warm and the lamp was on and the week ahead was going to contain the most difficult conversation of both our lives and we were going to walk into it with our hands full of each other and the lamp as evidence that love, when it is patient enough, leaves a trail you can follow home.
"This week," he said.
"This week."
"No more hiding."
"No more hiding."
He kissed me once more. Then we ordered dinner and sat at the table and ate and talked about hockey and didn't talk about Cole and the not-talking was itself a form of preparation. The calm before. The gathering of strength.
The week was coming. The conversation was coming. The truth was coming.
And when it arrived, we would meet it standing.
-e
JONAH
We didn't get to choose the timing. The secret chose for us.