I hung up and sat on the couch and the tears were on my face and the shower had stopped and Ren appeared in the hallway in a towel, hair wet, the specific, unselfconscious beauty of a man who had no idea he was being observed.
He saw my face. His expression changed instantly. The shift from casual to concerned was total, the responsiveness of a man who had been attuned to my emotional frequency for weeks and whose attunement was becoming more precise with every passing day.
"What happened?" He was across the room in three steps, crouching in front of the couch, his hands on my knees. "Jonah. What happened?"
"I told my mom."
His face cycled through a rapid sequence: alarm, understanding, tenderness. "And?"
"She said she's known since I was seventeen. She said my voice has room in it now. She said she's coming to Atlanta with kimchi and opinions about the apartment."
"Is that good?"
"That is the Korean mother's version of a standing ovation."
He exhaled. The relief was visible, a physical loosening, the tension of anticipation converting into the ease of acceptance. He sat next to me on the couch and took my hand.
"She said she knew before I did," I said.
"Mothers know everything."
"She said I talked about you the way I talk about the ice. Like something necessary. Not optional. Necessary."
Ren was quiet. His thumb traced circles on the back of my hand, the absentminded, affectionate gesture that he had developed over the past weeks and that had become one of my favorite physical sensations in the world, rivaling the feeling of blades on fresh ice.
"Am I?" he said. "Necessary?"
"You are the most necessary thing in my life. The ice is a close second. But the ice doesn't make me dinner and argue about defensive formations and fall asleep on my shoulder during bad movies."
"The ice also doesn't steal the covers."
"You don't steal the covers. You redistribute them according to a system that only you understand."
"The system is thermal optimization."
"The system is you taking all the blankets and leaving me with a corner."
He grinned. The grin was the grin that was mine, the one that nobody else got, the one that transformed his face from handsome to devastating and that I had been watching for ten years and would watch for the rest of my life.
"My mom wants to come to Atlanta," I said. "She wants to meet you properly."
"Properly?"
"As the person I love. Not as Cole's brother, not as my roommate. As you."
"That's a lot of pressure."
"She's going to love you. She already loves you. She's loved you since I was seventeen and couldn't stop talking about you and she heard what I wasn't saying."
"What weren't you saying?"
"Everything. I was saying 'Ren did this' and 'Ren said that' and 'Ren scored a goal' and what she heard was 'I love this person and I don't know how to tell anyone, including myself.' Korean mothers hear the subtext. It's a cultural superpower."
"My dad hears nothing but hockey."
"Your dad hears what he can process. Give him time. He'll get there."
"You always do that."