Both possibilities were terrifying. The first because it meant I was alone in this feeling, constructing significance from coincidence. The second because it meant I was not alone, and not being alone meant the locked drawer was going to have to be opened, and opening it would change everything.
I turned off the lamp. The room went dark.
Through the wall, Jonah was still breathing. Steady. Present. Close.
I fell asleep to the sound of it, which was either the most normal thing in the world or the beginning of something irreversible.
In the morning, I would decide it was normal.
But in the dark, alone, with no one to lie to, I let myself consider the alternative.
-e
JONAH
There are levels of hell that Dante did not anticipate, and one of them is watching the person you love discover a new passion while sitting close enough to smell his shampoo.
Cole pulled strings to get Ren a job as a video analyst with the Reapers. This was, objectively, a good thing. Ren needed purpose and direction and something to wake up for that wasn't the slow erosion of his self-worth, and video analysis was perfect for him because Ren's hockey brain had always been his best asset. He saw the game the way a chess player sees a board, three moves ahead, patterns emerging from chaos like constellations from stars.
What was not a good thing was that Ren now worked at my facility. He was in my building. Every day. In the film room that was thirty feet from the locker room, running footage on a laptop with the concentrated focus of a man who had found something worth concentrating on.
I could not escape him. Not at work, where he appeared in hallways and meetings and the training staff break room where he drank too much coffee and argued with the assistant coaches about neutral zone breakouts with an authority that made mentwice his age lean in. Not at home, where he existed in the guest room and the kitchen and the couch, where his presence had expanded to fill every available space like a gas obeying the laws of thermodynamics.
He was everywhere. And everywhere he was, I was paying attention.
In the film room, he was a different person than the one who had arrived at the airport with duffel bags and defeat. His posture changed. His voice changed. He spoke about hockey with an intelligence that the coaching staff noticed immediately, and the noticing produced a feedback loop of confidence that straightened his spine and sharpened his eyes and made him look, for the first time in months, like a man who knew exactly where he belonged.
I watched him break down an opposing team's power play for Coach Callahan. His hands moved across the screen like a conductor's, precise and purposeful, and his voice dropped into the low, sure register that it occupied when he was completely in his element. Callahan was nodding. The assistant coaches were taking notes. Ren Briggs, who had shown up in Atlanta with two duffel bags and the remains of a dream, was commanding a room full of hockey lifers, and they were listening.
I stood in the hallway outside the film room and thought: he's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and I can never, ever tell anyone that.
The voice in my head that said these things was familiar and unwelcome. It spoke with the particular clarity of a feeling that had been suppressed for so long that the suppression itself had become a form of expression. I had spent ten years converting love into friendship, desire into loyalty, wanting into waiting. The conversion was imperfect. There was always residue. A charge that didn't dissipate. A frequency that hummed below thesurface of every interaction, and the humming was louder now because Ren was thirty feet away instead of three hundred miles.
After practice, Wes Chen stopped me in the hallway. Wes, who communicated primarily through glares and the strategic deployment of sourdough, had apparently developed an interest in my psychological state.
"You're being weird," he said.
"I'm not being weird."
"You've been staring at the film room door for ten minutes."
I had been staring at the film room door. The door was closed. Ren was behind it. I could see his silhouette through the frosted glass, hunched over his laptop, and the shape of him, even blurred and refracted, was enough to make my pulse do things that were medically irresponsible.
"I was thinking about breakout patterns," I said.
"Breakout patterns."
"Yes."
Wes looked at me with the flat, evaluative stare of a man who had spent years reading opponents and was now reading me with the same dispassionate accuracy. "Sure," he said, and walked away, and the single syllable contained a diagnostic that I was not prepared to acknowledge.
Luca appeared at lunch. Luca was never more than ten feet from Wes and had the emotional radar of a golden retriever crossed with a therapist. He sat down across from me with a tray of pasta that had arrived from Hoboken via the United States Postal Service, because Rosa Moretti did not trust the nutritional standards of the American South and had taken matters into her own hands.
"So," Luca said, twirling rigatoni with the practiced ease of a man who had been raised on carbohydrates and saw no reason to stop. "The new video analyst."
"What about him?"
"He's Cole's brother."