"Then we go at your pace."
"My pace is: I want to see you tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that."
"Then I'll be here. Tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that."
He leaves at midnight. He stands in my doorway and looks back at me and the look is the look of a man who has walked through a door and discovered that the room on the other side is not empty. The room is full. The room is warm. The room has books and jollof rice and a man without glasses who is standing in the amber light and who chose him.
"Good night, Declan."
"Good night, Jamie."
He walks to his car. I watch him go. I close the door. I lean against it.
The glasses are on the counter. The notebook is in a drawer. The press credential is returned. The line is crossed. The possibility is no longer a possibility.
The possibility is a boy in a doorway, smiling, saying good night, walking to his car in the Atlanta dark.
The possibility is real.
JAMIE
The weeks after the first kiss are a language course.
I am learning a new vocabulary. Not the vocabulary of the search bar (that vocabulary is settled, named, no longer frightening). A different vocabulary. The vocabulary of proximity. Of touch. Of the thousand micro-decisions that constitute being close to another person: where to put my hand (his shoulder, his back, the warm space between his shoulder blades), how long to hold (until his breathing changes, which means he's relaxed into it, which means the holding is doing what holding is supposed to do), when to lean in (when his glasses are off, always when his glasses are off, because the glasses-off is the person and the person is who I'm learning).
Declan's apartment becomes our place. Not mine. Not his. The third space, the space between us that used to be six inches and is now zero, the space that is a couch and a kitchen and the amber light and the books.
I learn to cook. This is an overstatement. I learn to make scrambled eggs, which Declan eats with the generosity of a man who was raised by a woman whose jollof rice could end wars and who has therefore developed the diplomatic capacity to consume terrible food without visible suffering.
"These are good," he says, eating eggs that are, objectively, not good. The eggs are overcooked and underseasoned and Declan eats them because I made them, and the eating is a kindness that I file alongside the biscotti and the bread and the tea in the category of things people do for you that are about love and not about quality.
He teaches me jollof rice. The teaching takes three hours because the rice requires patience and attention and a willingness to stand at a stove and wait, and waiting is not a skill I have developed in nineteen years of hockey, which is a sport that rewards speed over patience. The rice burns twice. The third attempt is edible. The fourth attempt is good. Declan tastes it and says "my mother would approve, with caveats," which is the highest compliment available in the Osei culinary framework.
We watch film on his couch. Not game film. Movies. He introduces me to things I've never seen (a documentary about a Japanese chef who has been making sushi for sixty years, a film about a journalist who uncovers a corruption scandal, a nature documentary about penguins that Luca apparently also loves, which confirms my theory that Luca and Declan would be friends if they ever occupied the same social space). I lean against him while we watch. My head on his shoulder. His arm around me. The domesticity of the position is so foreign and so perfect that my eyes sting the first time it happens, and the stinging is not sadness. The stinging is the realization that this is what I was looking for when I couldn't find the words. This. The warmth of another person. The specific, chosen, deliberate warmth of a person who wants to be here.
The physical relationship develops at my pace, which is the pace of a body that is nineteen years behind on a curriculum that most people begin in adolescence and that I am beginning now, with urgency and caution in equal measure.
The kissing becomes confident. The first kiss was off-center and gentle and miraculous. The twentieth kiss is aimed and purposeful and carries intention that the first kiss did not, the intention of a man who has learned what his mouth can do when it's applied to another man's mouth and who is interested in the full syllabus.
The touching expands. His hands on my back become my hands on his chest become our hands on each other with the reciprocal curiosity of two people who are mapping new territory and who are, I discover, complementary cartographers. Declan maps with patience. I map with intensity. The combination produces a geography that belongs to neither of us and to both of us.
The evening it happens is a Saturday. The game was an afternoon matinee (a 3-1 win, I had a goal and felt good, the kind of good that carries over into the evening and makes the body feel capable and confident and ready). I drove to his apartment with the focused awareness of a man who has decided that tonight is the night and who is terrified and certain in equal measure.
"Hey," he says when he opens the door.
"Hey."
"Good game."
"Thanks. I'm not here to talk about hockey."
He smiles. The smile is the Declan smile, the one that's warm and knowing and that says: I see you. I see what you're carrying. I see what you want. And I'm here for it.
We start on the couch. The kissing is familiar now, the angles and the pressure and the specific way his hand goes to the back of my neck and my hand goes to his jaw. But tonight the kissing has a direction. The kissing is going somewhere. I can feel it in the increased urgency of his mouth and in the response of my body, which is operating at a frequency that I have neverexperienced in the presence of another person and that is, I understand now, the frequency that was absent at prom and absent with every girl I ever tried to want and absent in every context except this one: here, with him, in the amber light.
"Jamie," he says against my mouth. "We don't have to."
"I want to."