Page 41 of Rookie Mistake
I am underneath. Not physically (though physically also). Emotionally. The underneath that I showed Alexei and that Alexei used. The underneath is showing again and the showing is terrifying and the terror is not stopping me because the person above me is not Alexei. The person above me said "including me" in a media room and "the word is bisexual" at a team dinner and "sort of" to a nine-year-old and every one of those moments was Eli choosing honesty over safety, and if Eli can choose honesty over safety then I can choose trust over protection.
The choosing is the variable. Not the pace. Not the position. The choosing. The active, deliberate, eyes-open decision to be vulnerable with a person who has earned it.
Afterward, Eli holds me. The holding is the inversion of every previous holding: usually I hold him. Usually my arm goes around him on the couch, in bed, the arm of the larger man around the smaller one. Tonight Eli holds me. His arms around my shoulders, my face against his chest, the reversal quiet and enormous. The smaller man holding the larger one. The chaos holding the order. The noise holding the silence.
"Thank you," he says.
"For what?"
"For telling me. I know what that cost."
"The cost was less than I expected."
"That's how it works. Wes told me that. The alone part is what kills you. The telling is always less expensive than the carrying."
Wes. The bread. The enforcer who baked at 2 AM because his hands shook. The carrying. The alone part. The sentence has traveled from Wes to Eli to this bed in this dark room, and the traveling is the culture itself - the team, the building where people carry each other's weight without being asked.
"Nikolai."
"Yes."
"The intensity is not the problem. The intensity is the thing I love most about you."
The word. Love. Said in the dark, after the telling, by the man whose hand was on my stomach and whose patience was the gift and whose chaos is the medicine.
I close my eyes. His arms are around me. The room is dark. The telling is done. The wall has a door in it now, a real door, not the cracks and deviations and fractures. A door. Built deliberately. Opened deliberately. For the person who earned the opening.
The door is open. Eli is on the other side.
The other side is warm.
ELI
Icall my mother on a Sunday because Sunday is when Carmen Mercer is home from the ER and has opinions, and Carmen Mercer's opinions require a full day's energy to receive.
She picks up on the first ring. In the background: the sound of something sizzling, a radio playing salsa, and my father saying something indistinct that is probably "tell him I said hi" because my father's contribution to family phone calls is "tell him I said hi" delivered from an adjacent room.
"Mijo," my mother says. "You sound different."
"I sound the same."
"You sound like a person who is eating. You have been eating?"
"I eat every day, Mami. There is a nutritionist. The nutritionist is very committed."
"Nutritionists do not know about rice and beans. Nutritionists know about protein powder and sadness."
This is my mother's position on sports nutrition and it has not changed since I was fourteen and she packed a thermos of arroz con pollo in my hockey bag because she did not trust the arena cafeteria to feed her son food that "had a soul."
"Mami. I need to tell you something."
The sizzling continues. The salsa continues. My mother's silence is not silence. My mother's silence is the ER-nurse silence, the silence of a woman who has heard "I need to tell you something" from patients and families and doctors for twenty-three years and who has learned that the thing after the telling is what matters, not the telling itself.
"I'm seeing someone. His name is Nikolai."
The sizzling stops. I hear the stove click off. The salsa continues because the radio is not aware of the conversation and the radio does not care.
"His," my mother says.
