"I know."
We leave. He pays. I try to pay. He says "you're a rookie on an entry-level contract, I'm paying for the tea." The argument is so domestic, so mundanely interpersonal, that I laugh and the laugh is the laugh of a person who is, for one afternoon, not carrying anything.
In the parking lot, we stand between our cars. The Decatur afternoon is warm. The coffee shop is behind us. The six inches are between us.
"This was good," I say. The sentence is the most pathetically insufficient summary of three hours I have ever produced, and the insufficiency makes him smile.
"Yeah," he says. "This was good."
We don't touch. We don't hug. We don't shake hands. We stand in a parking lot and look at each other and the looking is enough. The looking is the thing.
I drive home. The apartment is less furnished than it used to be. The lamp is on the nightstand. There's a plant on the windowsill that Jonah gave me because Jonah believes that plants are "the gateway drug to caring about where you live." There's Wes's bread bag, folded and saved on the kitchen counter because throwing it away felt wrong. There's a sticky note from Luca on the fridge that says "Proud of you, kid," which he left during a team visit to my apartment last week and which I haven't removed because removing it would remove the warmth.
The apartment is becoming mine. The walls are coming down, one at a time, and behind the walls is a person who drinks tea and laughs at jokes and sat in a coffee shop for three hours with a man whose glasses were off and whose eyes were brown and whose attention felt like the only light in the room.
I pick up my phone. I don't open the browser. I don't need the browser anymore. The search is over. The finding has begun.
JAMIE
Icall Becca from my car in the parking lot of my apartment building because the apartment feels too quiet for what I'm about to say and the car feels like a room with an exit, which is what I need right now. A room I can leave if the saying goes wrong.
The saying will not go wrong. I know this. I know Becca the way I know the ice: instinctively, completely, with the full-body certainty of a person who has been loved by this specific human for his entire life and who has never, not once, received anything from her other than the truth wrapped in warmth.
But the knowing doesn't eliminate the terror. The terror is not about Becca. The terror is about the words. The words, once spoken, cannot be unspoken. The words are a one-way door. I am standing in front of it. The handle is my phone. I press call.
She answers on the first ring. Becca always answers on the first ring for me, which is a courtesy she extends to approximately three people on earth (me, our mother, and her best friend Maya, who is apparently the only other human whose calls merit first-ring status).
"Hey. What's up?"
"Hey. Are you alone?"
"I'm in my room. Why?"
"I need to tell you something."
The silence that follows is three seconds long. Three seconds is an eternity in Becca's conversational rhythm, which normally operates at the tempo of a caffeinated auctioneer. Three seconds of Becca silence means she has identified the weight in my voice and has recalibrated her approach from casual to careful.
"Okay," she says. "I'm here."
"I think I like someone."
I have rehearsed this sentence. I rehearsed it in the shower this morning and in the car on the way home and in the three minutes I sat in the parking lot before pressing call. The rehearsal did not help. The sentence sounds different out loud than it sounded in my head. In my head, the sentence was a controlled, measured statement of fact. Out loud, the sentence is shaking.
"A boy," Becca says.
Not a question. A statement. Two words, delivered with the calm, certain, completely unsurprised tone of a sixteen-year-old girl who has been waiting for this phone call since her brother was fifteen and who is not going to pretend, for his comfort or anyone else's, that this information is new.
The two words hit me like a wave. Not a crashing wave. A warm one. The kind that lifts you.
"Yeah," I say. "A boy."
The saying of it. The actual, out-loud, to-another-person saying of the word. "A boy." Two syllables that have been building pressure inside my chest for months (for years, if I'm honest, for the years before the name and the search bar and the Philadelphia hotel room, for the years when the feeling existed without vocabulary). The two syllables exit my mouth and enter the air and travel through a phone signal to Duluth, Minnesota, where my little sister is sitting in her bedroom, and the syllablesdo not destroy anything. The syllables do not end anything. The syllables are a beginning.
"Tell me everything," Becca says.
I tell her. Not everything. Not the search bar or the hotel room or the half-second in the celebration pile. But the coffee. The glasses. The three hours. The way Declan listens, which is with his whole body, which is with an attention so complete that it feels physical. The way his face changes when he takes his glasses off, the professional distance dissolving, the person emerging. The way I feel when I'm near him, which is the way I feel on the ice: present, alive, operating at a frequency that the rest of my life does not access.
"He's a journalist," I say. "He covers the team. Covered. He's... it's complicated."