I am falling for this person. The falling is not hypothetical. The falling is not a trajectory that I can redirect. The falling is happening, past tense, present tense, ongoing, and the choice that Sharon defined in her office (the beat or the boy, the career or the feeling) is no longer theoretical.
The clock is running. The tick is getting louder.
I start the car. I drive home. I take off the glasses and I hold them in my hands and I think about the word "Declan" in a doorway and the way it sounded like a door opening.
JAMIE
Igo to Cole on a Tuesday because Tuesday is the day Jonah picks the music and the locker room is loud enough that a conversation in the weight room won't be noticed.
This is the bravest thing I have ever done. Braver than the draft. Braver than the first practice. Braver than the Philadelphia hotel room, which was brave in the privacy of a dark room with a sleeping roommate and a search bar that nobody would ever see. This is bravery in the presence of another person. This is walking up to a man and asking a question that cannot be unasked and that will, depending on the answer and the asking, change the architecture of my relationship with the team and with myself.
Cole is doing curls. He's in a sleeveless shirt and his arms are doing the thing that NHL players' arms do when they curl, which is being unreasonably muscular in a way that makes normal human arms seem like a first draft. Mik is on the bench press nearby, spotting a rookie (not me, a fourth-liner named Bennett who talks even more than Jonah, which I did not think was possible). The weight room is occupied but not crowded, and the music from the locker room bleeds through the walls at a volume that provides cover.
I stand near the dumbbell rack. I pick up a pair of twenties, which is what I use for lateral raises, and I do three reps while I gather the words that I've been assembling for weeks. The words are simple. The simplicity is the terror.
I put the dumbbells down. I walk to Cole.
"Can I ask you something?"
Cole sets down the weight. He looks at me. And the look is the thing I will remember for the rest of my life, because the look contains no surprise. Zero. The expression on Cole Briggs's face when I say "can I ask you something" in a weight room on a Tuesday morning is not the expression of a man hearing an unexpected question. It is the expression of a man who has been waiting for this question from this person for weeks and who is not going to make the asking harder than it already is.
"Yeah," he says. "Of course."
I sit on the bench across from him. My hands are on my knees. My heart rate is approximately 140, which is the rate I hit during the third period of close games, and this is not a close game. This is the most important shift of my life.
"How did you know?"
Three words. The same three words I asked Declan in the media room, about journalism, about vantage points, about the moment you recognize a truth about yourself. But the words are different now because the context is different. I'm not asking about career. I'm not asking about finding a new way to love hockey. I'm asking about the thing. The actual thing. The name that I found in Philadelphia and have been carrying in my chest like a hot coal.
Cole does not ask "know what." Cole does not pretend that the question requires clarification. Cole Briggs, who kissed Mikhail Volkov on the ice after Game 7 in front of eighteen thousand people and an unknown number of television cameras, who was traded from Chicago because the sponsors werenervous about the gay winger, who rebuilt his career and his life in Atlanta on the foundation of a truth he refused to hide, does not need clarification.
"I always knew," he says. "Since I was a kid. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. I knew the way you know your dominant hand. Not a decision. A fact. The fact was there before I had the language for it. I just... knew."
"Was it that simple?"
"The knowing was simple. The knowing was the easiest part. The hard part was the pretending. I pretended for years. Through high school. Through college. Through the first two years in the NHL. I dated women. I performed straightness the way I performed penalty kills: with discipline and practice and the exhausting commitment to something that was not natural."
He leans forward. His elbows are on his knees and his eyes are on me and the eye contact is not the coach-to-player eye contact of Callahan or the mentor-to-mentee eye contact of Mik. It is the eye contact of a man who has been where I am. Exactly where I am. In this body, with this fear, at this age (or close to it), with this question.
"The pretending was more exhausting than the knowing ever was," he says. "The knowing was a fact. The pretending was a project. A full-time, every-waking-hour project that consumed energy I should have been spending on hockey, on relationships, on being alive. And the worst part is that I was good at it. I was so good at pretending that I almost convinced myself. Almost. There was always a gap. A place where the performance didn't quite seal. And the gap was where the truth lived, and the truth was patient. The truth waited."
"Did it get easier?" My voice is quiet. The weight room is not quiet (metal on metal, Bennett talking, the bass line from Jonah's playlist), but my voice is quiet because quiet is what I have and quiet is what this moment requires.
"The being got easier. The being got easier the second I stopped fighting it. The second I looked at the pretending and the performing and the exhaustion and I said: no. I'm done. This is who I am. The relief was..." He pauses. His eyes are bright. Not tearful. Luminous. The eyes of a man remembering the most important moment of his life. "The relief was physical. Like setting down a bag I'd been carrying for ten years. I didn't know how heavy it was until I put it down."
"And the telling?"
"The telling is hard every time. Every single time. It doesn't get easy. It gets less terrifying. The first person you tell is the worst. After that, each one is a little smaller. But it's never nothing. Telling someone who you are when who you are is something the world has opinions about... that's never nothing."
"Who was your first?"
"Jonah." He smiles. The smile is warm and specific and directed not at me but at a memory. "I was twenty-two. We were in my apartment. I said three words and he said two and the two he said were 'I know.'"
I laugh. The laugh surprises me. The idea of Jonah Park responding to his best friend's coming out with "I know" and the absolute certainty that Jonah said it with a smile and probably a hug and possibly a snack, because Jonah processes all emotional milestones with food, is so precisely Jonah that the laughter is involuntary.
"He'd known since we were teenagers," Cole says. "He said he was waiting for me to tell him and he was prepared to wait as long as it took."
"And Mik?"