"I'm aware."
"And he's living with you."
"Also aware."
"And you look at him like he's the last piece of bread at an Italian dinner and you haven't eaten in three days."
"I do not look at him like that."
"Jonah." Luca set his fork down. This was serious. Italians did not set forks down unless the conversation had escalated beyond the capacity of multitasking. "You look at him exactly like that. I am Italian. I know what bread hunger looks like. It is in our cultural DNA. It's practically a diagnostic tool."
"Luca, I appreciate the concern, but there's nothing going on."
"I didn't say there was something going on. I said you look at him like there could be, and you're terrified of it, and the terror is making you weird. Wes noticed, which means it's really bad, because Wes doesn't notice anything that isn't hockey or sourdough or the exact temperature of a bread oven."
"Wes noticed because Wes was standing in a hallway with nothing better to do."
"Wes was standing in a hallway because I asked him to check on you, because I've been watching you watch the film room door for a week and a half and the trajectory is concerning."
I stared at him. He stared back with the steady, warm, completely non-judgmental gaze of a man who had personally navigated the most unlikely love story in the NHL and was now dispensing romantic wisdom over postal pasta.
"It's complicated," I said.
"Love is always complicated. The simplicity is on the other side."
"Who told you that? Your nonna?"
"My therapist. But Nonna would co-sign."
I changed the subject. Luca let me, which was generous, because Luca was physically incapable of letting things go when he smelled emotional distress and the restraint must have cost him considerable effort. We finished lunch and I went to afternoon skate and I did not look at the film room door on my way to the ice.
I looked at it on my way back. But only once.
In the locker room, I sat at my stall and taped a stick that didn't need taping because my hands needed something to do. Across the room, Cole was laughing with Mik about something, the two of them operating in the easy, gravitational closeness that had become their default since the kiss on the ice. Wes was at his stall, quiet and enormous, his scarred hands wrapping a stick with the mechanical precision of a man who had turned every physical act into a meditation.
Mars Santos, the goalie, was in his corner. Mars was always in his corner. He was the quietest man on the team, which was saying something given that the team included Mik Volkov and Wes Chen. But where Mik's silence was brooding and Wes's silence was intimidating, Mars's silence was architectural. He had built a space around himself that was impermeable. Not hostile. Just sealed. The goalie in the crease, even off the ice.
He was listening to something on his headphones. I could hear the faint bleed of bossa nova, which was his signature and which drove Jonah crazy and which Mars had never once changed despite approximately four hundred complaints from teammates who did not want to hear Antonio Carlos Jobim at 7 AM.
I liked Mars. Everyone liked Mars, in the theoretical sense that you like a person you respect but don't know. He was an excellent goalie. He was a reliable teammate. He was a complete mystery, and the mystery was not an invitation but a perimeter.
I finished taping my stick. I put it in the rack. I went to the parking lot and sat in my truck and texted Ren.
Thai or Korean tonight?
His response was immediate: Surprise me.
I drove to the Korean place in Doraville that my mom had recommended, the one that made the kimchi jjigae that tasted like her kitchen, and I ordered enough for two and drove home and set the table because Ren Briggs was going to eat dinner at my table and the table was going to be set properly because some acts of service were the only love language available to a man who couldn't say the words.
He came home at 7. He saw the table. He saw the food. He looked at me with the expression of a man who was being cared for in a way he hadn't been cared for in a very long time, and the expression was gratitude and confusion and something else that I filed in the same place I filed everything about Ren Briggs, which was the bottomless, overstuffed, structurally unsound vault at the center of my chest.
"You set the table," he said.
"It seemed appropriate."
"You never set the table."
"I'm trying new things."