He sat down. We ate. He told me about the power play breakdown and I told him about the afternoon skate and the conversation was easy and warm and exactly like every conversation we'd ever had, except that underneath it, in the space between the words, something was building that had been building for ten years and was running out of room.
After dinner, he washed the dishes. I dried them. Our hands touched twice. Both times were accidents. Both times my heart stopped and restarted like a defibrillator demonstration.
"Hey, Jonah?" he said, handing me the last plate.
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for dinner. And for the table."
"Anytime."
He smiled. The smile. Mine.
I dried the plate and put it in the cabinet and thought about Luca's bread metaphor and Wes's monosyllabic diagnosis and the film room door and the table I had set and the ten years of wanting that were no longer content to be filed and forgotten.
The vault was full. The door was bowing.
Something was going to give. The only question was when.
-e
REN
Living with Jonah Park was ruining my ability to maintain the fiction that my feelings for him were normal.
Normal friends did not notice the way a person's throat moved when they drank water. Normal friends did not catalog the specific schedule of another man's morning routine and find the predictability of it comforting rather than boring. Normal friends did not lie awake at night with their ear almost pressed to the wall, listening for the sound of breathing, and feel their own heart rate synchronize with a rhythm they couldn't actually hear but somehow knew was there.
I was doing all of these things. The evidence was mounting and the defense was crumbling and the analytical brain that had been trained to identify patterns in hockey footage was now identifying patterns in my own behavior that led to conclusions I was not prepared to draw.
Two weeks into the arrangement, we had fallen into a rhythm that was so domestically intimate it felt like method acting for a relationship neither of us had acknowledged. Morning coffee together at the kitchen counter, shoulder to shoulder because the counter was small and neither of us had suggested moving to the table, which was larger and would have provided a moreergonomically appropriate workspace. We didn't move to the table. The counter required proximity. The proximity was the point.
Shared rides to the facility in Jonah's truck, the radio on low, conversation flowing with the effortless ease of two people who had known each other their entire lives and had never once run out of things to say. He listened to a mix of K-pop and nineties hip-hop that shouldn't have worked together but did, the way everything about Jonah worked even when the components seemed mismatched. I learned the lyrics to songs in Korean that I couldn't translate but could hum, and the humming made him smile, and the smile made the truck feel smaller and warmer.
Evenings were the dangerous part. Evenings were the couch and the TV and the particular closeness that develops when two people share a small space and neither of them wants to be anywhere else. We watched hockey. We argued about line combinations and defensive systems and whether the Reapers' penalty kill was scheme-deficient or personnel-deficient, and the arguments were heated and passionate and felt, in their intensity, like a substitute for something else. Something that couldn't be argued about because arguing about it would require naming it, and naming it would require acknowledging it, and acknowledging it would require doing something about it.
He left the bathroom light on for me every night. Not the main bathroom light, which would have been blinding. The small nightlight plugged into the outlet near the sink, which cast a warm amber glow into the hallway and which I had never asked for and which he had never mentioned providing. It was just there. Every night. A small act of attentiveness performed without comment or expectation of gratitude.
He stocked the refrigerator with my beer. The craft IPA from Rochester that he had somehow found at a shop in Decatur, and which he did not drink himself, and which appeared on theshelf with the quiet regularity of a man who had incorporated someone else's preferences into his own grocery list without being asked.
He ordered my food without consulting me because he already knew. Pad see ew, no bean sprouts. The modification, the detail, the memory.
These were small acts. Individually meaningless. A nightlight. A beer. A modification on a takeout order. Together, they formed a pattern that my analytical brain could not ignore, the same way it couldn't ignore a pattern in an opposing team's forecheck. The pattern said: this man pays attention to you in a way that exceeds the requirements of friendship. The pattern said: you are not imagining this.
The counter-argument said: Jonah pays attention to everyone. He remembers Mik's coffee order and Wes's blade specifications and Cole's pre-game meal. He is an observer. A caretaker. This is who he is. You are not special. You are projecting because you are lost and lonely and he is kind.
The pattern and the counter-argument had been fighting in my head for the better part of two weeks, and the pattern was winning, and I was not sure I wanted it to lose.
One night, three weeks in, we were on the couch watching the Reapers' last road game on replay. Jonah had played well. He always played well, in the way that players who aren't stars play well, which is to say invisibly, functionally, essentially. He was the spine of the line. Without him, everything else collapsed, and the collapse was only visible in his absence, which meant his presence was the thing that held it together, which meant his value was structural and therefore invisible, which was the most Jonah Park metaphor in existence.
"You're better than you think you are," I said.
He looked at me. The apartment was dim, lit only by the TV and the kitchen light I'd left on. His face in the blue glow of thescreen was angular and warm and the combination of angles and warmth was doing something to my respiratory system.
"At what?"
"Hockey. You're better than anyone on that team gives you credit for. You play like you're supporting cast, but you're not. You're the spine. Your board work in the second period was elite. Your face-off percentage is top-five in the league. And that backhand pass to Cole at the six-minute mark of the third was the best pass I've seen this season."
He was quiet. The game continued on the screen but neither of us was watching it anymore.