He smiled. The smile. Mine. Always.
In the lobby, Mars and Theo had not moved. They were standing in the space where ice met carpet and winter met warmth and the goalie who read everything was looking at the skater who couldn't be read, and the skater was looking back without flinching, and the not-flinching was new, and the new thing was beautiful.
A hat trick requires three things: skill, timing, and luck.
Jonah had all three. The skill to wait. The timing to act. The luck of being born two years before me, in the same town, on the same rink.
And so did I. Because after twenty-four years of being the other Briggs, of being second and lesser and not quite enough, I found someone who only ever saw me.
He saw me at the dock. He saw me at the airport. He saw me on the couch and in the kitchen and in every room I entered for the rest of our lives.
I reached. He caught me.
That was the whole story.
Until the next one.
-e
REN
The night of the tactical win, after the locker room celebration and the phone call to my father and the Mars Santos conversation in the hallway, I went home and I found Jonah on the couch with a beer and an expression on his face that was so transparent in its adoration that a stranger walking into the room would have known, immediately and without question, that this man was in love with whoever he was looking at.
He was looking at me.
"Coach pointed at you," he said. "In front of the whole team. And then the team went insane."
"I noticed. I was there."
"You were standing in the doorway looking like you wanted to disappear into the wall, and the entire Atlanta Reapers roster was banging their sticks for you, and you looked like a man who didn't know how to receive what he was getting."
"I'm not used to it."
"Being celebrated?"
"Being seen. As the reason something good happened. My whole hockey life, I was the reason things didn't quite happen. The shot that missed. The draft position that didn't materialize.The contract that didn't get renewed. Tonight was the first time my brain did something that a room full of professionals recognized as valuable. That's new for me."
"It shouldn't be. Your brain has always been your best asset. The world just didn't know where to point it."
He stood and crossed the room and his hands were on my face and his mouth was on mine and the kiss was not gentle. It was the kiss of a man who had watched the person he loved receive public acknowledgment for the first time and had been holding the pride in his body for two hours with nowhere to put it and was now putting it everywhere at once.
I kissed him back. The adrenaline from the win was still in my blood, the specific, accelerated chemistry of a person who has done something meaningful and whose body is rewarding the achievement with every neurochemical at its disposal. I was buzzing. Alive. Confident in a way I had not been confident since before the AHL ended, and the confidence was not the fragile, performing confidence of a man trying to prove something. It was earned. It was real. It was based on evidence.
"I want something," I said against his mouth.
"Tell me."
"I want to be the one tonight. I want to take you apart."
The words landed in the room with a specific, deliberate weight. I had not spoken like this before. In our previous encounters, the dynamic had been exploratory, mutual, Jonah guiding me through the unfamiliar territory of a body that was not what my previous experience had prepared me for. He had been patient. Teaching. Generous in a way that was consistent with every other aspect of his personality.
Tonight I was not asking to be taught. I was offering to lead.
Something crossed his face. Not surprise, exactly. Recognition. The recognition of a man who had been waiting for this shift and was deeply, viscerally ready for it.
"Yes," he said.
I took his hand and led him to the bedroom. Our bedroom. The room that had been his room and then my room and was now the room where the reading lamp glowed and the bed held both our impressions and the closet contained a disorganized merger of two wardrobes that neither of us had bothered to sort because the mingling was the point.