"Since you were sixteen?" he said.
"Yeah."
"That's a long time."
"It's a lifetime."
"You should've told me, Park."
"I know."
"I would've been okay with it."
"You don't know that. Twenty-year-old Cole, finding out his best friend was in love with his little brother? You might not have been okay."
He considered this. The honesty of it. The possibility that the Cole of the past might not have had the capacity for the acceptance that the Cole of the present was offering.
"Maybe not," he admitted. "Maybe I needed to go through my own stuff first. The coming out. Mik. The public. Maybe I needed to understand what it costs to love someone in a world that doesn't always make room for it."
"Maybe."
"But I understand now. And I'm telling you, man to man, friend to friend: I'm okay with it. I'm more than okay. Ren is happier than I've ever seen him, and that happiness is because of you, and any idiot who can't see that you love my brother more than you love hockey doesn't deserve to call himself your friend."
The word "friend" landed with the specific, warm, load-bearing weight of something that has been tested and proven.
He extended his fist. The fist bump. Ours since we were eight.
I bumped it. The contact was brief and it held twenty years and a future and the particular, indestructible bond of two men who had been through the worst and chosen to keep going.
"If you hurt him," Cole said.
"I know. You end me."
"Not as his brother. As your friend. That's worse because I know where you're ticklish."
"You would not."
"Try me, Park."
I laughed. The laugh surprised both of us because laughter was not what the moment seemed to call for, but laughter was what the moment needed, because laughter was the sound of the pressure releasing and the ice breaking and the world returning to the shape it was supposed to be.
Cole grinned. Not the full grin. Not yet. But the foundation was there, and the foundation was strong, and everything else was just construction.
"Same time next week for skating?" he said.
"Five AM?"
"The only time that matters."
"I'll be there."
He stood up. Clapped my shoulder. The contact was firm and familiar and contained the entire vocabulary of a friendship that had just been stress-tested and had held.
He walked away and I sat at the breakfast table and I breathed. Really breathed. The first full, clean breath in a week.
The ice was breaking. The bridge was holding. The couch was waiting.
And somewhere in a guest room that was no longer a guest room, a reading lamp was on, and a man was waiting for me, and the man was Ren Briggs, and the waiting was almost over.